March 9, 2003 Sunday Home Edition

SECTION: Features; Pg. 1L

HEADLINE: ARTIFACTS OF SLAVERY;White couple from Mississippi with a vast collection wants to build a museum about America's shame

BYLINE: JIM AUCHMUTEY

SOURCE: AJC

Mobile, Ala.

The object under glass looks like a snake coiled to strike, with a brass handle for a head, braided leather for a body and a dun-colored lash for rattles.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" the owner says. "If you didn't know what it was used for . . ."

A label in the display case completes the thought: field whip, Darien, Ga., mid-1800s.

Between the object and the exhibit lies an unlikely obsession.

Jim and Mary Anne Petty, a young couple from Gulfport, Miss., own the whip along with thousands of other artifacts and documents: shackles, cuffs, branding irons, bills of sale, tintypes, utensils, crafts --- one of the nation's largest private collections of slavery materials. They bought the items because they believe America has whitewashed the horror of human bondage. Which is why Petty turned to his wife one day and said, "Mary Anne, let's go build a museum."

There was little in their background to suggest such a grandiose quest. The Pettys are not museum professionals --- he used to host a radio talk show, she managed real estate. They are not wealthy. They are not African-American.

They simply believe in the power of physical evidence to help set the record straight.

The institution the Pettys envision would be built in Mobile, an hour east of their home, and while it would cover many aspects of black history, the main thrust would be to unflinchingly tell the story of slavery. They call the project the Middle Passage Museum, after the hellish Atlantic voyages that brought millions of Africans to the shores of the New World and left countless others dead at sea.

The Pettys previewed their collection recently at the Museum of Mobile, a history center near the waterfront of this 300-year-old port. The City Council had just endorsed their project --- without providing any funds --- and the publicity drew a stream of people to a gallery where samples of the collection were displayed in cases and shelves the Pettys had built with some friends.

Many of the items came from daily life: forks carved from wood, quilts made from seed bags, a field canteen with two spouts (a big one for whites, a little one for slaves). But it was the hardware of subjugation that drew the most scrutiny: manacles, neck restraints, a branding iron from a rice plantation that was displayed next to a photo of a man with letters seared into his forehead.

The Pettys hovered nearby answering questions, meeting viewers, occasionally hugging someone when emotions overflowed.

One visitor had driven hundreds of miles to evaluate the collection --- and the collectors. "I wanted to look them in the eye," said Melvey Brown, a teacher from Fredericksburg, Va. "I wanted to see what kind of people they are."

They don't seem like zealots.

At 44, Jim has straight black hair with streaks of gray racing down the sides and a smooth radio baritone that shifts into overdrive when he explains his motives. He says that history has fascinated him since he volunteered on archaeological digs as a young man in Southern California. When he moved to Mississippi in 1989 to work at the Stennis Space Center, his interests naturally shifted to the Civil War.

Mary Anne, two years younger, grew up with those Rebel ghosts. A native of Meridian, Miss. --- "I was Little Miss La Petite," she says sheepishly --- she attended Catholic schools and learned to value tolerance early on. Outgoing and open, she tears up when she speaks about all the effort and money they've put into their dream.

After the Pettys married in 1992, they spent much of their free time driving around the Deep South touring the sites of the Civil War and the civil rights movement. At an Alabama antiques shop, they paid $4 for their first slavery object, a button bearing a master's name. Grasping it, Petty simmered with rage like a latter-day abolitionist. He wanted to buy more.

The couple's enthusiasm deepened when Petty made a career change in the mid-'90s. He started covering the casino industry as a free-lance journalist and broadcaster, hosting a call-in show about gaming on a Gulfport radio station, WJZD. The owner happened to be one of the area's leading black activists.

Rip Daniels had stirred up a hornets' nest by suing to have a Confederate battle flag removed from a public plaza on the beach in Biloxi. He showed Petty some of his hate mail; one postcard pictured the charred corpse of a black man with the inscription: "You're next."

Petty asked to borrow books on African-American history. Soon he was speaking out on the air and getting threatening phone calls from men who accused him of being a "race traitor" or worse.

"Jim really identified with the black experience," Daniels says. "He isn't offended by the truth like some white people."

Petty's radio work led to an offer to host a TV show in Las Vegas. After three years in Nevada, the couple returned to Mississippi in 2000 and renewed their search for black memorabilia, going so far as to sell his sizable collection of Native American artifacts to finance acquisitions. They scoured antiques shops and estate sales and worked through pickers who specialized in finding rare objects.

Their greatest find came through eBay, the Internet auction site. A dealer in Middle Georgia was advertising an iron used to brand slaves. The Pettys bought it for $900 and went to see the seller, an older white man who wants to remain anonymous. They told him about the museum idea, Petty says, and he was so sympathetic that he offered to sell them the bulk of his holdings at a discount. That explains why so many of their best items come from Georgia.

