Slavery on Exhibition: Display Practices in Selected Modern American Museums

Home , Betty Hemings, Edgar Toppin, Lonnie Bunch, Michael Atwood Mason

by Kym Snyder Rice

B.A. in Art History, May 1974, Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University M.A. in American Studies, May 1979, University of Hawaii-Manoa

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

January 31, 2015

Dissertation directed by

Teresa Anne Murphy Associate Professor of American Studies

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University

Certifies that Kym Snyder Rice has passed the Final Examination for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy as of November 22, 2014. This is the final approved form of

the dissertation.

Slavery on Exhibition: Display Practices in Selected Modern American Museums

Kym Snyder Rice

Dissertation Research Committee:

Teresa Anne Murphy, Associate Professor of American Studies, Dissertation Director

Barney Mergen, Professor Emeritus of American Studies, Committee Member

Nancy Davis, Professorial Lecturer of American Studies, Committee Member

iii

Acknowledgements

This dissertation has taken many years to complete and I have accrued many debts. I remain very grateful for the ongoing support of all my friends, family, Museum

Studies Program staff, faculty, and students. Thanks to each of you for your encouragement and time, especially during the last year. Many people contributed directly to my work with their suggestions, materials, and documents. Special thanks to

Fath Davis Ruffins and Elizabeth Chew for their generosity, although they undoubtedly will not agree with all my conclusions. I also deeply appreciate substantial support I received from The George Washington University, Columbian College of Arts and

Sciences, especially from Iva Beatty, Tara Wallace, Chris Sterling, Roy Guenther, and

Peg Barrett---as well as faculty and staff of the American Studies Department. I also want to recognize my committee, the current members and those who helped me in the past. In particular, until his retirement in 2013, John M. Vlach served as my greatest cheerleader and assisted me in countless ways over many years. John’s scholarship in African

American material culture continues to inspire me. I also remain grateful for the past contributions of Jim Horton and the late Phyllis Palmer. My greatest debt, however, is to

Terry Murphy. Without Terry’s patience, kindness, and input over the last several years, even as she took on increasingly demanding administrative work for GW, I would not have completed this project. I especially will miss our talks.

Much of this work mirrors my long career in museums developing exhibitions that began in 1975 and reflects my struggles to understand my own small

iv place within a rapidly changing landscape. I am very grateful to all the individuals--- too numerous to mention here---who sustained, tolerated, and boosted me during my exhibition work. I do want to single out the exceptional impact by dear friends

Tucker H. Hill, Barbara G. Carson, and Fredrika J. Teute to both my life and career.

Hardly a day goes by that I do not think fondly about our conversations, shared interests, and enduring friendship. Finally, I give special recognition to my beloved family, my daughter Claire, my husband Mark, and several generations of canine companions for their extraordinary support and love. I regret that my mother Jean

M. Snyder did not live to see my PhD finally completed. Both my parents provided great introductions to history, museums, and culture to me and my brothers but it was Jean who gave me a deep and abiding curiosity about the world.

Abstract of Dissertation

Slavery on Exhibition: Display Practices in Selected Modern American Museums

In the postmodern museum, exhibitions frequently serve as charged sites for ongoing debates occurring in society over subjects that include authenticity, authority, difference, representation, identity, exclusion, and inclusion. This dissertation explores how modern

American museum exhibitions became critical locations for ongoing efforts to interrogate slavery. Slavery first received sustained attention in mainstream museums some forty years ago through a series of pioneering presentations positioned against a portrait of the

American past as divisive and troubling. Initiated following the Civil Rights era, when museums struggled for inclusivity on several fronts, these projects illustrate multiple approaches advocated by social history methodology, which legitimated slavery as a subject for serious consideration in American culture. A series of history exhibition case studies presented chronologically, beginning with the Smithsonian Institution National

Museum of American History’s “After the Revolution” (ca. 1984), reflect on how slavery has been “museumified.” As American museums re-imagined national history and identity through these “re-presentations,” these projects attempted to resist the museum’s powerful tendency to fix or homogenize difficult subjects. In the late 1980s, two pioneering exhibitions in Richmond, Virginia, organized by the Valentine Museum and the Museum of the Confederacy offered up an image of slavery to the public that challenged their own racially nostalgic institutional histories. “In Bondage and Freedom:

Antebellum Black Life in Richmond” at the Valentine and the Museum of the

Confederacy’s “Before Freedom Came: American Life in the Antebellum South”

vi strengthened each museum’s own legitimation but also brought to public attention the latest historiography, which focused on enslaved agency and the ability of slaves to create lives that were autonomous from whites. Foreground against the subsequent decades-long contestation over representations of historically marginalized groups, “At Freedom’s

Door: Challenging Slavery in Maryland” (2005-2007) resulted from a close collaboration between artists, Maryland Institute College of Art students, and several Baltimore museums. This example permits a behind- the-scenes glimpse at the continuing role that both memory and contemporary racial dynamics can play in exhibition making. Finally,

“Slavery at Monticello: Paradox of Liberty” (2011-2014), a collaboration between

Monticello and the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture focused on Thomas Jefferson and his slaves. The exhibition hoped to demonstrate how slavery helped to shape a collective national past, which African

Americans and whites share together. As demonstrated, despite decades of presentations related to slavery in museums, greater familiarity with slavery as an historical event does not translate into significant change with respect to race in the national discourse.

Scheduled to open in 2016, exhibitions at the National Museum of African American

History and Culture promise to employ a hybrid approach that will work across difference to embrace multiple perspectives, simultaneously creating a post-national turn.

NMAAHC’s embrace of slavery may finally help to reconcile elements of our troubled racial history within a national museum.

vii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments iv-v

Abstract vi-vii

Chapter 1: Introduction 1-16

Chapter 2: Introducing Slavery to the Exhibition 17-59

Chapter 3: Slavery in the Exhibition: “In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black Life in Richmond, Virginia” and Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South” 60-114

Chapter 4: “At Freedom’s Door”: Experiments in Exhibiting Slavery 115-158

Chapter 5: “Slavery at Monticello: Paradox of Liberty”: An Exhibition Collaboration between the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation 159-193

Chapter 6: Conclusion 194-207

Bibliography 208-230

Appendices 231-251

viii

List of Figures

1. Object theatre. After the Revolution (Courtesy, The Smithsonian Institution) 234

2. Entry sign. Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South 234

3. Entrance, Before Freedom Came 235

4. Clenched fist charm, collection of The Hermitage, Nashville, Before Freedom Came 235

5. Archaeological objects related to spiritual practice, Before Freedom Came 236

6. Plantation life section, Before Freedom Came 236

7. Urban life section, Before Freedom Came 237

8. Ex-slave narrative audio stations, Before Freedom Came 237

9. Ivory bust of Nora August, c. 1865, collection of Sea Island Company, Jekyll Island, Georgia, Before Freedom Came 238

10. Exhibition panel with audio, Mining the Museum 239

11. Kirk silver set with shackles, Mining the Museum 240

12. Runaway slave broadsides and hunting rifle, Mining the Museum 240

13. Klan robe in baby carriage, Mining the Museum 241

14. Class brainstorming session, At Freedom’s Door 242

15. Selecting the big idea, At Freedom’s Door 242

16. Exhibition Development students in class 243

17. Opening festivities at the Maryland Historical Society 243

18. Exhibition opening sign and first several galleries, MHS, At Freedom’s Door 244

19. Slavery in Maryland section, MHS, At Freedom’s Door 244

20. Joan Gaither, “Maryland, My Maryland” quilt (partial), MHS, At Freedom’s Door 245

21. Maren Hassinger, “Legacy” installation, MHS, At Freedom’s Door 245

22. Civil War case, MHS, At Freedom’s Door 246

23. Entry area with Holmes gate, Lewis Museum, At Freedom’s Door 247

24. “Beyond the Door” section, Lewis Museum, At Freedom’s Door 248

25. David Claypool Johnston, “Early Development of Southern Chivalry (detail), c.1861-65, collection of the Maryland Historical Society, Lewis Museum, At Freedom’s Door 249

26. David Levinthal, “Blackface Series,” collection of the artist, Lewis Museum, At Freedom’s Door 250

27. Opening area, Philadelphia installation, Slavery at Monticello 251

28. Opening area, Philadelphia installation, Slavery at Monticello 252

29. “Remembering Those Enslaved at Monticello,” Philadelphia Installation, Slavery at Monticello 252

30. “The Hemings Family,” Philadelphia installation, Slavery at Monticello 253

31. “Getting Word,” Philadelphia Installation, Slavery at Monticello 254

Chapter 1: Introduction

I thought that this has got to be the least read of all the books I’d written because it is about something that the characters don’t want to remember, I don’t want to remember, black people don’t want to remember, white people don’t want to remember. I mean, its national amnesia.

-Toni Morrison, interview about her novel, Beloved, “The Pain of Being Black, Time Magazine, May 22, 1989

America as a single unified nation, yet at the same time were tempered by the museum’s powerful tendency to fix or homogenize difficult subjects. Through a sequence of exhibitions about slavery that occurred in American history museums over the last 40

years, the dissertation reflects on how the museum re-imagines nation through modes that seek to “re-present” an uncomfortable past or a historically marginalized people.1

Paradoxically, the process that requires museums to construct narratives that are more

inclusive, at the same time must maintain distinctions of difference. In the future, we may

realize more fluid, hybrid models of nation that will better articulate James Clifford’s

vision of the museum ideally as a contact zone that combines cross-cultural, global, and

transnational histories and identities.

In 2011, while visiting Charleston, South Carolina, for the impending Civil War

sesquicentennial, the New York Times cultural reporter Edward Rothstein looked in vain

for museum exhibitions connected to American slavery and its legacy. Rothstein

1 The term is borrowed from Kylie Message, New Museums and the Making of Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 17. 1 wondered, “After all, is there any more vexed aspect of this country’s history than its embrace and tolerance of slavery? And is there any aspect of its past that has been less well served in museums, exhibitions and memorials?”2 Rothstein’s observations underscore the important role contemporary culture has assigned to museums as symbolic of nation in moderating the American past, including slavery. A recent study found that modern American audiences regard history museums, their exhibitions and programming, and their websites as authoritative sources for understanding the past.3 On the one hand, this public perception that museums are purveyors of national “truth” gives institutions great power and authority, nonetheless in the case of dark history like slavery, American museums have found it especially challenging, difficult, and politically fraught to reshape, or revise or even ultimately reposition our national narrative with respect to race. 4

Although museums traditionally portray themselves as neutral spaces to their audiences, they, in fact, embody through their exhibitions and other interpretations various political, ideological and cultural orthodoxies.5 When slavery is presented in its

2 Edward Rothstein, “Emancipating History,” New York Times, March 12, 2011, Accessed January 28, 2014. www.nytimes.com2011/03/12/arts/design/Charleston-museums-finally-Chronicle-history-of- slavery.html?pagenated=all&_r=0. Samuel Redman observes that 20th-century exhibitions about race in America are not especially well “remembered.” (Samuel Redman, “Remembering Exhibitions on Race in the 20th-century United States,” American Anthropology 111 (November 2009): 517-518, accessed February 1, 2014, doi: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.20009.01160_1.x.) 3 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 4 The term “dark history” borrows from Lennon and Foley’s characterization of “dark tourism.” See John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (New York: Continuum Books, 2000). 5 See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988); Robert Lumley, The Museum Time Machine: Putting Culture on Display (London: Routledge Press, 1988); Paul Vergo, ed., The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989); Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Michael M. Ames, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 1992); Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge Press, 1992); Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992); Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge Press, 1995); Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne, 2

historical context in museums, it directly challenges the revered portrait of American

exceptionalism still taught in schools, presented in the media and promoted by politicians,

and threatens the long-held representation of (white) citizens as virtuous and innocent. As

Ira Berlin notes, “Wherever the issue of slavery has appeared---whether in books,

museums, or monuments, or classroom discussions---there have been tense debates over

how to present the topic, often accompanied by charges that the interpreters have said too

much (why do you dwell on it?) or too little (why can’t you face the truth?).”6 Even if

today we report that slavery is thoroughly “museumified”---measured by its appearance in modes ranging from reenactments to exhibitions of all types---little agreement exists in the museum profession or among their critics about either its presentation or meaning. In large part, this lack of consensus is powered by conflicted ideas about racial identity, difference, and representation in contemporary society that influence how we relate to, process, and consume ideas about nation in museums. Many historians and cultural commentators note what Salamishah Tillet terms “the racial exclusivity of civic myths” in the United States that reflects our “amnesia” (as Toni Morrison put it) about slavery in particular and African American history in general.7

eds., Thinking about Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 1996); Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996);; Sharon J. Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1996); Moira Simpson, Making Representations: Museums in the Post-Colonial Era (London: Routledge Press, 1996); Timothy W. Luke, Museum Politics: Power Play at the Exhibition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Andrea Witcomb, Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (London: Routledge Press, 2003); and Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 6 Ira Berlin, “American Slavery in History and Memory and the Search for Social Justice,” Journal of American History 90 (2004): 1260, accessed February 16, 2014, ProQuest document: 224893442. 7 Salamishah Tillet, “In the Shadow of the Castle: (Trans) Nationalism, African American Tourism, and Gorée Island,” Research in African Literatures 40 (Winter 2009): 126, accessed December 30, 2013, http://muse.jhu.edu/; Nathan Huggins, Black Odyssey: The African American Ordeal in Slavery (New York: Pantheon Press, 1990), xlivf; Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), , accessed February 9, 2014, eBook 3

Because slavery played such a critical role in shaping early America, race has assumed a defining role in forming our understanding of nation throughout our history.

