WASHINGTON — On a rainy spring afternoon, Denise Diggs visited the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. She was in search of a family artifact.
Wearing jeans and a blue windbreaker, she blended in with other Washington tourists, until she descended into a dimly lit exhibition area. There, Diggs began weaving in and out of visitors engrossed by the remnants of a slave ship, a wrought-iron slave collar and a 6-foot statue of Thomas Jefferson standing in front of a wall of stacked bricks memorializing the hundreds of humans he owned.
Diggs was on a mission — to find a Bible once owned by her family's patriarch.