The Pettys now own some 20,000 objects and documents from every era of African-American history. Perhaps a third of them are associated with slavery. They figure they've spent at least $100,000 on the collection, which is uninsured and stored in vaults at several locations.

The slavery trade

Buying slavery artifacts is a risky business. As black heritage has become more popular, cruel-looking counterfeits and reproductions have littered the market.

"There are some very good fakes out there," says Philip J. Merrill, a Baltimore dealer who appraised African-American memorabilia for the TV program "Antiques Roadshow." "I know a blacksmith who can make branding irons that would fool the best museum specialists. I have an extensive collection, and even I get burned."

Petty agrees that buyers need to be wary. He says he wouldn't touch some of the slave ID tags and shackles coming out of Charleston these days because they're so obviously bogus. While the Pettys haven't hired an appraiser to authenticate their collection, they have sought the opinions of other experts.

They loaded their Ford Expedition and drove to Tuscaloosa to show a sample to University of Alabama historian Howard Jones, who wrote "Mutiny on the Amistad," the basis for the Steven Spielberg movie. "I couldn't believe it," Jones says. "I'd never seen anything comparable."

The Pettys also visited the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, one of the largest African-American archives. "The quality of some of these pieces is mind-boggling," says visual arts curator Regenia Perry. "I've been looking at objects in this field for 30 years, and there's no question to me that these are authentic."

Michael Lomax, the former Atlanta politician who is now president of Dillard University in New Orleans, went to the Pettys' home to examine the collection for himself. He was impressed by the artifacts, but also by the couple's passion for their cause.

"They feel they're doing something no one else is doing and they have a special responsibility for it," Lomax says. "I admire them."

Goodbye, Mississippi

The feeling hasn't been universal.

The Pettys approached officials in Gulfport and Jackson last year to see whether the city or state would be interested in displaying their collection in a new museum. The governor was noncommittal. The response elsewhere was tepid or downright negative; one man told Mary Anne Petty that Gulfport already had too many black people on the streets.

"Mississippi can put millions of dollars into Jefferson Davis' home, but they don't have a cent for this," Jim Petty says, referring to Beauvoir, the beachfront estate in Biloxi where the Confederate president spent his retirement. In the mid-1990s, the state appropriated $3 million to help the owners, the Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, build the Jefferson Davis Presidential Library.

The Pettys gave up on Mississippi and started talking to people out of state. Among the half-dozen cities that courted them was Atlanta.

A representative of Mayor Shirley Franklin's office showed them sites on Auburn Avenue and introduced them to veteran civil rights leaders Joseph and Evelyn Lowery. The Lowerys are exploring the idea of establishing an African-American museum themselves.

During their first visit, the Pettys toured "Without Sanctuary," the lynching exhibition then showing at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. Characteristically, Petty thought the presentation could have been more blunt. "One of those photos should have been blown up on the wall where you walked in," he says.

After five meetings with various parties in Atlanta, the couple decided against relocating the project in Georgia. It wasn't the city's fault, Mary Anne Petty says. "Atlanta is so big and has so many things going on, we thought we might get lost in the shuffle."

The Pettys had staged several temporary showings at schools and hotels on the Gulf Coast and were planning one in Mobile at the beginning of the year.

When city officials learned they were looking for a permanent home for their collection, council members rolled out the red carpet with a unanimous resolution supporting the museum.

Now comes the hard part.

Calling Bill Cosby

The Pettys estimate their project will cost $25 million to $45 million. They aren't counting on public money, although the city may help them secure a site. Now that they've incorporated the museum as a nonprofit, they plan to assemble a board and begin fund-raising with companies and foundations that have contacted them.

So far, though, the financial sacrifice has been all theirs. The Pettys haven't held full-time jobs in three years. They've taken a second mortgage on their house and have maxed out their credit cards. Even so, they say they've refused lucrative offers to sell off parts of the collection.

"I don't think they're looking to get rich," says George Ewert, director of the Museum of Mobile, who has taken the couple under his wing, helping them refine their concept and introducing them to museum and fund-raising professionals.

With the sagging economy and worries about war and terrorism, it would not seem to be a promising time to find money for any ambitious cultural undertaking.

Regenia Perry of the Amistad Research Center doubts whether the Pettys can raise enough capital privately to keep control of their brainchild.

"They seem to think that Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey and other black celebrities will fund this," she says. "I don't think that will happen. Many African-Americans will be offended by these things. Some of them will be offended by the fact they're owned by a white couple. That doesn't make any difference to me, but I don't think they should count on a lot of African-American support."

The Pettys say they will build what the market will bear. If they have to start with a $5 million museum, that's better than nothing. In the meantime, they plan more temporary exhibitions like the preview in Mobile.

At that showing, a tall black man bent over the display case of whips and wondered how anyone could ever mistake slavery for a form of benevolent paternalism. "Some people seem to think slavery wasn't that bad," said Olabode Anise, a credit union president in Mobile. "They need to see these things."

That, the Pettys say, is the whole idea.