Although scholars interpret nationalism differently, the historian Gary Gerstle identifies a particular “racial nationalism” in the United States, which defines the country in

“ethnoracial terms, as a people held together by common blood and skin color and by an

inherited fitness for self-government.”8 Whether identified by skin color or other

constructs, racial difference supplies a critical determinate by which Americans constitute

national groups. Writing more generally about the history of the American West, David

Boswell observes that we form views of nation as much by our grasp of our

commonalities as “the perception of difference from others.” 9 Through the ways in which it constituted, displayed, and communicated certain notions of nation and community for over a century, the American history museum enforced racial nationalism

by imposing notions of otherness through expressions of racial difference. As Ghassan

Hage points out in his criticism of Australian museums, parallel representational display practices occurred at natural history museums that “belong to a long Western colonialist tradition of exhibition the national self through the exhibiting of otherness.”10

Collection (EBSCO host), EBSCO host; Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 8 Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002): 5. On other arguments and approaches, see, for example, Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Eric J. Hobsbaum, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage Publications, 1995). 9 David Boswell, “Introduction to part one,” Representing the Nation: A Reader, eds. David Boswell and Jessica Evans (London: Routledge, 2007), 11. In a lecture that is part of her preparation for a new scholarly project, historian Barbara Fields recently argued that this perception of racial difference is treated by contemporary American society as permanent through what she calls race craft, defined as “the process that makes racism invisible to people” (see Molly Dyal, “Barbara Fields Inaugurates Gilder-Jordan Lecture Series,” The Southern Register (Spring 2011): 4). 10 Ghassan Hage, “Republicanism, Multiculturalism, Zoology” quoted in Message, New Museums and the Making of Culture, 201. 4

This approach held true in American history museums until the modern Civil

Rights era concluded in the early 1970s. With their embrace of social history

methodologies, museum representational practices finally challenged the idea of a single

(read white) nation. Not coincidentally, these transformations gathered momentum at roughly the same time that contemporary museums were rethinking, under postmodernism’s growing influence, the then widely held notion that museums should only “reflect accepted truth,” not search for new meanings or advocate reform.11 As a

result, by the early 21st century, we increasingly regard modern museums through the

vehicle of their exhibitions that now serve as, according to Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz,

“central manifests of and forums for these processes and debates.”12

In our global age, museums play an increasingly important role in the

dissemination of culture and history. We can measure their significance by their growth and popularity globally among audiences who visit them both physically and virtually, and observe that in rapidly developing countries like the People’s Republic of China, governments create, support, and carefully control museums to reinforce particular historical interpretations and to generate national pride.13 A well-funded and large-scale

project known as EuNaMus (also called NaMu) sponsored by the European Union is

investigating the changing role of national museums across Europe through a series of

academic research projects, conferences, and publications. 14 At the same time, the

11 Neil Harris, “Museums and Controversy: Some Introductory Remarks,” The Journal of American History 82 (December 1995), 1104, accessed February 16, 2014, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2945115. 12 Kratz and Karp, “Introduction,” Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, 11. 13 In addition to modernizing many current facilities, the Chinese are creating roughly 100 new museums annually. For a critical view of this enterprise, see Edward Vickers, “Museums and Nationalism in Contemporary China,” Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education 37 (2007): 365-382, accessed February 16, 2014, doi: 10.1080/03057920701330255. 14 Peter Aronsson and Gabriella Elgenius, “Making National Museums in Europe—A Comparative Approach,” conference proceedings from EuNaMus, European National Museums: Identity Politics, the 5 significant increase over the last two decades in published museum criticism and theory by the academy is striking. In contrast to the museum-going public, scholars study how imperial or colonial histories shape or mark Western museums, and as such, embody particular ideological structures, which privilege or centralize certain representational strategies uncritically.15 The link between museums and ideas relating to nationalism or national identity forms a major element of the contemporary museum critique.16

Arguably, among the world’s most famous museums, the British Museum and the

Louvre were created in 1753 and 1793, respectively, as national public institutions that focused on producing a national citizenry. Tony Bennett, Benedict Anderson, and Carol

Duncan, among others, characterize the idea of the museum as a “social terrain” and their work traces how from its early modern origins forward museums performed a series of

“civilizing rituals” intended to regulate its publics by inculcating them with the political and cultural pedagogies that constitute modern nationalism.17 Exhibitions, or displays of collections, formed the critical mode to transmit ideas to museum visitors. As John Urry observes, museums demonstrate their facility as a “metaphor for the power of the state”

Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, Bologna, 28-30 April 2011, EuNaMus Report No. 1, 5-20, accessed January 5, 2013, Linkoping University Electronic Press, ISSN: 1650-3686. 15 See for example, Sharon J. Macdonald, “Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities,” Museum and Society 1 (2003): 8, accessed February 18, 2011, ISSN: 1479-8360; Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Multiculturalism and Museums: Discourse about Others in the Age of Globalization,” Theory, Culture and Society 14 (1997): 123-124, accessed February 18, 2011, Sage Publications, doi: 10.1177/026327697014004006. 16 In addition to Boswell, Evans, Macdonald and Nederveen Pieterse, see also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), chapter 10; Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995); Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2004); Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Flora Kaplan, ed., Museums and the Making of ‘Ourselves’:The Role of Objects in National Identity (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994); Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995); and Andrea Witcomb, Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (London: Routledge, 2003). For the enduring importance of national identity to museums, see Simon Knell and Peter Aronsson, National Museums: New Studies from Around the World (London: Routledge, 2010). 17 Quotes are from Anderson, 4 and Carol Duncan’s title. 6

through the authoritative exhibition arrangements they adopt, which in the nineteenth

century showcased classification systems that conveyed the organization of knowledge in ways that promoted “visions of progress and unity,” as Robert Rydell described

Chicago’s museum-like 1893 World’s Fair.18 Referring specifically to the nationalizing

facility residing within modern museum exhibitions, the Australian art historian Christine

Dauber defines this power as the ability to “create an illusion which is in itself an

abstraction which is the nation.”19

In considering the role that exhibitions about slavery played in transforming the

American museum beginning in the 1970s, this dissertation draws its contextual and

theoretical background from recent critical histories by scholars concerning western

museums and their exhibition practices. In addition to published sources, my analyses

uses different groups of unpublished records that describe the organization of a series of exhibitions focused on slavery acquired from multiple sources including the Smithsonian

Institution Archives, files from my own 30-year plus career as an exhibition curator

(always clearly identified), and those of other curators and their exhibitions. I also interviewed two curators about the exhibitions that they organized. Although I was intimately involved with two exhibitions analyzed here, I intend this as a kind of

intellectual history, not a memoir.

As Chapter 2 discusses, American museums ignored African American history

until the Civil Rights movement---partially through fear of the disagreeable associations

that slavery might conjure for their audiences but more significantly; this inattention

18 John Urry, “Gazing on History,” in Boswell and Evans, Representing the Nation, 226; Robert W. Rydell, “The Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893,” in Ibid, 297. 19 Christine Dauber, “Heterotopia: The Challenge for Museums in the Twenty-First Century” (undated paper), 3, accessed May 5, 2011, http://www.scribd.com/doc/48573207/the-museum . Dauber has written extensively about the Australian national museum. 7

signaled an inability to confront the racism reflected in the nation itself that was its

legacy. While the topic possibly raised negative issues for white citizens about the

American past, for black Americans the meaning of an enslaved past was more complex and recently historians have argued that its memory ultimately grounded the contemporary African American identity. 20 Influenced by social history’s rise in the

academy as a post-Civil Rights era methodology, together with the development of

African American history as a specialization and the impact of Black Nationalism as a political philosophy, that trajectory began to change.21

Slavery first occupied its legitimate place in the public imagination through its

introduction in living history museums, national parks, museum exhibitions, and similar

vehicles during the 1976 national Bicentennial celebration of the American Revolution

anniversary. The influential television broadcast of a mini-series based on Alex Haley’s

best-selling book, Roots, followed in 1977. Captivating millions of white and black

American television viewers, Roots opens with the capture and enslavement of an

African named Kunta Kinte, follows his journey to the New World, and traces the lives

of his descendants. At around the same time, the first significant exhibition to highlight

enslaved material culture toured art and history museum venues across the nation,

including the Smithsonian Institution. As they introduced slavery into their storylines,

history museums took a first step towards acknowledging that the idealized image of

America on display in their institutions minimized the nation’s oppressive history,

20 Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1-2, accessed February 9, 2014, eBook Collection (EBSCO host), EBSCO host. 21 Gerstle, 328-334. See also Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 8

omitted African Americans from the country’s past, and marginalized them in the present

as audience members.

By calling for new methodologies and understandings of the people and the

experiences that had created the United States, including slaves and the institution of slavery, social history offered a direct challenge to the idea of nation then widely held by

Americans.22 Chiefly through its reification of “difference,” enslaved history contested

the homogenous presentation of American identity (white, male, and privileged)

complicit in most expressions of nationhood then found in museums, school textbooks,

and other popular expressions. While initially museums merely sought to locate this

painful experience within the national arch of American history, the transition proved

difficult. The range of issues that quickly materialized related to slavery’s interpretation and presentation in the museum are demonstrated by the chapter’s case study of the

National Museum of American History’s landmark exhibition, “After the Revolution:

Everyday Life in America, 1780-1800.” With scant objects remaining to supply physical presence, slavery did not lend itself easily to the notions of authenticity implicit in most museum displays or fit within the seamless visualizing technology then entering the museum through increasingly sophisticated exhibition designs. Lacking a palpable materiality with which to surround it, the “exhibitionary apparatus” (to borrow Tony

Bennett’s term) required by slavery threatened to disrupt long-standing museum conventions. These included prevailing collecting practices and exhibitions centered on

“person-object relations”---what Naguib criticizes as a perception of artifacts as “object- witnesses and trophies”---as well as the concept that time stands still in the museum, an

22 For the impact of social history on historic house museums and historic sites, see James B. Gardner and George Rollie Adams, eds., Ordinary People and Everyday Life: Perspectives on the New Social History (Nashville: American Association of State and Local History, 1983). 9

emphasis Dauber points out undergirds general collecting and exhibition practices for more than a century. 23

Chapter 3 describes efforts made by museum professionals to incorporate slavery

into their exhibition programs in the late 1980s---part of a larger movement that

“museumised” African American history generally. Curators created new narratives that

responded to emerging historiographical emphases crafted by scholars that reinterpreted

documentary history and as a result, now conveyed significant agency to enslaved people,

among other distinctions. As academic historians increasingly invoked slavery as a “state”

of its own, museums attempted to follow their lead.24 Requirements instituted for funding awards by federal agencies for the humanities and the arts mandated that museums

establish partnerships with scholars to guide historical content. These collaborations positively resulted in the introduction of innovative interpretive ideas directly into exhibitions. Initially during this period, white-run majority museums proved more successful at securing funding than smaller community or ethnically oriented museums.

Their administrators and curators perceived exhibitions about slavery as conveying a certain cachet that handily demonstrated institutional modernism through a commitment to cutting-edge history. National funding made possible several major exhibitions about slavery at two history museums in Richmond, Virginia. These institutions appropriated slavery into their narratives as a means to bolster their own connection to national

identity; demonstrate their commitment to progressive, inclusive interpretation;

23 Saphinaz-Amal Naguib, “The One, the Many and the Other: Revisiting Cultural Diversity in Museums of Cultural History,” conference proceedings, “National Museums in a Global World,” eds. Arne Bugge Amundsen and Andreas Nyblom, NAMU III, University of Oslo, Norway, November 19-21, 2007, 7, accessed August 6, 2011, Linkoping University Electronic Press, http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/031/ecp07031.pdf ; Dauber, 2. 24 For example, Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974). 10

strengthen their ties to the African American community; and finally, prove their

increasing relevance to new audiences that now included many more African Americans

visitors. Whatever their approach---whether using powerfully imagined design elements

or an encyclopedic gathering of enslaved material culture---these exhibitions introduced

audiences to the new ideas about slave life then circulating through the academy.

As Chapter 4 relates, starting in the early 1990s a series of critical debates raging within American society prompted changes in museums and their exhibition practices.

Dipesh Chakrabarty summarizes the disputes that impacted museums as including “the canons of the Western academy being both vigorously challenged and defended, the rise of varieties of cultural relativism, the accent on diversity and the politics of identity, the coming of postmodern and postcolonial criticism.”25 Corinne Kratz and Ciraj Rassool

characterize this pivotal period as “remapping” the museum.26 Within a larger public debate then occurring about multiculturalism---criticized by conservative politicians and pundits as political correctness---tensions surfaced in museums over who had the right to tell the story of minority or otherwise marginalized histories. As new museums or similar cultural projects emerged within communities that chiefly identified themselves as

African American and drew their legitimacy from that distinction, their organizers

perceived slavery’s growing appearance in majority museum programs as an unmerited

power grab gained at the expense of their own history and identity.27 Often, museums

responded to the dissention that accompanied the spread of ideas about pluralism by

25 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Museums in Late Democracies,” Humanities Review 9 (2002): 6, quoted in Message, 40. 26 See Corinne A. Kratz and Ciraj Rassool, “Remapping the Museum” in Karp, Kratz et.al, Museum Frictions, 347-355. 27 Edmund Barry Gaither, “ ‘Hey! That’s Mine’ Thoughts on Pluralism and American Museums,” Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, 56-64. 11

seeking engagement with the living nation and granting stakeholder/community groups

greater latitude in determining exactly what “shared memories” to exhibit. In other cases,

the new stakeholder-organized museums that emerged during this period endorsed

meaning-making strategies that presented slavery differently from the academy in ways

that significantly reinvented or reinterpreted it. Kylie Message observes that in the

presentation of aboriginal history in Australian museums, community-controlled institutions “often appear to echo or privilege historical moments of social change or challenges to mainstream culture” that reflect their community memories while distorting others.28 In refuting similar concerns that surfaced about academic scholarship

diminishing in American museum projects at this time, Susan Crane notes that “while

historical scholarship is dedicated to the production of knowledge for a larger public,

publics continue to harbor and develop their own collective memories which justifiably

resist historical interpretation and which form an active component of public life.” 29 In

ways that deemphasized traditional scholarship, museums began to move closer to

sharing authority for their content and interpretation with their audiences.

The larger questions that emerged in the 1990s about ownership, authority,

memory, and empowerment together with arguments about ‘cultural belongingness’

influenced how different groups of contemporary Americans understood what slavery

meant in the past and what it meant today.30 Exhibitions that represented slavery’s history

as existing long ago without reference to its present-day legacy, no longer resonated with

28 Message, 26. 29 Susan Crane, “Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum,” History and Theory 36 (1997): 63, accessed February 16, 2014, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505574. 30 Stuart Hall observes, in another context, “ ‘Cultural belongingness’ (redefined as an old, exclusive form of ethnicity) has replaced genetic purity and functions as the coded language for race and colour” (Stuart Hall, “Culture, Community, Nation” in Boswell and Evans, Representing the Nation, 39). 12

either critics or audiences. Emerging theories concerning the formation of social memory

and its importance to community identity offered new ways to understand a contested

history.31 In his influential work concerning the intersection of history and memory,

Pierre Nora observes that individuals and institutions engage in “framing from the present”

as one expression of the “will to remember.” According to Tallentire, social memory

forms “how people select, transmit and agree upon their shared memories.”32 From the

provocative “Mining the Museum” created by artist Fred Wilson at the Maryland

Historical Society in 1992 forward to the collaborative “At Freedom’s Door” in 2007, as

concerns about present day racism and exclusion in America took a larger role in framing

museum exhibitions about slavery, artistic works took the appearance of greater subjectivity in depicting slavery.

By analyzing the Smithsonian Institution’s still developing National Museum of

African American History and Culture (hereafter, NMAAHC) with respect to its recent

joint exhibition with Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello:

The Paradox of Liberty,” Chapter 5 considers the future for interpreting slavery in

museum exhibitions. Together with other alternate histories or presentations about race

presented in museums, exhibitions about slavery continue to play a role in ongoing public

negotiations to re-conceptualize American national identity from white to culturally

diverse. Potentially they will be influential in moving the “imagined communities of the

nation from outmoded forms of identity and perception to new ones…,” as Tony Bennett

31 See Jenéa Tallentire, “Strategies of Memory: History, Social Memory and the Community,” Historie Sociale/Social History 34 (2001): 202, accessed February 16, 2014, http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index/php/hssh/article/new/4545; and Joseph R. Llobera, “The Role of Historical Memory in Catalan National Identity,” Social Anthropology 6 (1998): 333. 32 Nora quoted in Tallentire, 198; Tallentire, 203. 13

(evoking Benedict Anderson) writes in his consideration of museums and the “other.” 33

NMAAHC’s founding director, Lonnie G. Bunch, has gone on record multiple times

about his determination to “help the public understand that they are shaped and touched

by African American history—all the day, every day.” 34 Sounding a little like Pierre

Nora, Bunch emphasizes, “remembering” as one way to reframe America’s

understanding of race and ethnicity. “We are all made better when we dip into that

reservoir that comes only when you remember,” Bunch has said.35 Memory, in fact, plays

a central if not fully acknowledged role in “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello.” While

Jefferson remains the fulcrum around which the exhibition pivots, organizers give

significant agency to the individuals that he enslaved (including his paramour Sally

Hemings) and their descendants. Although the exhibition fails to present the full

significance of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship, it reiterates Bunch’s central argument that slavery helped to shape a collective national past now shared by African Americans and whites together.

