A decision about where a new museum in DC celebrating African-American history is to be made this week. “The country has always been reluctant to come to grips with the slave part of its history. Washington, more than any other city, has that contradiction. People look at the South with the cotton plantations and sugar plantations and say, yes, slavery. But the idea of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as slaveholders is a much more difficult idea. You don’t sit in Lafayette Square and think about the slave auction block.”