With the NMAAHC under construction until 2016, we can only imagine its inaugural exhibitions. Yet by the early 21st century, one can say with greater certainty

that we have consigned the totalizing vision of nation once presented in museums to the

past but the museum’s impulse to classify/fix remains. What will replace the underlying

impulse to represent a national identity remains undetermined, but certainly American

33 Bennett, “Difference and the Logic of Culture” in Boswell and Evans, Representing the Nation, 60. 34 Bunch promises that the new Smithsonian museum will “promote reconciliation, healing and a greater understanding of the African American experience for all visitors” and a “great fun to visit.” (See the National Museum of the American Indian and Lonnie Bunch, “There’s something new on the Mall and we want NMAI supporters to know about it,” mass email communication, March 15, 2011.) 35 Lonnie Bunch III, Call the Lost Dream Back: Essays on History, Race and Museums (Washington: AAM Press, 2010), 70; Bunch, “Preserving to Remember,” keynote address, Connecting to Collections Forum, Atlanta, George, January 31, 2008, accessed February 16, 2014, http://www.heritagepreservation.org/C2C/LonnieBunchkeynote10-27. 14

ideas about our multicultural nation remain conflicted.36 If we can put aside our tendency

to seek absolutes, the future holds out hope for a more porous model organized around

what Naguib, Golding, and others characterize as “the plurality and diversity of identities.”

Ideally, it will result in a future that is less fixed, with hybrid identity created from

“disparate fragments of similarity and difference,” “perennially in motion, continually

under reconstruction.”37

In seeking to become a more fluid space where multiple and conflicting ideas

about national history and culture might take the stage together, the 21st century museum

desires to shift authority almost completely to their visitors by creating a forum like

atmosphere where audiences can explore and even debate contentious topics like slavery.

Kylie Message distinguishes this recent attempt among museums to position themselves as dialogic sites, as vitally “important for the rebuilding of collective national imaginaries…” 38 Similarly, Andreas Huyssen argues that “museum and exhibition

culture in the broadest sense provides a terrain that can offer multiple narratives at a time

when the meta narratives of modernity…have lost their persuasiveness, when more

people are eager to hear and see other stories, when identities are shaped in multiply

layered and never-ceasing negotiations between self and other, rather than being fixed

and taken for granted in the framework of family and faith, race and nation.” 39 Clearly,

new exhibition models must resist the museum apparatus’ tendency to fix people in

36 Werner Sollors observes that the multicultural position rejects American models of pluralism and exhibits “resistance to true and messy syncretism.” (Sollors, “National Identity and Ethnic Diversity: ‘Of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown and Ellis Island’: or, Ethnic Literature and some Redefinitions of America, “History and Memory in African American Culture. Eds. Geneviève Fabre and Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 108, accessed February 14, 2014, eBook Collection, EBSCO. 37 Naguib, 7; Viv Golding, Learning at the Museum Frontiers: Identity, Race and Power (London: Ashgate Publishers, 2009), 190; Pieterse, 125. 38 Message, 130. 39 Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge Press, 1995), quoted in Message, 120. 15

absolute categories as well as to project only positive trajectories. Saphinaz-Amal Naguib

warns that whenever museums privilege one “ethnic” identity over another, they run the

risk of becoming totally destabilized, because “the other no longer is a stabilizing

category.”40 Once created, representations can slip into dangerous, stereotypic

“authenticities,” not that different from old views of national identity.

Slavery may offer an effective strategy to disrupt conventional ways of thinking about nations, racial identities, constructs, and global histories through a deep consideration of both its past history and its legacy together, including a more layered understanding of the ways in which museums as well as individuals have made meaning around it. Viv Golding maintains subjects like slavery that promote the “perpetual re- conceptualisation of ‘subjectivity’ ” can confer a kind of cohesion on the museumification of difference.41 As Sharon MacDonald points out, the ongoing struggle

of museums to realize difference, rather than represent a homogenous national identity, is

occurring throughout the world, not only in the West. Even when they fail, these attempts

to produce a welcome hybridity marked as they are by “rupture, trauma and change” hold

out the best guarantee of the museum’s continued relevance into the future. 42

40 Naguib, 7. See also Sharon Macdonald, “Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities,” 7 and Message, 26. 41 Golding, 199. 42 MacDonald, 10. 16

Chapter 2- Introducing slavery to the exhibition

Given their symbolic and material properties, museums figure prominently on the

checklist for the nation state. 43 The leading American examples are the museums attached to the Smithsonian Institution founded in 1846 in the nation’s capital. Seen today, stretched along the national mall between the United States Capitol and the

Washington Monument in a line that faces each other, their grand architecture conveys to spectators a tangible sense of national stability and prosperity. The location sits in close

proximity to the nexus of American political power that, among other things, controls a significant part of the Smithsonian’s budget through yearly appropriations, granted by politicians who frequently feel empowered to scrutinize their programming. Inside the museum buildings themselves, the exhibitions employ orderly arrangements and selective messages that embody and/or enforce certain ideas about the nation and its people yet for most of its history, any discourse about American slavery was absent from the

Smithsonian. Until 1984, Smithsonian exhibitions made few references to slavery: their

experts collected few artifacts related to it. However, this was not unusual or unexpected,

given the hegemonic grip white privilege maintained over what constituted a nation (and

a national museum). As John J. Bukowczyk observed in “Who is the Nation?” a “racial

polarity” divided American society---“one, ‘real,’ normative America that was ‘white,’

43 Benedict Anderson, “Census, Map, Museum,” Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 167-190. 17

and a marginal, sometimes oppositional, (after Ralph Ellison) sometimes invisible

population in America that was not.” To borrow from an observation made by

Salamishah Tillet about slave trading landmark Gorée Castle, with no project on the mall to anchor them, African Americans stood outside the “national memory” and the

“national community.” 44

Because this dissertation concerns how presentations of slavery changed and

developed through the mode of museum exhibitions, we will look first at earlier forms of

presentations of African American history that attempt to re-inscribe slavery onto notions

about the American past. Through a detailed case study of the contested crafting of an

interpretation of slavery that took place behind the scenes in the National Museum of

American History’s exhibition, “After the Revolution,” this chapter concerns how

museums first negotiated difference as a locus for complicating public understandings of

nation.

The late-19th century “exhibitionary” complex identified by Tony Bennett situates

the display of all American history at the Smithsonian Institution. According to Bennett,

the nation state accorded the modern museum a civilizing function that was most evident

through its “public instruction,” embodied in the ways in which its displays represented

certain ideas about knowledge and authority to the visiting public.45 George Brown

Goode, who began his tenure as the Smithsonian’s National Museum director in 1879,

44 John J. Bukowczyk, "Who is the nation?"--or, ‘did cleopatra have red hair?’: A patriotic discourse on diversity, nationality, and race,” MELUS 23 (1998): 10-11, accessed February 14, 2014, http://search.proquest.com/docview/203687810?accountid=11243; Tillet, “In the Shadow of the Castle: (Trans)Nationalism, African American Tourism, and Gorée Island,” 124. 45 Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations 4 (Spring 1988): 73-102, accessed July 9, 2010, http://www.londonconsortium.com/uploads/The%20ExhibitionaryComplex%20.pdf. 18

considered museums vehicles for the “education of the people.”46 He communicated to

his audience a vision of American history closely tied to the Colonial Revival movement

then directing the creation of museums within historic houses like George Washington’s

estate Mount Vernon, which first opened to the public in 1860. Historians attribute the

glowing images of the American past that these museums sought to circulate to rising

tensions created among American elites compounded by such factors as growing

immigrant populations in cities, large-scale strikes by industrial workers, and turn-of-the- century white fears of black enfranchisement.47

Goode sought to create a “museum of record” at the Smithsonian by collecting

what he perceived as “permanent land-marks of the progress of the world.” What the public witnessed in the National Museum’s history hall during Goode’s era constituted a shrine to America’s founding fathers and the well-known political events they helped to engineer. Surviving photographs show the history hall’s large glass cases filled with marble presidential portrait busts, ship models, and other artifacts arranged to celebrate the century since the country’s founding as one of glorious American progress. Both the

objects selected and the stories that they reflected neatly omitted the tensions and

conflicts that had shaped the nation. The history hall exhibitions were silent on slavery,

the destruction of Native American communities, women’s rights, labor history, and class

struggles.48 Only recently have we recognized that national museums and their

46 This discussion relies on Gary Kulik’s interpretation of Goode. See Gary Kulik, “Designing the Past: History Museum Exhibitions from Peale to the Present,” History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, eds. Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 3-37. 47 See, for example, Karol Ann Marling, George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876-1989 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). 48Goode quote in Kulik, 8. For more on Goode, see also Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 19

exhibitions occupy as critical a role in contesting national identities as they do in

articulating the status quo.49

For almost another century following Goode’s tenure, representations and exhibition interpretations at the Smithsonian continued to authorize a view of the

American past, present, and even future, that affirmed sweeping successes from empire building to military might. A separate museum for American history, which opened in

1964 as the National Museum of History and Technology (hereafter, NMHT), projected a

hushed shrine-like atmosphere, populated with exhibitions about the First Ladies gowns,

among others, that, as Robert Cantwell describes, communicated ideas to visitors in

“tones of nationalism, patriotism, and technological progress.”50 Finally, in the late 1970s

NMHT actively moved African Americans away from the margins with its presentation of a milestone Cleveland Museum of Art traveling exhibition that introduced African

American material culture to a wider audience. 51 The NMHT venue for “The Afro-

American Tradition in Decorative Arts,” was the last stop on a tour that originated at the sponsoring organization in Cleveland, Ohio, in February 1978. In the exhibition, curator

John Vlach, an academic folklorist and anthropologist, argued that enslaved and free

African Americans not only flourished artistically and creatively during slavery but that their legacy not only survived the institution, it continued to the present day. Through material culture, Vlach linked African Americans directly to African cultural traditions

49 Peter Aronsson, “Foreword: A European Project,” Building National Museums in Europe 1750-2010, 1. The EuNaMus Project has commissioned studies of national museums throughout Europe, with the idea of updating and complicating Anderson’s theories about museums and their relationship to the nation state. 50 Robert Cantwell, Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1993), 78. 51 The impact of “The Afro-American Tradition” is not widely recognized. Vlach attributes the “surprisingly muted reaction from [the] academic community” to the exhibition and book’s somewhat misleading title. See John M. Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Art (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990 (reprint)), vii. 20

while also showing the various assimilations and adaptions that occurred in the New

World during slavery. For the first time, audiences saw evidence that included wooden

boats built along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts; strip quilts produced in Alabama

and Mississippi; the pictorial quilts made by former slave Harriet Powers; New Orleans

shotgun houses closely related to their Caribbean predecessors; work by the Charleston

blacksmith Philip Simmons; and glazed earthenware face jugs that Vlach connected to earlier work by enslaved potters like Dave Drake of Edgefield, South Carolina (who

began his posthumous climb to folk art fame with this exhibition).

Almost none of “The Afro-American Tradition’s” contents previously was exhibited. Few institutions, outside of those with folk art focuses, collected material objects with African American histories---up to this point. A decade or so later, Vlach recalled, “My findings helped complete the picture of black American cultural history by revealing that the full account must include things as well as words and deeds.”52 When

“The Afro-American Tradition” catalogue was reprinted in 1990, reviewers

complimented Vlach on the ways this somewhat disparate groups of objects and their

histories drawn from many different collections, representing a wide swath in time,

effectively came together to support his thesis.53 Countering the attitude by museums and

some historians that enslaved African Americans were a vanished people or worse yet,

invisible, the exhibition confirmed that objects survived that slaves had made and when

52 Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Art (1990), viii-ix. The original catalogue was published in 1978 by the Cleveland Museum of Art. 53 Linda Rochell Lane, review of The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts by John M. Vlach, The Journal of Negro History 78 (Autumn 1993): 245-246. Accessed February 18, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2717418; Sally Price, review of The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts by John M.Vlach, Ethnohistory 39 (Spring 1992): 242-243. Accessed February 18, 2014. doi:10.2307/482426.

brought together and showcased in exhibitions, these “things” could become powerful

exemplars, from which a seemingly obscured past might be reconstituted.

“The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts” introduced an American art museum

audience then largely composed of whites of European descent, to African American

material culture and removed it from the realm of the quaint.

Although the narrative’s principal storyline focused on material culture, the

racism and oppression that blacks faced throughout American history constituted a subtle

thread of reality that ran throughout the exhibition. While Vlach’s written labels did not

downplay the suffering or onerous conditions that existed for enslaved African

Americans under slavery or during post slavery decades, the objects’ novelty somewhat

overwhelmed the written content. 54 Exhibiting these objects at the Smithsonian gave

them a national prominence, although not yet a secure place within the nation’s collective

history.

The backstory of how “The Afro-American Tradition” arrived at NMHT

highlights the tensions and political issues that emerged as representations of African

American history and culture began to appear on the national museum scene.

Smithsonian curator Richard E. Ahlborn originally hoped that the NMHT would be the

first site on “The Afro-American Tradition’s” exhibition tour, but due to the high loan fee charged by the Cleveland Museum of Art, the exhibition initially proved too steep for the

54 A version of the exhibition script used at one venue (the Birmingham Art Museum) written by John Vlach survives, although the Smithsonian apparently edited it for their installation at NMHT because exhibition designer James Piper felt that the texts were “too long.” See Gail Anderson to James Piper, undated (spring, 1979), “Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts, 1977-1979” folder, Box 19, National Museum of American History, Department of Exhibitions Records, 1957-1992, Record Unit 551, Smithsonian Archives (hereafter, “Afro-American Tradition,” Box 19-RU551). 22

NMHT’s budget. 55 Because Ahlborn believed that the exhibition was “significant,” he

nevertheless began to advocate for it to come to NMHT. Reflecting on the Smithsonian’s

poor relationship with Washington’s largely African American community, Ahlborn

hoped that the exhibition could serve a larger purpose for the entire institution: a genuine

opportunity to reach out to local residents who seldom saw themselves represented at the

institution and, as a result, did not visit most Smithsonian museums. In a memo to

NMHT’s then Senior Historian Brooke Hindle in 1977, Ahlborn promoted the exhibition

by focusing on “what this show can do for our image and reputation.” He also contacted

Anacostia Museum director John Kinard for ideas about “how we can produce an exhibit

that the Washington community and the Smithsonian will take pride in.”56 Ironically,

Kinard’s own Anacostia Museum, a community museum located in the city’s poorest

neighborhoods and folded into the Smithsonian Institution in 1967 as a satellite museum,

had already produced exhibitions about the African American experience for over a

decade. Nevertheless, Ahlborn’s championing of “The Afro-American Tradition”

represents the first serious attempt by a mainstream Smithsonian museum curator to place

a major exhibition that focused solely on African Americans on the National Mall. Up to

this point, the Smithsonian’s record of recognizing the importance or historical

significance of African American materials can only be described as dismal.57

55 Although not extensive, surviving records in the NMAH Department of Exhibitions files relate the history of the museum’s involvement with the exhibition. See “Afro-American Tradition,” Box 19-RU551. 56 Memo from Ahlborn to Hindle, October 27, 1977; memo from Ahlborn, January 9, 1979, both “Afro- American Tradition,” Box 19-RU551. Although the Cleveland Museum loan fee eventually was negotiated away, only $6500 was allotted from the museum’s budget for the exhibition. The Links organization, which supported the exhibition in Cleveland, also was approached to contribute to the Washington venue. 57 See for example, the story of the attempted donation of African American Civil War military hero’s Christian Fleetwood’s Medal of Honor to the Smithsonian, as outlined in Steven Lubar and Kathleen M. Kendrick, Legacies: Collecting America’s History at the Smithsonian (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 195-197. 23

In fact, for some two decades, beginning in the mid-1960s, NMHT staff had

argued over how African Americans should appear in the museum, eventually deciding

merely to drop them into the overall story line. In a 1965 written response to an unsuccessful attempt by Congressman James Scheuer to establish on the mall a separate museum for African American history, Wilcomb Washburn, then Curator of Political

History, characterized any other action as potentially “divisive”:

A separate Museum of Negro History and Culture, by lacking the broader relationships to the total American culture which it is possible to obtain in a textbook, film, or play, might be a divisive force rather than a unifying one in American society….The question of isolating the Negro contribution, even within the confines of the U.S. National Museum, has been discussed in the past, and it has always been concluded that the contribution of the Negro, in whatever role he played, should be introduced into exhibitions dealing with those roles rather than isolated in terms of race.58

During roughly the same time period, in 1965 and then in 1968, NMHT seriously contemplated organizing several exhibitions featuring the American Civil Rights movement but the displays were never completed due to concerns about “sensitive” subjects in the museums and fears about their public reception. 59

Ten years later, African Americans were included in the NMHT’s 1976

extravaganza, “A Nation of Nations,” produced for the Bicentennial of the American

Revolution, but hardly given prominence in what was a visual retelling of the nation’s

history. The exhibition’s opening section featured enslaved African Americans, among other groups, but it referred to slavery obliquely by positioning a pair of shackles and a

58 Wilcomb Washburn to James H. Scheur, September 23, 1965, quoted in Michelle Gates-Moresi, “Exhibiting Race, Creating Nation: Representations of Black History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution, 1895-1976” (PhD dissertation, The George Washington University, 2003), 115. Some 50 years later, the Smithsonian’s national museum of African American history is under construction and scheduled to open in 2016. 59 Kylie Message, “Commemorating Civil Rights and Reform Movements at the National Museum of American History,” Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums, ed. Laurajane Smith et.al (London: Routledge, 2011), 306-313. 24

slave collar (actually an incorrectly identified nineteenth-century pet dog collar) in close

proximity to objects related to Native Americans. Visitors stood behind waist-high

Plexiglas barriers near the exhibition entrance and looked down on these objects, scattered about on platforms---some at considerable distance---located below ground level. Quote panels floated overhead. Exhibition labels, some stacked together and mounted on pylons, briefly reported an exhibited object’s characteristics in art museum fashion (the maker, if known; the piece’s date; and the materials that composed it) but made no interpretive statements.

According to one source, exhibition planners believed this arrangement made an explicit statement about the exploitation and racism that “others” had experienced in the

United States, but their design strategy doubtless sailed over the head of most visitors who walked quickly by. During planning for “A Nation of Nations,” museum curators nixed a proposal by Smithsonian exhibition designers to feature slavery more conspicuously by placing a model of a slave ship in the exhibition. Instead, they selected less troubling images. Few moments in this exhibition, which remained on view for more than a decade after the Bicentennial concluded, detracted from its overall themes of

American exceptionalism and progress. It largely celebrated an energetic nation made up of diverse people and traditions; although a small section in an alcove titled “Prejudice” touched on racial stereotyping by displaying cartoons and engravings with ethnic caricatures as illustration.60 In clear contrast to “A Nation of Nations,” even though not

created within the Smithsonian, “The Afro-American Tradition” entered NMHT as the

first notable effort to privilege African American stories and objects, particularly those

created under slavery.

60 For a more detailed discussion, see Michelle Gates-Moresi, “Exhibiting Race, Creating Nation,” 177ff. 25

NMHT staff even attempted to brand the entire exhibition package as “theirs.”

Curator Vlach only borrowed a few sea grass baskets and pottery jugs from NMHT’s collections for the “The Afro-American Tradition.” Smithsonian staff privately complained that the exhibition’s contents failed to highlight the museum’s African

American holdings. While no one claimed that the NMHT’s collections were either extensive or extraordinary in terms of African American materials, the curatorial and

design staff charged with presenting “The Afro-American Tradition” recognized the significant opportunity that the exhibition offered them to impress local black audiences.

In response, NMHT curators selected their own spectacular Harriet Powers pictorial quilt (made by a former slave in the late 19th century) together with other

Smithsonian-owned objects not in ”The Afro-American Tradition,” and placed them on

view near the Constitution Avenue entrance on the first floor, separate from the location of “The Afro-American Tradition” exhibition. Surviving records indicate that no one apparently consulted John Vlach on the museum’s decision to create a separate exhibition of its own collection apart from the traveling exhibition. NMHT staff picked a prominent location intentionally to demonstrate to museum visitors that their collections contained the same sort of remarkable objects that were as emblematic of the African American experience as the examples displayed in “The Afro-American Tradition.”61 This “keynote”

display (NMHT’s term) featured “three and four special loans not used in other A-ATDA showings” and they also incorporated several African objects for comparison purposes,

61 Ironically, James D. Williams, the editor of the Washington Afro-American criticized NMHT in 1965 after the museum appealed to the local Washington community for objects with African American history to add to the collection. He wrote, “Such an appeal carries with it the idea that the Smithsonian knows so little about Negro History that it is ready to take anything and everything, junk or relics of value, just as long as it has something-anything-to do with Negro History” (quoted in Gates-Moresi, “Exhibiting Race, Creating Nation,” 120). 26

borrowed from the Smithsonian’s relatively new Museum of African Art (then located on

Capitol Hill in a townhouse associated with Frederick Douglass). Curators described

these African artifacts as the “prototypes” for several African American pieces selected

by Vlach and displayed in the actual exhibition.62

By placing the traveling exhibition on the museum’s more remote third floor

while creating a new gallery space to present their own objects almost exclusively on the

more populous first floor near Constitution Avenue, the museum, in effect, appropriated

the “the Afro-American Tradition’s” authority and its presence in their building. Many casual visitors doubtless never reached the third floor exhibition gallery. For a short time, the first floor space transformed into the only area in the museum where African

American objects from the Smithsonian’s own collections might be encountered in a significant number. This briefly disrupted the museum’s otherwise nearly absolute focus on traditional white only history, outside of the other ethnic and indigenous groups fleetingly presented in “A Nation of Nations.”63

The show was a hit and reportedly, it attracted African American visitors in record numbers (although attendance figures do not survive). Roger Kennedy, the museum’s newly appointed director, applauded Ahlborn for giving the exhibition such

“full curatorial and promotional attention. The result was, apparently, that from the beginning the scholarly and public aspects reinforced each other.” He distributed an

62 See Ahlborn to Mayr, December 11, 1979, “Afro-American Tradition,” Box 19-RU551. 63 This reorganization of “The Afro-American Tradition” raised red flags with the exhibition’s sponsors in Cleveland. Late in 1978, Ahlborn reported to the museum’s acting director that he had performed damage control by assuring the Links organization, the national African American sorority that funded the exhibition in Cleveland, that the Museum intended to “respect and preserve” the exhibition as Vlach originally conceived it. At the same time, Ahlborn reassured NMHT’s administration that he had communicated to the group that “the final design decisions rested with us,” an edict it appears that the funders accepted (Ahlborn to Mayr, October 11, 1978, “Afro-American Tradition,” Box 19-RU551).

internal memo praising Ahlborn and other staff directly involved in the exhibition. There,

Kennedy complimented the “social history” quality of the exhibition “which made use of

beautiful objects to tell us more about people and their experience.” To prevent any

possible misunderstanding, he hastened to add that “The Afro-American Tradition” was

not a show about beautiful things that said something “only incidentally” about the

culture involved. Rather, he praised the “close, intimate, integrated and well-explained

format” that NMHT’s designers and John Vlach’s scholarship created. 64

Despite its success, “The Afro-American Tradition” did not set in motion a rush for more ethnically specific exhibitions to amplify NMHT’s mission. Shortly before the exhibition opened there, Richard Ahlborn tried unsuccessfully to interest the museum’s administration in borrowing an exhibition about Spanish textiles in New Mexico by arguing that it met the same criteria as “The Afro-American Tradition.” It too focused on the “traditions of a specific ethnic group,” included a major publication, had an already determined strong curatorial framework, and offered the possibility of a related craft demonstration tied to the SI Folklife Festival, which happened annually outside the museum on the Mall. Nevertheless, “The Afro American Tradition’s” success succeeded in establishing a new interest among the NMHT curators and administrators in more

African American history.

Even before “The Afro American Tradition” officially closed, museum staff began to discuss what their next African American project might be. Archival records indicate that the museum determined not to squander the gains made for the Smithsonian in terms of audience and subject matter by “The Afro-American Tradition.” The exhibition that followed “The Afro American Tradition” focused on recent African

64 Kennedy to Ahlborn & staff, October 22, 1979, “Afro-American Tradition,” Box 19-RU551. 28

American history. Eventually titled, “We’ll Never Turn Back,” it consisted of

photographs taken in the 1960s during the Civil Rights movement and was organized for

display during a major Smithsonian-sponsored conference on the Civil Rights era

engineered by the Performing Arts Division (which at the time was not assigned to a

particular museum). Bernice J. Reagon, a former Civil Rights worker herself, now well

known as the founder of the vocal group Sweet Honey and the Rock, who worked in

Performing Arts, co-curated the exhibition with Worth W. Long.

Disagreements over space and resources between the NMHT curators and the

exhibition staff (who were outside the museum) plagued the project’s initial development.

The NMHT’s head exhibition designer, Ben Lawless, asked in a note appended to one report, “If Curatorial Involvment (sic) is Nil-Why Do We Do This Show?” 65 Then acting

NMHT Director Otto Mayr (Kennedy had not yet assumed the job) agreed with Lawless

and opposed the exhibition’s display at the museum, arguing that because it was created

elsewhere at the Smithsonian, it should be shown elsewhere. Under pressure from

Margaret Klapthor, the senior Curator of Political History, Mayr eventually changed his mind. Klapthor’s division collected Civil Rights material and she enthusiastically endorsed the Conference, co-sponsored with Howard University and the National

Endowment for the Humanities. In arguing her case for the exhibition, she reminded

Mayr not to jeopardize “the years it has taken us to gain respect with the black academic

community.” When the project ran into a snag due to a conflict over space with another

planned exhibition, Klapthor approached Director Kennedy, now at the helm, and

65 Benjamin Lawless to Claudine ? (first name only), October 5, 1979, “Civil Rights Movement, 1979-1980” folder, National Museum of American History, Department of Exhibitions Records, Box 19, Record Unit 551, Smithsonian Archives (hereafter, “Civil Rights,” Box 19-RU551).

reiterated to him exactly how high the stakes were for the museum, especially if the exhibition went elsewhere. “This Division feels the exhibit would be useful to NMHT

and would bring interesting additions to our collections on Civil Rights. If we say no, our

relationship with people working in the same area of study will suffer a real blow.”

Kennedy instructed his staff to find space within NMHT for the exhibition.66

These few stories from NMHT underline a significant methodological transformation now occurring as American history museums moved against the cannon.

The celebrated political and social turmoil that characterized the 1960s and early 1970s gave rise to a new generation of American historians who redirected their scholarship away from the political and intellectual history then in vogue to focus on the individuals and the communities previously omitted or underrepresented in research about the

American past. Initially, this new scholarship concentrated on everyday life for less

affluent whites, African Americans, and women. The field called “social history” became

the principal catalyst for a sea change in American historical scholarship for several

decades. Falling generally under the influence of the French Annals school, including

work by academics such as Fernand Braudel who advocated the application of

quantitative social science methods to history, social historians promoted approaches that required new deep research into underutilized archival collections like municipal records, tax lists, probate inventories, and other ordinary records.67 Within a fifteen-year period, these scholars produced in a rapid succession books and journal articles that shed new

66 Margaret B. Klapthor, summary memo to Roger G. Kennedy, “Civil Rights Photographic Exhibit,” October 11,1979, “Civil Rights,” Box 19-RU551. 67 Some influential examples of social history scholarship include John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (1970), Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (1970); John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972). See Nicole Eustace, “When Fish Walk on Land: Social History in a Postmodern World,” Journal of Social History 37 (Autumn 2003): 77-91, accessed February 18, 2014, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3790314. 30

light on the lives of white and black men, women and children, young and old,

disadvantaged and impoverished, free and enslaved, who, up to this point, remained virtually undetectable on the American historical landscape.68

For the first time, individuals who possessed advanced academic training in history and American Studies joined museum staffs. An expansion of PhD degrees accompanied by a soft job market during the 1970s put newly trained historians on the frontlines in major history museums as curators and administrators, rather in university

classrooms. These individuals were better educated than many museum colleagues who did not hold advanced degrees. They possessed in-depth historical knowledge informed by social history and a desire to revise the way that museums presented the past to the public. The newly anointed museum professionals were eager to construct new narratives about America in their new institutional homes. 69 Through their efforts, they succeeded

by the early 1980s in raising the profile of American history museums overall in

academia. Within a decade, academic conferences such those held by the Organization of

American Historians, routinely devoted entire sessions to museum interpretive issues.

Academic journals including the Journal of American History and the American

Quarterly not only published scholarly articles related to museums but began to regularly commission reviews of their exhibitions.

68 In the case of slavery, for example, scholars generally recognized Kenneth M. Stampp’s landmark The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South, which first appeared in 1956, as the publication that made slavery and slave life a critical part of the social history enterprise, although successive scholars moved away from Stampp’s focus on the institution of slavery and instead sought to capture more directly the perspective of enslaved individuals themselves. Among those influential and pioneering works were John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972), Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) and Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (1976).

69 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 296-297.

In history museums particularly, social history interpretation became the vehicle that negotiated meaning and difference into long-standing understandings of the

American past. As a result, institutions assumed greater interpretive risks. At the larger urban history museums such as the Chicago Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York, Baltimore’s City Life Museum, and the Atlanta Historical Society, to name a few major and influential examples, this new emphasis appeared most visibly on the exhibition floor.70 Museum curators now eagerly sought out for their collections objects that represented everyday life in the American past. At the same time, curators embarked on partnerships with academics who advised them on exhibition content and interpretation, as mandated by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the US government agency, as a condition to receive funding.71 Writing about why these partnerships succeeded, Thomas Schlereth notes:

Social historians and certain students of material culture [substitute curators, my emphasis] have much in common: a mutual concern for historical explanation of human behavior over time and place; a wish to challenge the older view of history as solely past politics: an interest in the heterogeneity of the American people and

70 An example would be the filmed introduction that Joseph V. Noble used at the Museum of the City of New York in the late 1970s where a large plastic, talking character (the “Big Apple”) helped tell the story of New York City. 71 Awarded competitively, significant government funding supported the exhibitions and educational programs that anchored social history’s place within the museum. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed federal legislation that created two government agencies, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Each provided public funding, sometimes on a large scale, over the next fifty years for a growing cornucopia of diverse programs that included books, educational ventures, public television programs, film documentaries, and scholarly research projects related to the arts and the humanities. NEH created high standards for all humanities-based museum projects by mandating that successful grant proposals include bone fide consultation between project staff and knowledgeable historical experts, many of who worked in universities. The long period of collaboration and exchange between scholars and museums that ensued ultimately benefited both groups. In 1969, the establishment of a separate Public Programs Division within NEH produced a funding stream for almost twenty-five years principally dedicated to museums and their activities for both project planning and its implementation. If one made a list of the history exhibitions funded by NEH between the mid-1970s and 1995 (when a reorganization jettisoned the Public Programs division), it reads like a who’s who of the important and critically admired social history exhibitions. Doubtless, most of these exhibitions would not have taken place at all without financial support from NEH. Thus far, no substantive history of NEH exists. 32

their life ways; and a design to expand the traditional boundaries of American historical scholarship.72

In less than two decades and in dramatic fashion, social history opened up for

history museums wholly new subject areas that now included African American history,

women’s history and labor history.73 Beginning in the late 1970s, museum interpretations

more consistently presented the American past as messy, more complex, and even

occasionally, as contradictory in its messages. In historical reconstructions such as

Sturbridge Village, Plimouth Plantation, and Colonial Williamsburg, the lives of farmers

and tavern keepers now stood alongside those of politicians and merchants.74

Professional museum publications like Museum News (the magazine produced by the

American Association of Museums, now called Museum) and History News (published

by the American Association of State and Local History) regularly discussed and

publicized these changes to their members, who in turn disseminated these new ideas

throughout the museum profession.

To communicate the new vision of America portrayed by social history and social

historians to late 20th-century audiences, museums moved forward a construction of

nation that portrayed a less hegemonic, more diverse model of society that sometimes

challenged cherished ideas about democracy. Yet even as African Americans began to

72 Schlereth, “Museums and Material Culture,” History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, 309. University of Notre Dame professor Thomas Schlereth had a far- reaching influence on reshaping history museums in the late 1970s and 1980s. 73 In fact, in 1980, during a reorganization implemented as part of the transformation of the National Museum of History and Technology into the National Museum of American History, the museum created the Department of Social and Cultural History, where its most innovative exhibitions were born. It disappeared in 1999 during a subsequent reorganization. 74 Andreas Greenspan, Creating Colonial Williamsburg (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 121-147. For a more critical account of Colonial Williamsburg’s African American history program, see Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 33

assume a new importance and legitimacy as a subject for representation, slavery

remained so sensitive and threatening to museum boards, staffs, and visitors that its mere

introduction in an exhibition seemed radical. When the subject of slavery first appeared, it followed the same interpretive methods experienced by women’s history, which

entered the museum arena at roughly the same time and in a similar manner.75 In this

first phase, which occurred through the late 1980s, curators sought to insert enslaved

African Americans into the existing historical narrative--- through the inclusion of

imagery or by adding to an exhibition a very few objects that possessed strong

provenances. This effort failed to challenge “the racial hegemony of the national memory”---as Salamishah Tillet puts it--- or disrupt the narrative of national progress then told in most museum exhibitions and programs. It would take another decade or more for museums to transition away from this approach and instead frame a new cultural construction that featured the world as experienced by enslaved individuals as explicitly different from other Americans.

As mentioned previously, NMHT generally held an uneven record of

accomplishment with respect to African American history exhibitions. Their permanent

“Hall of Everyday Life,” which opened with the original building in 1964, contained multiple vignettes intended to represent a wide cross-section of American life over time.

The Hall featured objects installed in period rooms and, in some cases, included fragments of real houses or buildings but African Americans did not appear in this depiction of the nation’s “everyday life.” In 1967, the staff installed in the Hall a single exhibition case with artifacts related to the transatlantic slave trade labeled “African

75 Christina Simmons and Barbara Melosh, “Exhibiting Women’s History,” Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public, eds. Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier and Roy Rosenzweig (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 203-21. 34

Backgrounds and Negro Slavery.” Two years later, the museum acquired its largest

African American artifact then to date, an early twentieth-century black sharecropper’s house from Southern Maryland, that it reassembled backwards, it turned out, in the Hall.

It remained on view there for several decades until the late 1980s when the museum moved the house into “From Field to Factory” and reinstalled it correctly.76

The decision to replace the Hall of Everyday Life in 1981 led directly to the first

considerable push to incorporate enslaved African Americans into a major American history exhibition. The previous year Roger Kennedy renamed the institution the

National Museum of American History (hereafter, NMAH) in an effort to refocus its

mission on American history, and received congressional funding to underwrite a

building-wide exhibition concept that called for a series of large gallery spaces; each

arranged around major historical period. Kennedy envisioned several large-scale permanent exhibitions that each would tell the story of America in big chronological sweeps arranged in a more thematic than linear fashion using current historiography. He intended each gallery bring together and contextualize seldom seen objects from the collection, framed with various didactic materials. In a later fund-raising proposal crafted to lure donations from the pop star Michael Jackson, Kennedy outlined his vision for a museum “to tell stories about the real history of the American people.” He elaborated:

We tell serious stories, and complicated ones. But we tell them truly, with real objects. People have come to expect the truth from us. They come to us for that. All ages and all sorts of people, who make pilgrimages to the Smithsonian in search of authenticity. And in search of things that will last.

76 See Gates-Moresi, 123-124. Also George W. McDaniel, Between Hearth and Home: Preserving a People’s Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 3-28. John Vlach also told me this story. 35

Along the same vein, Kennedy continued, “To help the American public learn, our

Medium is the ‘exhibition.’ That word used to mean pictures on a wall and some words

on a text panel placed next to those pictures. Over the last decade, we have been the

leaders in the world in stretching this old definition…to intensify the experience, and to

permit each visitor to participate by selecting what interests him or her.”77 Under

Kennedy’s direction, “authentic” museum artifacts took on a new and intentional role of

representing ideas in exhibitions, becoming symbolic markers intended to communicate complex histories including expressing notions of ace, class, gender or national identity.

After four years devoted to its planning and implementation, Kennedy’s first

“transformational” exhibition opened to the public on November 18, 1985. 78 Initially

called “Life in America,” the exhibition eventually took the title, “After the Revolution:

Everyday Life in America, 1780 to 1800” (“ATR” henceforth). It occupied some 10,000

square feet on the building’s first floor, near the museum’s Mall entrance. “ATR”

incorporated parts of the old Hall of Everyday Life including an entire house, two room

settings, architectural elements, and displayed some 1225 eighteenth-century objects. The

exhibition featured the latest design and technological innovations represented by its

77 All quotes are from Roger G. Kennedy, memorandum to Michael Jackson, John Branca, Bob Jones and friends, April 3, 1990. Michael Jackson Project 1986-1991, folder 2, Box 18, National Museum of American History, Department of Exhibitions Records, Record Unit 551, Smithsonian Archives.. 78 Kennedy reorganized the museum into two major divisions---Science and Technology and Social and Cultural History. He tasked each division to provide exhibitions that supported his vision of an American chronology. The second offering from Social and Cultural History called “Communities of Change,” which focused on the 19th century, would not open until more than a decade after “After the Revolution.” Science and Technology opened all three of their chronological exhibitions---“Engines of Change,” “The Computer Age,” and “Science in American Life” but little tied them together for the museum visitor (author interview with Fath Davis Ruffins, December 8, 2008). The exhibition that would tell a part of the 20th century story, “From Field to Factory,” (the Great Migration) was in planning by Spencer Crew as early as 1983, under the title, “Afro-American Migrations to the North” [“American History as seen from National Museum of American History” folder, Box 19, National Museum of American History, Department of Exhibitions, Record Unit 551, SI Archives]. 36

stunning object theatre and employed bold graphics, striking colors, and large-scale cases throughout its floor plan.

Social history scholarship closely guided the creation of “ATR’s” storyline. Fath

Davis Ruffins, the exhibition project manager, summarized very deliberately the methodology employed by NMAH in an early project memo, “The cognitive path we have used to put together the exhibit should be derived from the specific historical paradigm in which we believe: the social historical method.”79 The exhibition sought to

create a portrait of a young and diverse country, one that had emerged from the American

Revolution dramatically altered, in both large and small ways. Employing specific stories

that highlighted individuals, families, and communities of different socio-economic status,

race and ethnicity, the exhibition attempted to sketch out for visitors the new national

social, cultural, political, and economic landscape. “ATR” not only highlighted the lives

of free and enslaved African American people and groups using the latest historiography

but for the first time, NMAH curators gave their stories equal treatment within an

exhibition hierarchy. In the methodology that the exhibition employed to emphasize

slavery, class and racial diversity, “ATR” broke new ground.

Two young museum curators and historians, William Pretzer and Fath Davis

Ruffins, shared primary responsibility for developing the exhibition through the critical planning stages. Both began their work as contractors in NMAH’s Department of Social and Cultural History, although Ruffins became a federal employee in 1983.80 Pretzer,

79 Fath Davis Ruffins, Memo to AD, WSP, GBK, SZ, November 29, 1982, p.19, “Conceptual meetings, Fall 1982” folder [17], Box 7, Department of Social and Cultural History, Exhibition Records, 1981-1985, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Archives, Acc. 86-155 [hereafter S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155]. 80 Roger Kennedy can be credited with diversifying the staff at NMAH. Ruffins recalls that she, Spencer Crewe and another African American individual were hired by Kennedy under monies granted from the Ford Foundation (which Kennedy previously headed) to bring more African Americans onto the museum 37

who left the project in 1983, holds a PhD in History from Northern Illinois University

and his specialty is labor history.81 A graduate of Radcliffe College, Ruffins served first

as Historian and Project Administrator (1981-83) and then as Historian and Project

Manager (1983-87). Before she joined NMAH, Ruffins completed PhD course work in the American Civilization Program at Harvard University. She also worked as the administrator of the African American Studies Program at Simmons College and spent three years at Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute in the 1970s. That “ATR” focused so much on African American history can be attributed to Ruffins.

Created over four years, “ATR” involved a large number of Smithsonian staff, contractors and experts, in addition to Ruffins and Pretzer. Historian Barbara Clark Smith joined the project near its completion and wrote the companion book as well as re- authored the exhibition script. 82 Michael Carrigan, James Sims, and Debbie Breitfield

made up the museum’s exhibition design team. NMAH curators Ann Golovin, Rodris

Roth, Rayna Green, Susan Meyers, and Claudia Kidwell each worked on different

exhibition areas. Professors Dell Upton, John M. Vlach, James Horton, and Ira Berlin as

well as several other exhibition designers and other specialists served as outside

consultants.

“ATR” illustrates how new techniques in historical interpretation and exhibition

presentation emerged that revolutionized how history was visualized and displayed in the

staff. Ruffins originally worked as Claudia Kidwell’s assistant, which put her in line for the “ATR” project (author interview with Ruffins, December 8, 2008). In 1983 Kennedy assumed control of the Smithsonian’s Program in Black American Culture (formerly in the Division of Performing Arts) and brought Bernice Johnson Reagon onto the NMAH staff (see Bernice Johnson Reagon, ed., Black American Culture and Scholarship: Contemporary Issues (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1985), i.). 81 Pretzer left NMAH in 1984 when his contract was not renewed during a Reagan administration job freeze that affected the entire Smithsonian. He joined the Henry Ford Museum staff in Dearborn, Michigan and is now working at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. 82 Barbara Clark Smith, After the Revolution: The Smithsonian History of Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century (New York, Pantheon, 1985). 38 museum. While objects remained central to the museum exhibition form, “ATR” demonstrated how the approach to their role was shifting. Exhibition designers who had studied theatre set design or graphic design now entered the museum field. Their exhibitions frequently incorporated vivid colors, large wall and case graphics (sometimes blown up to huge sizes), and employed scenic vignettes that incorporated sculptural mannequins posed in period clothes. They made bold use of visual effects that included film (later video) and audio soundscapes as well as integrated handsome exhibit cases or other cabinetry. Working together with curators, these designers displayed objects in close proximity to documentary evidence intended to supply greater historical context for the public. Each exhibition section included texts and labels that presented interpretive information usually written by curatorial experts.

If measured by its extensive planning, its attempts to formulate a “new” historical methodology and interpretation borrowed closely from the academy, and its novel exhibition design, “ATR” represented the best exhibition development practices of its day.

With great deliberation, evident in the project’s surviving archives, organizers sought to locate the exhibition within a new paradigm intended to challenge the organization and execution of all previous Smithsonian history exhibitions. Early in the planning stage,

Fath Ruffins elaborated:

A new synthesis is possible [in “ATR”]. Where it may lead is not now clear, but the survey of everyday objects for what they tell us of the symbol-systems of earlier American times is an important avenue of inquiry. If we learn to translate folk art and quilts and hand tools, moving always in a methodologically dialectical process of testing theory against the evidence of the objects and seeing the objects in the context of theoretical paradigms, we may achieve a new synthesis. A synthesis of theory and evidence of methodological practical, joining the ‘right

questions” with the ‘right method.’83

Common practice at the time dictated that NMAH specialists link exhibition contents to

what surviving well-provenanced object collections specifically demonstrated. This

approach created problems for exhibitions intended to convey a new vision of the

American past. There continued to be many collecting areas that the museum had

neglected. For a year, Ruffins and Pretzer worked to develop a clear process for planning

and creating the exhibition while constructing a thematic content outline that everyone in

various positions of authority at NMAH would endorse. Marrying objects, ideas, and

theory within the exhibition framework proved so challenging that disagreement between

all the principals persisted on certain matters throughout the entire project. 84

By November 1982, however, an exhibition outline had finally taken shape.

Project records indicate that the team’s historians and curators met regularly to grapple

over the appropriateness of exhibition themes and to discuss what NMAH collections

might best represent them. Rather than exhaustively covering all eighteenth-century

American life, the curators designed the exhibition around the metaphor of a “tour” (or

trip) inspired by the many European travelers who left memoirs and accounts of their

visits to the new country. At the same, the necessity to incorporate certain buildings and

83 Ruffins, memo, November 29, 1982, p. 18, “Conceptual Meetings, Fall 1982” folder [17], Box 7, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155. 84 Pretzer and Ruffins, for example, clashed with their supervisor, Gary Kulik, over the exhibition contents and the amount (or lack of) his involvement in the project. Some two years before the opening Pretzer noted in a memo to Ruffins: “Either he [Kulik] starts dealing with us and the project daily, or he backs out and gives us leeway…leeway to do things he thinks are wrong, mistaken, etc. as well as things he likes. We can’t continually look over our (my?) shoulder wainting [sic] for him to suggest something else or to approve our decisions” [Pretzer, Memo to Fath [Ruffins], January 12, 1983, “Current Scripts & Statements & Agendas” folder [15], Box 7, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155]. Almost thirty years later Ruffins remembers less about the specific disagreements that occurred between individuals but she does recall the overall “intensity” that the project engendered among the participants [Author interview].

principal room settings that survived in place from the Hall of Everyday Life dictated

physical arrangements within the space. For that reason, the exhibition largely consisted of six case studies that visitors theoretically would “travel” between as they meandered

through parts of rural New England, Virginia, Delaware and urban Philadelphia. Seneca

Indians and African Americans occupied their own exclusive sections.

With some success, “ATR” managed to depart from past NMAH exhibitions that overwhelmed visitors by the sheer number of similar objects on display. Yet because certain eighteenth-century collections were so plentiful at NMAH, planners tacked on

small study galleries to the main exhibition near the end. Here behind a door, in closet-

like rooms that contained seating that faced wall-mounted cases or pull out drawers,

visitors were given the opportunity to look closely at many examples of graphic arts,

textiles and costumes, and ceramics. Ruffins remembers that these study galleries were a compromise to satisfy NMAH’s “old line curators” who wanted more objects incorporated into the “ATR” storyline. At its conclusion, the exhibition opened onto an educational gallery space called the “Hands on History Room,” aimed at children that offered opportunities for simple interactive experiences generally related to exhibition themes, designed and manned by museum educators.85

Early in the planning process, Gary Kulik, then the Social and Cultural History

Division head, established five goals for “ATR:”

1) To tell visitors things they did not know about the 18th century; to suggest to them that their current understanding is incomplete or incorrect. To achieve this goal, the exhibit experience must be structured. 2) To stress the various meanings of interdependence; to undercut notions of independent, autonomous action. America has links to old world

85 Author interview with Ruffins. The Hands-On History galleries were not completed until after the exhibition opened to the public in 1985. 41

traditions but is actively engaged in the new consumerism of the late 18th century. 3) To emphasize the ethnic, racial, cultural, physical diversity of America. 4) To elucidate various notions of the division of labor (urban/rural, male/female). 5) To suggest, by indicating the “new” things of the late 18th century, that this was a period of change. 86

Ultimately, the exhibition team found it impossible to construct coherently an

interpretation from so many disparate strands despite repeated efforts. Not only did their

supervisors expect them to create a viable exhibition that succeeded in synthesizing

current academic history but also one ideally described by one memo as not “heavily

labeled.”87 The curators hoped that the period rooms (for instance, the Massachusetts

parlor of the Colton family who were Loyalists during the American Revolution) became

stage settings “where we must emphasize the people” that told their stories through

ambient audio together with real objects or reproductions sometimes barely visible from

behind theatrical muslin scrims completely covering the openings. Areas that focused on

eighteenth-century communities utilized traditional exhibition design techniques

including static wall texts, visuals, and objects displayed in cases.

Although the exhibition team planned to stress America’s racial diversity from the beginning, contentious discussions took place among the curators on how to incorporate and underscore it, particularly with respect to enslaved populations. At first Ruffins

86 Pretzer, notes of meeting with GK [Gary Kulik], FDR [Fath Davis Ruffins], BP [Bill Pretzer], SZ [Shomer Zwelling] and AD [Avi Dector], November 10, 1982, “Current Scripts & Statements & Agendas” folder [15], S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155]. At this time Zwelling and Dector, who worked together in a consulting business called the Center for History Now, were project contractors. The records indicate that Zwelling, not Kulik, actually authored this list of themes/messages. 87 Ruffins, Design Agenda---Life in America 18th C. Project, January 6, 1983, “Current Scripts & Statements & Agendas” folder [15], S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155.The exhibition’s labels caused long discussion. During winter 1983 while the exhibition script was in preparation, Pretzer send Ruffins a two-page detailed memo describing the hierarchy of information that needed to be established for the labels and maintained throughout the script [see Pretzer, memo to Fath [Ruffins], January 25, 1983, “Current Scripts & Statements & Agendas” folder [15], S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155 ]. 42

argued that an entire exhibition section should focus “specifically on diversity”---

although she meant “diversity” in its broadest sense and intended this area include more

than only African Americans. She succeeded in convincing the team to concentrate a

“ATR” section on late 18th-century Philadelphia where the exhibition could relate the relative autonomy of urban free black life as well as highlight relationships with whites through themes of work, community, religion, and family life. Eventually, a subsection that spotlighted the devastating 1792 Yellow Fever epidemic helped unify these themes.

As Ruffins noted, emphasizing early African American Philadelphia “also [was] a way to

direct attention to ethnic sub-cultures as both independent and interdependent”88 in

contrast to the sections on plantation slavery that proceeded it. Even so, the project

archive suggests that the other exhibition planners appeared more comfortable with

Ruffins’ ideas when she demonstrated the close connectedness between African

Americans and European Americans, and kept notions of autonomy to a minimum.

To display slavery, the team initially wanted to show visitors “the creation of an

Afro-American culture reliant on European or American-made goods,” exhibited in a

recreated Virginia slave quarter based on a Carter family plantation but the scholarship

on enslaved life then emerging contradicted this interpretation and instead placed an

emphasis on the surviving African heritage of slaves. Eighteenth-century American

objects that illustrate Africanisms are rare. As Pretzer considered both potential

interpretations side by side, he wondered how the exhibition could possibly juxtapose

“the (evidently) non-surviving artifactual evidence of African influences” with the

proposed array of goods that other NMAH curators imagined as desirable to slaves,

88 Pretzer, notes of meeting with GK, FDR, BP, SZ and AD, November 10, 1982, “Conceptual meetings” folder [17], S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155. 43

arranged somewhat like a shop window in the exhibition area. Even when the team

eventually dropped this idea, a thorny problem remained. What encompassed enslaved

material culture in eighteenth-century America and how would they illustrate it?

Throughout the 1980s, most exhibition planners remained convinced that strong material

content was a necessary component for an interpretation to be included.

Unlike other “ATR” exhibition sections where plentiful Smithsonian collections

might supply material evidence that mirrored the thematic content more closely, the

African American content was sparse. Some team members disagreed with Ruffins about

her proposed interpretation, which they argued relied too heavily on didactical elements

driven by the new social history. They raised concerns that the exhibition lacked the

ability physically to manifest the enslaved story with actual artifacts and disputed her

plan to present the new dimensions of enslaved life unearthed by scholars using

exhibition techniques. In a meeting summary, Pretzer noted, “Research has shown no

18th century African objects in [the] Chesapeake. We know of no 18th century African

artifacts objects in collections in the Washington area, or even in the U.S. To use 18th century African objects, we need to find those from the correct geographical/cultural region representing those Africans who were brought to America; materials that could be

found in America; and object types which were amenable to creation in America. This

was an almost insurmountable order. At the same time, the team wrestled with other

difficult interpretive issues related to slavery. They wondered how to clarify slavery to

the audience as a labor system without unfairly diminishing the human element. The

exploitation and sale of slaves by white owners needed explanation, without demonizing

slaveholders. One team member proposed, “juxtapose[ing] a slave bill-of-sale [next] to a

lable [sic] on family life” but the others quickly rejected this idea.89 To avoid controversy, the planners intentionally decided to avoid altogether explicitly commenting on the complex nature of relationships between blacks and whites during slavery.

Why did the curators not go in search of African American objects? As the so- called “nation’s attic,” NMAH felt compelled to draw largely on its own rich resources for “ATR.” This was the Smithsonian’s usual practice in creating exhibitions. Yet obviously in the case of early African American materials, their collections were limited and no collecting initiative related to acquiring such materials was in place in the early

1980s. 90 Up to this point, the museum had little experience in borrowing objects from

other museum collections. Granted, in any permanent exhibition, objects on loan from

other museums or private collectors create logistical problems for the curatorial,

exhibition design and collections staff because the timeframe for such loans typically is

short. For this reason, “ATR” exhibition designers objected to borrowing content for the

exhibition’s slavery sections because “all objects for these sections are likely to be loan

objects and it is unlikely that they will be added to the collections. How can we build in

change and flexibility of interpretation as well as design since we know there is likely to

be movement in these areas?” 91 Today, exhibition content developers and designers are

more comfortable in employing other elements---from large-scale wall murals to technical wizardry---to stand in for any interpretive shortfall in an exhibition but this was not common practice in 1985.

89 Pretzer, notes of meeting with GK, FDR, and BP, November 11, 1982, “Conceptual meetings, Fall 1982” folder [17], Box 7, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155. 90 Later, NMAH launched a special initiative called the Afro American Inventory project intended to locate and document African American materials in collections throughout the Smithsonian Institution but it never produced anything very definitive or accessible. 91 Ruffins, Design Agenda---Life in America 18th C. Project, January 6, 1983, “Current Scripts” folder [15], Box 7, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155. 45

Turning to academic scholarship, Ruffins argued that “ATR” needed to

demonstrate that African traditions had survived among enslaved people despite slavery.

Her assertion echoed the scholarship, notably work by the anthropologist Melville

Herskovits, followed later by Afrocentric historians such as Sterling Stuckey, who

contended that New World slaves and their descendants retained significant elements of

African culture.92 When black nationalists took up this claim in the 1960s, it spread

through the African American community and became an important means to remove

some of slavery’s sting among descendant communities by countering outdated

interpretations of the slave as dehumanized victim and tabula rasa. “Roots” introduced

what one historian terms “a progressive narrative of slavery.”93 To demonstrate African

connections to “ATR” visitors visually, Ruffins proposed that the exhibition employ

some 19th-century African American objects as stand-ins for the missing 18th-century ones, but team members dismissed her idea. Pretzer wrote Ruffins a long memo, “But if, as you say, 19th century African-inspired objects are known, I don’t right now see the

justification for assuming that such objects were evident in the 18th century…It is the

range of African-inspired artifacts which I question for the 18th century, not the range of

African-inspired cultural and social practices and norms.”94 NMAH clung rigidly to the idea of a strict provenance as well as verifiable dating for any African American object included in “ATR.” Several years later, the burgeoning field of plantation archaeology

92 Melville Herskovits, Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Beacon Press, 1990) and with Frances Herskovits, The New World Negro (Purdue: Indiana University Press, 2008); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 93 Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, 217. 94 Pretzer, memo to Fath [Ruffins], January 17, 1983, “Current Scripts” folder [15], Box 7, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155. No notes survive from the consultation that Pretzer proposed over this matter with Ira Berlin, Spencer Crew and Jim Horton. 46

brought forth new and significant evidence related to enslaved material culture including

objects that appear to display Africanisms.95

Further debate over the exhibition’s African American sections illustrate how

aspects of scholarly debate occurring among academic historians played out among the

“ATR” team and ultimately shaped---or failed to affect--- the exhibition’s final portrayal of slavery. Drawing on then-cutting edge scholarly interpretations emerging about slave life, Ruffins promoted to the exhibition team a new way of looking at enslaved people in the exhibition, what social historians came to call “agency,” that accorded them more control over their lives and circumstances than had been previously suggested. 96 Her approach reflected an interpretation then emerging among scholars about slave resistance

to enslavement as measured by actions that included refusing to work or claims of illness.

Of course, the power that resided in the hands of white slaveholders is easier to

demonstrate in imagery and documents, and therefore much more obvious to a visitor,

which makes the subtleties about slave resistance hard to grasp or to illustrate in an

exhibition format.

NMAH’s own long standing sensitivities regarding African American audience

members complicated matters. Clearly, an exhibition that even unintentionally portrayed slaves as victims might offend many black visitors as well as raise objections on the part of historians. For Ruffins, it became imperative for “ATR” to make a direct case for slave agency. In the parts of the script that she authored, which dealt principally with communities, her interpretation also referenced the persistent racism and inequality that

95 Theresa A. Singleton, ed., Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life (New York: Academic Press for Studies in Historical Archaeology, 1985). 96 See for example, Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974). 47

still undergirded African-American life in post Civil Rights-era America. Clearly, making

these larger historical connections might facilitate a contemporary African American

audience’s acceptance of the exhibition’s complex portrayal of slavery. At the same time,

other “ATR” team members, all of whom were Caucasian, appear guided by an unspoken sensitivity to those white visitors who would read a candid explanation of the treatment of enslaved people by their slaveholding masters as a criticism of contemporary white

America and its racial issues.

Several outside experts in eighteenth-century American history closely scrutinized the first versions of the “ATR” exhibition script in winter, 1983. In his 12-page singled- spaced response, historian Michael Zuckerman carefully analyzed the script. In particular, he intensely disliked the exhibition’s proposed tour metaphor, which placed “a gross unrealism on the audience. No one would start a tour of America in the Connecticut valley…no one would visit the slave quarters at all, let alone before they went to the master’s plantation house.” Zuckerman continued, “The ‘tour’ isn’t a metaphor at all; it’s a too-transparent cover for certain political necessities of 1983…a museum of the

American people [should] acknowledge that blacks were one-fifth of those people…”

While Zuckerman applauded the inclusion of African Americans in “ATR,” he rejected the exhibition’s attempt to confer agency on enslaved people, calling it “substantively baloney.” He elaborated, “Slaves could hardly produce independence for themselves— that would have been a contradiction in terms--- and they could hardly create stability for their families either.” Zuckerman pointed out what he perceived as an inherent inconsistency in the exhibition’s overall message, particularly as it concerned “the movement toward a single nation/people and on the other the assertion of emerging and

increasing Afro-American cultural autonomy.” He later returned to this point about

cultural singularity in his memo and questioned whether the evidence of African survivals in music and religion in the Chesapeake truly “constitute an autonomous culture.”97 The exhibition team themselves went back and forth in their own ongoing

script revisions over this point: a handwritten note from an undated internal meeting

cryptically raises the specter of citizenship for African Americans in the Chesapeake and

notes, “blacks see themselves as part of larger culture.”98 Zuckerman’s criticism

apparently damaged the integrity of Ruffins’ overall argument, and NMAH eventually

amended the script on this point.

Another reviewer also responded in detail. When he reviewed the exhibition script,

historian Alfred F. Young had just begun a four-year stint as a guest curator at the

Chicago Historical Society that would culminate in a well-received exhibition about the

American Revolution.99 By reputation a more radical social historian than Zuckerman,

Young took a different tact. He wanted the team to push concepts of slave autonomy and

resistance even further than they appeared in the draft that he reviewed. Young advocated

adding more information about slave resistance by reproducing a series of runaway slave

ads from colonial newspapers. He also suggested that “ATR” play ambient African

American music, incorporate more illustrations that depicted slavery (even if “off by

years or not Chesapeake”) and install audio tracks that utilized black narrators and

97 Zuckerman to Pretzer, April 28, 1983, “Script Comments” folder [7], Box 10, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155. Zuckerman was not a historian of the South or slavery. At the time, his scholarly expertise concerned early New England. Some of his remarks suggest the divide that came to exist between “traditional” social historians and cultural historians who in the case of slavery drew on “less traditional” materials for their interpretations. 98 Author unidentified, memo entitled “Labels: Specifics,” pg. 2, “Contextual Panels” folder [35], Box 6, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155. It appears that several different individuals made notes on this copy. 99 See Alfred F. Young, “A Modest Proposal: A Bill of Rights for American Museums,” The Public Historian 14 (Summer 1992): 67-75, accessed February 18, 2014, doi: 10.2307/3378231. 49

perspective rather than replicating only white voices and attitudes. In recommending the

previously discussed “Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts” as a model for

picturing African survivals in images and objects, Young observed that the “Afro-

American Tradition” “was convincing because it laid an African artifact alongside an

Afro-American artifact. Secondly it was effective because of its cumulative impact; where one comparison may not have been convincing, a series was…seems to me some

African artifacts are a must if the exhibit is to have any punch.” 100 While Young’s

comments did not overcome NMAH’s concern for authenticity nor their hesitancy about

making claims that might seem outlandish or unsubstantiated to visitors or historians, his

position as a well-known social historian gave his suggestions credence and as a result,

some African and Caribbean artifacts were added to the exhibition’s Chesapeake section.

At this point, likely due to the historians’ extensive comments, NMAH decided to

reconceptualize the initial script prepared by Pretzer and Ruffins and removed their sole

authority for it. Soon, the museum hired as exhibition curator and author of the accompany book, Barbara Clark Smith who specialized in the Revolutionary period and received her PhD. from Yale in 1983.101 Roger Kennedy, who hoped to recruit the best and the brightest young PhD historians to join NMAH, selected Clark Smith.102

After some two months on the job reviewing the project’s files, Smith suggested

that the exhibition move away from its overall focus on the growing consumer

100 Alfred F. Young, memo, May 11, 1983, “Script Comments” folder [7], Box 10, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155. In the case of his overall comments on “After the Revolution,” Young pushed the exhibition team to focus harder on the conflicts, tensions and uncertainties that engulfed the new nation’s residents. 101 This is Ruffins’ recollection of events too. A contract employee, Pretzer lost his position at NMAH during a hiring freeze instituted by the Reagan administration and soon after disappeared from “ATR.” 102 Kennedy’s elevation of young academic historians to curatorial positions during his tenure caused grumblings and discontent among long-time curatorial staff who resented these outsiders who, in their view, had no knowledge of material objects, no museum experience and no familiarity with NMAH collection. 50

marketplace (and the material prosperity in early America that it suggested) and instead

center itself around “conflict and confrontation” as the hitherto unexplored but critical

theme she felt that “ATR” needed to address. Echoing Alfred Young’s comments, Clark

Smith noted, “Tracing conflict through the exhibit would give us a way to frame artisan-

merchant relations, black-white relations, and master-journeyman relations, for example.”

In its final version, the exhibition incorporated the dramatic incidents that Clark Smith

envisioned, which centered on these moments of conflict. Because of her hire, the

museum reorganized the “ATR” exhibition team’s duties. Clark Smith subsequently

assumed responsibility for the exhibition’s case studies that now occupied the period

settings, which centered mostly on “the people.” Other staff, including Ruffins, now

focused on “ATR’s” other half, the communities.103 Clark Smith’s ideas imposed a new

and different order on the exhibition that made it more coherent and ultimately

contributed to its success. Because she was neither a material culture expert nor a curator,

connections between the objects on display and the ideas expressed by the exhibition’s

main messages grew somewhat tenuous.104 What Clark’s reorganization clearly

accomplished was to raise ideas in a national museum about what individuals are

considered part of a nation, regardless of their political status as citizens.

In a section now called, “African-American Culture in the Chesapeake,” Ruffins

attempted to present a more complicated notion of slave identity. In addition to

Chesapeake artifacts, Ruffins selected related materials from Africa, the Caribbean,

103 Author interview. After Pretzer’s departure in 1983, Ruffins remained involved in “After the Revolution” as a project manager and continued to be responsible for the exhibition’s African American material. 104 Both major scholarly reviews of the exhibition point this out---Barbara Carson’s in The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 44 (April 1987): 391-394, accessed February 18, 2014, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1939679 and Robert Gross in The Journal of American History, Vol.76 (December 1989): 858-861, accessed February 18, 2014, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2936427. 51

South America, and elsewhere in North America to suggest that Africa continued to

maintain an important and in some cases, long enduring cultural presence in the lives of

individuals despite slavery. Choosing objects from outside the region launched a

disagreement between Ruffins, Bob Selim, the script’s editor and Michael Carrigan, the

exhibition designer that reached up to the museum’s director for resolution. Although

Selim angered Ruffins by complaining about the lack of Chesapeake material, he

conceded, “I think this section is probably the most important one in the show, and the

one most likely to give visitors something important and troubling to think about.” 105

In defense of her interpretation, Ruffins fired back a long memo the next day to

Kennedy himself “in order to avoid further summit meetings on like questions.” It is

worth reproducing her major points in full because they summarize the important work

that she tried to accomplish with respect to exhibiting slavery:

1. *MYTH: Not much is known about African-American culture.

*Fact: For the last 15 years, the works of Gutman, Levine, Blassingame, Raboteau, Nash, Genovese and others has communicated a wealth of general and specific information about African-American culture. (AfAm hereafter) The work of Ira Berlin, Rhys Isaacs, Allan Kulikoff, Richard Dunn and others has revealed as well as [sic] lot[s] of information about AfAm culture in the Chesapeake---the largest and oldest AfAm community in the late 18th century.

**MYTH: There are no African-American artifacts.

105 Bob Selim to Ruffins, African-American Culture in the Chesapeake’ section of LIA script, June 18, 1984, “LIA Design Issues” folder [1], Box 6, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155. That the memo passed from Carrigan to Kennedy to Kulik in the space of a few hours suggests just how contentious this interpretation apparently was. “I never expected this kind of circulation when I wrote it,” Selim allowed to Ruffins. In her subsequent memo to Kennedy about Selim’s comments, Ruffins defended the section’s organization, “In some long ago summit meeting, I was instructed to change this to focus more specifically on [the] Chesapeake. Objects and labels were eliminated to achieve this purpose. However, the structure remains strikingly similar. Why? Because this progression is quite simply the only way to do it” (Ruffins, memo to Kennedy, June 19, 1984, “LIA Design Issues” folder [1], Box 6, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86- 155).

**Fact: There are only a precious few AfAm artifacts from the Chesapeake which exist today. We own almost none of them and cannot get them on long-term loan. There are a wealth of documents, books, letters, newspaper articles, etc. The visual impact of such artifacts would be slight and does not justify the extensive and expensive conservation and case-work which would be required to keep them on view at all.

2. In discussing this section, we need to keep in mind certain parameters which limit our choices and so define the terms of our interpretation.

First. The objects listed are the available objects (period). The few external loans which are being sought are just about the maximum possible at present. No matter what words we wish to surround them with, we must construct our interpretation around this particular set of objects (with only one or two exceptions).

Second. We have in the microcosm of this section the general problem of social history interpretation. The research/evidence/data is voluminous. The objects are few and far between. In and of themselves, they reveal little. Properly grouped, surrounded with the appropriate setting, attached to powerful words, they can take on and communicate volumes.

N.B. This problem takes on a particular meaning in AfAm culture. In this cultural tradition, music, dance, oratory and other forms of performance are not peripheral. Rather these forms of expression are essential for communicating the nuances of AfAm culture, and also are themselves a major kind of historical evidence. All culture is not material, yet we must use the material (in a museum) as the basis of interpretation.106

“ATR’s” organizers struggled with a challenging problem created by the museum

field’s embrace of social history. Curators recognized that American museum collections

were deficient. They over represented elite material culture and even in the best cases,

their holdings seldom included more than a few objects that represented ordinary people

and their lives in early America. The number related to enslaved African Americans

106 Ruffins to Kennedy, June 19, 1984, “LIA Design Issues” folder [1], Box 6, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155. 53

were very small. As Ruffins outlined in her memo, she had availed herself of the few known choices. If willing, the museum needed to consider other ways to tell the story.

Instead, ATR ultimately took a rather circumspect and timid interpretation of slave life with respect to what values or beliefs might have survived slavery intact. Eventually, at

Selim’s suggestion, the team reorganized the exhibition area “to present the broad look at

African-American culture first and then narrow down the focus to the Chesapeake.”107

The objects that Ruffins selected from outside the region remained but designers installed them together, in a separate grouping, apart from the others, reducing their interpretive effectiveness.

In the model then practiced at NMAH (and elsewhere in museums), the interpretation rested with objects; exhibition labels offered viewers minimal information but offered little with respect to meaning. Ruffins proposed something different for the

African American sections: provide substantive interpretive information and let the object identification assume a secondary importance. Her position alarmed Selim. Regardless of the time and energy she spent in the past searching for appropriate African American objects, Ruffins now became convinced that her larger arguments could be carried through a narrative strategy. In this example of her approach that incorporates some revisions, she offered Kennedy a sample main section text:

AFRICAN-AMERICAN CULTURE IN THE CHESAPEAKE

Current text: The first Africans had arrived in the Americas with the Spanish by 1502, nearly a century before Jamestown was founded in Virginia (1607). They came from many different countries with distinct histories. They spoke hundreds of different languages and practiced a variety of religions. Despite their differences, they arrived in America with beliefs and traditions that were

107 Selim to Ruffins, June 18, 1984, “LIA Design Issues” folder [1], Box 6, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155. 54

uniquely African.

Insertion: By 1790, nearly 350,000 African-Americans lived in Maryland and Virginia---then known as the Chesapeake region. They constituted the largest and oldest black community in the United States. The Africans who were brought to the Chesapeake between 1619 and 1808 came from all parts of Central and Western Africa.

Current text: These Africans, torn from their families and homes, were unwilling immigrants to the Americas. Whether slave or free, they had limited choices, but they built new lives for themselves in the New World. By doing so, they created new cultures fusing their various African traditions with those of the Europeans who surrounded them. This new African- American culture was manifested in the ways they spoke, thought about their work and families, made music, danced, and practiced religion.

Objects: Congo Door Panels from Natural History108

Others worried that the interpretation negatively influenced how a visitor might

experience slavery in the exhibition. “ATR” curators went back and forth about how to

enable museum audiences visiting historical exhibitions to locate themselves in the past.

More recent visitor studies suggest that museum audiences respond positively to

encounters with real historical persons whose lives and circumstances that they can

personally identify with in some way. “ATR” curators wondered whether the exhibition

should play up commonalities or instead, problematic by standards of historical integrity,

overstate the differences between our time and the 18th century in order to make the past

even more distinctive and distant. Pretzer worried that this approach would alienate “the

audiences by giving them nothing secure about their [lives].”109 Ironically, according to

108 Ruffins to Kennedy, June 19, 1984, “LIA Design Issues” folder [1], Box 6, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155. 109Pretzer to Ruffins, memo, The issues of presentism, bias, and perspective, January 26, 1983, “Current Scripts” folder [15], Box 7, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155. 55

surviving documentation, no one expressed any reservations about visitors’ abilities to

relate directly or personally to slaves.

Ruffins wanted the exhibition text to make clear connections between the past and

the present so that the audience could draw parallels and relationships that might help

them relate eighteenth-century America to today. Pretzer characterized her interpretation

negatively as “presentism.” He stated, “This does not mean that the past is unusable,

clearly I think it is useable and relevant to today; but I do not [think] it provides answers

to current situations nor that we can judge the past by the present.”110 Because “ATR”

kept its interpretation resolutely focused on 18th-century America, it failed to link, among

other things, slavery’s legacy to nineteenth- and twentieth-century racism. Generally, the exhibition steered clear of unpleasant subjects that potentially might cause a negative reaction among the audience. As a result, “ATR” set aside a significant and traumatic part

of the nation’s history as untouchable.

In the end, exhibition planners relied on multimedia to create a sense for visitors

that they had penetrated another world crossing the exhibition’s threshold.111 Audience

members entered “ATR” through doors of a surviving 18th-century New England

farmhouse (empty of furnishings) constructed as a theatre on the interior. Every 15 minutes or so, the doors slid shut, the room darkened, and a dramatic object-theatre presentation began. Using a collage approach that featured visuals and spot lit artifacts, the multimedia presented the exhibition’s main messages and set the historical context.

110 Pretzer, Ibid. Advisors to “ATR’s” Seneca section similarly complained about the exhibition’s failure to “show Indian life now as well as then.” Quoted in William S. Walker, A Living Exhibition: The Smithsonian and the Transformation of the Universal Museum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 218. 111 Other exhibitions at the time also used similar techniques. A notable example is the introduction to the Canadian historical site, St. Marie among the Hurons. More recently, the City Museum of Washington (which ultimately failed) centered its interpretation on an elaborate filmed theatre production that cost several million dollars to create. 56

At its conclusion, a back wall cleverly slid open and visitors walked into the exhibition

space. A confusing layout greeted them. The period rooms disguised by white

cheesecloth scrims. The deep cases filled with artifacts and graphics. The detailed labels, text and quote panels, some of which were black with white lettering and hard to read.

Lacking a tightly controlled pathway for the audience to move through the exhibition--- either spatially or intellectually---visitors frequently wandered aimlessly, left to draw their own representational associations.

In her efforts to create a complex exhibition storyline without many actual objects to support it, Ruffins garnered few defenders among the NMAH staff. She sought to equate slavery and slaveholding, not as remote, unconnected outcomes but as integral experiences that affected individual people. Ruffins asked Kennedy to support her attempts to locate the sections on African American culture and another that discussed slaveholding planter Henry Saunders (and his family) from Isle of Wight County,

Virginia, in close proximity to each other because “these two sections are two parts of the same whole.”112 Although the slavery material “opened” “ATR” and remained physically

close to the Saunders material, the placement and color choices made by the exhibition

design ultimately rendered the relationship between them oblique to observers.

Perhaps if Ruffins had successfully argued her final point to Kennedy about the

centrality of performative traditions to African American culture, the exhibition might

have incorporated audio and video to greater effect in the Chesapeake section as a means

to present a more dynamic experience to the audience. Despite Ruffins’ best efforts, the

112 Ruffins to Kennedy, June 19, 1984, “LIA Design Issues” folder [1], Box 6, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155. . .

exhibition in its final form remained relatively static with respect to African Americans.

After consuming years of research, discussion, and careful planning, the cautiously crafted interpretation relied almost completely on whether the visitor diligently read the exhibition text. Among the most effective elements was a remarkable genealogical chart that colorfully traced the kin and familial relationships of George Washington’s slaves: it made a subtle but powerful point about the resilience of enslaved families and communities in the Chesapeake while at the same time, reminding visitors about the powerful American founding fathers who were slaveholders.

Interviewed by the Washington Post when “ATR” opened in November 1985,

Kennedy claimed that the exhibition was “the best museum show ever” and commented to the reporter that NMAH had spent more money on research for “After the Revolution” than on any other aspect. “The ideas arranged the objects.” 113 However, in his exhibition

review, historian Robert Gross termed “ATR’s” attempt to display so many objects while

still creating a historically substantive exhibition organization as “schizophrenic.” Gross

did praise the sophisticated exhibition text as “based on the most up-to-date scholarship”

but found that it offered a viewpoint that was too “abstract and analytical” for most

visitors. In his assessment, the tools, utensils, and decorative arts displayed in association

with the narrative did “not constitute significant historical evidence in their own right.”

Gross advocated a greater collaboration and engagement with material culture

scholarship on the part of the museum, in order to create stronger exhibitions that might

113 Kennedy, interview with Washington Post, November 16, 1985, quoted in Gross, “After the Revolution: Everyday Life in America, 1780-1800,” 858, 860. 58

better “embody ideas in three-dimensional worlds, while setting those worlds in broad,

historical contexts.” 114

Although the exhibition did not accomplished what Ruffins hoped or intended,

the job, by her own admission, was “a large and difficult task: communicating clearly,

forcefully, and without hesitation about the characteristics of a rich but emotionally

complex period in African-American history specifically and American history generally.

If we manage to get this up, it will stand as an informed, fresh, and preeminent statement

by a major cultural authority on this topic.”115 With its wide sweep and focus on the

multitude of new emphases advocated by social history, “After the Revolution” not only

set the stage for a new type of history exhibition, but it was the first to make enslaved life

a central component of its interpretative framework. Yet, as this case study demonstrates,

political wrangling behind the scenes at the museum prevented the exhibition’s true

reification of “difference.” By limiting itself to merely writing slaves into the American

story, it denied them their role in shaping that history. It awaited future exhibitions later

in the 1980s to attempt to more deeply describe the cultural space occupied by American

slavery.

114 Gross, 860-861. Barbara Clark Smith did address this shortcoming in her preface to the accompanying book, “We still do not fully know how to understand [surviving objects] as documents that can tell us about history” [Clark Smith, After the Revolution: The Smithsonian History of Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century (1986), xix]. 115 Ruffins to Kennedy, June 19, 1984, “LIA Design Issues” folder [1], Box 6, S&CH, ExRecords, NMAH, 86-155.

Chapter 3: Slavery in the Exhibition: “In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black Life in Richmond, Virginia” and “Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South”

The late 1980s witnessed what Kratz and Karp term “the museumization of

African American history” by mainstream museums. 115Museums reacted to the more prominent role African American assumed in the public sphere with increased programs and exhibitions about African American subjects. It followed that a greater diversity also appeared among museum staff, trustees, and audiences. As Fiona McLean summarized,

“narrating the nation in the museum increasingly becomes a task of narrating the diversity of the nation and for engaging in a politics of recognition.” 116 If exhibitions serve as an indication of how ideas about the past form in museums, with respect to slavery, they played a critical---albeit imperfect---role in the construction of new

American civic narratives put before the public.

115 Corrine Kratz and Ivan Karp,” Introduction,” in Museum Frictions: Public Culture/Global Transformations, eds. Corrine Kratz, Ivan Karp et.al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 21. See also Lonnie Bunch, “In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Life in Richmond, Virginia, 1790-1860,” Journal of American History 76 (June 1989):202-203, accessed January 15, 2014, URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/1908365. 116 Fiona McLean quoted in Saphinaz-Amal Naguib, “The One, the Many and the Other: Revisiting Cultural Diversity in Museums of Cultural History,” eds. Arne Bugge Amundsen and Andreas Nyblom, Conference proceedings, NAMUIII, University of Oslo, Norway, 19-21 November 2007, 5, accessed January 21, 2014, Linkoping University Electronic Press (www.ep.liu.se/exp/031/001/exp0703101.pdf). See also Ivan Karp, “Culture and Representation,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds. I.Karp and Steven Lavine (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 15 and Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Multiculturalism and Museums: Discourse about Others in the Age of Globalization, “ Theory, Culture & Society 14 (1997):124, accessed February 18, 2011, doi: 10.1177/02632769014004006

60 For institutions located in the American South, predictably marked by an

embattled past, this usually involved some public reckoning with slavery.117 This chapter

considers two Richmond, Virginia, projects that featured new strategies for the

interpretation and exhibition of slavery in the late 1980s and early 1990s: the Valentine

Museum’s “In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black Life in Richmond, Virginia,”

and the Museum of the Confederacy’s “Before Freedom Came: African American Life in

the Antebellum South.” Each presented storylines considered innovative because they

featured interpretations of, and discoveries about, American slavery taking place among scholars. In describing the Valentine’s exhibition project, Henry Chase writing in

American Visions, a popular magazine that focused exclusively on African-American art

and culture, encapsulated the larger transformation then underway: “For the first time,

America’s past is properly seen as embracing African Americans as subjects rather than

objects of history.”118

Through these two projects, each museum took up its own exploration of slavery

as a kind of moral imperative, foreground against an institutional past that was replete

with silences or omissions about African Americans or, as in the case of the Museum of

the Confederacy, included frequent demonstrations of explicit racist ideology. In the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Museum of the Confederacy’s parent

organization consistently portrayed slavery as a positive good in displays and

presentations. The museum staffs embraced a revision of southern history that confronted

117 See for example, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 270-316 and Fath Davis Ruffins, “Revisiting the Old Plantation: Reparations, Reconciliation, and Museumizing American Slavery,” Kratz and Karp, 394-434. 118 Henry Chase, “Past due and on time! The Valentine Museum-use of innovative media to display African American history exhibits, Richmond, Virginia,” American Visions (June-July 1994), accessed February 24, 2009, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1546/is_n3_v9/ai_15495026.

61 otherwise settled notions of racial and national ideology, where slavery now played a

principal role as an “undeniable” and objectionable reality.119 While neither museum

overtly addressed emerging notions of multiculturalism in these projects, their organizers

sought the participation of community partners and stakeholders, although in a supporting

role to the museum curators.

Varied issues challenged the two museums in mounting exhibitions that

confronted their institutional histories and southern heritage roots. Yet both organizations

shared a location in the same conservative southern city where for more than two

centuries established racial hierarchies had defined the economic, social and political

relationships between black and white residents. Even though the 1980s were heralded as

a new era of social and political change in Virginia that culminated in the election of the

nation’s first African American governor, Douglas Wilder, in 1989, the deep-rooted

legacy of slavery had shaped the identities of white and black Virginians over many

generations in ways that were seldom openly acknowledged. The Commonwealth’s long

relationship with the “peculiar institution” stretched back to the establishment of captive

Africans as legal chattel by the colonial legislature in the late 17th century, credited by

historians with launching the institution in the North American British Colonies.120 Both

exhibitions similarly integrated the new social history interpretations and methodologies concerning slavery then in circulation.121 Academic advisors considered experts in the

subject matter worked in partnership with each museum to create the exhibition. Both

119 See Patrick Hagopian, “Race and the Politics of Public History in the United States,” in Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground. Ed. Grey Gundaker (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 274. 120 Influential accounts of the establishment of slavery in early Virginia include Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1975), which is still in print today. 121 Peter J. Parish lays out these interpretations in Slavery: History and Historians (New York: HarperCollins, 1989).

62 projects won competitive federal funding from the National Endowment for the

Humanities, which awarded monies only to exhibitions that conveyed a national story.

Each exhibition received nationwide attention in the popular and scholarly press, and, in

some cases, later scholarly reviews treated them together.122 New leadership at both the

Valentine and the Museum of the Confederacy (hereafter, MOC) facilitated this dramatic shift in direction. The Valentine’s new director transformed the entire institution to focus on emerging interpretations of southern and urban history, with the intention of highlighting Richmond’s position as an urban manufacturing center within that history.

At the MOC, the “Before Freedom Came” project pushed the staff and board to reinvent itself by confronting its long embrace of Lost Cause mythology that portrayed slavery in a benign and paternalistic light, which ultimately resulted in interpretive and administrative changes for the museum.

When examined together, the two exhibitions emerge as attempts to insert histories of “others” into the narrative of the nation state by adapting the mythmaking rhetoric of American exceptionalism. Following historical interpretation then current, both exhibitions portrayed slaves as intrepid individuals, battling oppression, and succeeding against slaveholding society in many cases.123 Commendably, they told

stories about individuals who purchased their freedom and that of family members;

resisted slavery through various means including feigning sickness or refusing to work or

escaped slavery altogether by running away; and living and working apart from their

white owners in urban environments. While all actually occurred, these experiences

122 See for example, Mike Wallace, “Museum Metamorphosis,” Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 116. 123 See, for example, Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

63 certainly were not common to most enslaved individuals. In their eagerness to inscribe

strategies for agency on enslaved individuals (and create a narrative appealing to majority

audiences), the exhibitions underplayed the scope of white repression of blacks.

At the same time, the projects raise other problematic issues including those that

surround a white museum’s power and authority to construct and mediate African

American history. In effect, both museums appropriated the black experience by

representing it from a position of authority. Can a non-African American history museum,

particularly one with a troubled racial history, organize a viable project about African

American history that is inclusive of diverse perspectives and critical of past injustices in the nation? Is it possible for an institution to turn against its own “heroic” storyline, one that essentially validates slaveholding, and present it side by side with a narrative that in effect contradicts the core interpretation?

“In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black Life in Richmond, Virginia”

In 1988, the venerable Valentine Museum, one of Virginia’s oldest museums,

opened an important exhibition that featured antebellum African American experience in

the capital city. It borrowed its title from Frederick Douglass’s famous 1845

autobiography that described his life and experiences as a slave first on a Maryland

plantation and then as a hired out worker in urban Baltimore as well as his audacious

escape to the North. “In Bondage and Freedom” represents an early effort in what was an

ambitious reorientation of the Valentine’s mission as a history museum dedicated to

Richmond’s story, under the direction of Frank Jewell and his staff. Founded in 1892 by

the local New South industrialist Mann Valentine, the museum campus located in

64 downtown Court End includes several historic buildings that house and display the

Valentine’s remarkable collections that contain, among other things, historic costumes

and textiles rivaled only by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1984, the Valentine’s

Board of Trustees hired as the Executive Director, Frank Jewell, the former director of

the Colorado Historical Society in Denver, and, prior to that, a librarian at the Chicago

Historical Society.124 In a crisis financially, the museum board recognized that the

institution desperately needed modernization and they retained Jewell to ‘make the trains

run on time.’ He made a condition of his employment at the Valentine the complete

flexibility to remake the institution. 125

Jewell moved quickly and dramatically. As a former staff member remembered recently, Jewell had “about 20 good ideas every day.” Within a few months, he had

completely overturned the museum’s administration. He fired the old staff and hired new

and more professionally trained employees, diversified the museum’s Board, and took

firm control of “the intellectual agenda of the museum.”126 Even more earthshattering to

Richmonders, Jewell sought to move the Valentine away from its decidedly Old South

and undeniably antiquarian approach to the city’s history. The museum’s new

interpretation instead would position Richmond in the wider context of modern regional

and national urban history. Jewell even renamed the institution to underscore this

124 Jewell remained the Valentine’s director until 1995. He died in 2012. For a brief synopsis of Jewell’s final project, Valentine Riverside at the Tredegar Iron Works, which left the museum more than 10 million dollars in debt, and caused his resignation, see Harry Kollatz, Jr., “Valentine 2.1,” in Richmond Magazine (December 2011), accessed January 12, 2014, http://www.richmondmagazine.com/articles/valentine-2-1- 06-19-2012html. 125 Bruce M. Stave, “A Conversation with Frank Jewell: Urban History at the Valentine Museum,” Journal of Urban History 18 (February 1992): 198, accessed February 20, 2009, doi: 10.1177/009614429201800205. The interview with Jewell took place in 1990. 126 Gregg Kimball in Kollatz; Stave, 193.

65 emphasis, adding the subtitle, “The Museum of the Life and History of Richmond,

Virginia.”

During a two-year planning process that occurred in 1984 and 1985, Jewell and

his new staff identified “areas needing special concentration to balance and enlarge the

museum’s interpretation of Richmond’s history” that included a laundry list of programs

and exhibition presentations to be undertaken. Topping the list was the city’s racial

history.127 In order to plan the many projects that Jewell laid out in an ambitious Five-

Year plan that he subsequently refined with the assistance of academic historians, the

Valentine’s staff took a series of retreats and research trips across the country. Together they visited award-winning similar-sized museums that featured exhibitions endorsed by academia. As another part of his extraordinarily well-planned and immersive undertaking for his staff, Jewell also instituted mandatory monthly “staff seminars” that focused around presentations by historians or discussions of assigned books or articles relevant to the Valentine’s new interpretive agenda. Staff received a number of paid “reading” holidays per year “to read something that’s not directly related to one of their projects in order to stay current.”128 In addition to using these tools to develop exhibitions internally,

the museum utilized the expertise of southern historians such as David Goldfield from

University of North Carolina-Charlotte and Howard Rabinowitz, University of New

Mexico, to function as their in house academic consultants intended to help the museum

strengthen its agenda, its methodology, and its approach. According to one observer,

Jewell ran the Valentine “like an emergency M.A.S.H. unit for several years non-stop. He

127 Frank Jewell, “Foreword,” in Marie Tyler-McGraw and Gregg D. Kimball, In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black Life in Richmond, Virginia (Richmond: Valentine Museum, 1988), 8 128 Frank Jewell, “Audience and Museum: Reflections about Fruitful Conversations,” The Public Historian 14 (Summer, 1992): 59, accessed January 15, 2014, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3378229; Stave, 193.

66 rolled planning, grant writing, exhibiting, and curating all into one exhilarating,

exhausting, enormously productive, pell-mell, pressure-cooker frenzy of activity that

transformed every staff member into a jack of all-tirades for as long as the individual—

and the museum---lasted.”129

Jewell ran the museum like an ambitious graduate seminar and the series of

exhibitions, publications, collecting initiatives, and programs called the Richmond

History Project that resulted produced a distinctive interpretation of the city’s history

focused on race, ethnicity, gender, and class.130 In a 1992 interview, Jewell explained how his thinking evolved into the process by which the Valentine developed its new interpretation:

Very little had been done about working people, very little done about women as thinking adults, and we clustered our questions that way, laid out the interpretive agenda. We also wanted questions that were interrelated, so that as we built a staff seminar there was a cross-fertilization of research, a weaving in and out, a repetition, and a reexamination. We called that exhibition series “Works in Progress,” because we realized that we were not doing definitive monographs. We were scratching the surface. Those shows have fed on each other and generated whole new bodies of questions.131

To devise each project’s interpretation, Jewell followed a particular sequence of

intellectual organization and structure that he subsequently described to interviewers.

Working together with the historical advisors, the Valentine staff first developed a series of questions about the topic at hand that typically considered new historical

methodologies and new approaches that then undergirded the exhibition interpretation.

Once the big ideas were in hand, Valentine curators assigned to each exhibition then

129 Cary Carson, “Colonial Williamsburg and the Practice of Interpretive Planning in American History Museums,” The Public Historian 20 (Summer 1998): 39, accessed December 1, 2013, doi:10.2307/3379773. 130 Lonnie Bunch, “Richmond History Project” in Ideas and Images: Developing Interpretive History Exhibitions. Eds. Ken Ames, Barbara Franco, and Tom Frye (Walnut Creek, Cal: Altamira Press, 1992), 283-311. This series of essays highlighted innovative history exhibitions throughout the United States. 131 Stave, 200.

67 prepared specific exhibition outlines, annotated bibliographies, and made object lists in

short order. New exhibitions sometimes appeared as rapidly as three in a single year. The

exhibition treatments that staff and consultants advanced almost always became the basis

for narratives in NEH implementation grant proposals submitted by the Valentine.

Exhibition development under Jewell worked like a well-oiled machine.

By treating these exhibitions in their grant proposals and press releases as “Works

in Progress,” the Valentine wisely defined their projects as introductory and never

positioned the exhibition project as the last word on any subject. This approach relieved

the museum staff from the burden of delivering a nuanced scholarly interpretation,

although some academics eventually criticized the Valentine for what they perceived as

the museum’s shallow content.132 Nevertheless, the museum enjoyed phenomenal

success in securing NEH funding.

However, demanding Jewell’s strategies may have been on his staff, they created

a synergy that succeeded in establishing the Valentine as among the nation’s leading

urban history museums in less than a decade: the museum profession held the museum up

as an example of what a small to mid-size urban history museum might accomplish with

the right leadership and staff. 133 Through its exhibitions, publications, programming, and

NEH funding, the Valentine quickly became an admired national model of museum

innovation, particularly with respect to African American history. In the words of Fath

Davis Ruffins, “the Valentine’s decision to focus on the “complex, conflictural, and

132 See, for example, Lonnie Bunch’s criticisms of the Valentine’s “machine-gun” approach to exhibitions in his essay, “Richmond History Project,” 307-308. 133 Ibid, 283-311.

68 circuitous history of race relations makes it virtually unique among American museums

of any size.” 134

Over roughly a 36-month period between 1986 and 1989, the Valentine organized

five exhibitions that related “the whole history of black Richmond.” Soon after his arrival

at the Valentine, Jewell dismantled a permanent exhibition that displayed the history of

Richmond that he considered “an embarrassment.” He immediately removed the opening

image, an oversized photographic portrait of William Byrd, the city’s founder, the “great

white man in history.” Jewell found the exhibition’s approach to African American

history particularly offensive. He later recalled that the exhibition “had, for example, all

black history in a little ghetto, which was clearly marked “black history…Physically in

the exhibition there was a little alcove of black history that didn’t speak to the fact…that

the city could not have been built had it not been for the African Americans, the skilled

labor force.”135 In particular, Jewell wanted the Valentine’s interpretive program to make

clear to locals and tourists alike that “Afro-Americans were central and essential to

American development, not peripheral.” 136 Following closely the historiography then

thriving in academia, Jewell represented antebellum African Americans as central players

in the creation of Richmond, the South, and the nation.137 Additionally, Jewell contended

134 Fath Davis Ruffins, “Jim Crow: Racism and Reaction in the New South,” The Journal of American History, 78, (June 1991): 264, accessed January 15, 2014, URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/2078101. See also James O. Horton and Spencer R. Crew, “Afro-Americans and Museums,” History Museums in the United States, ed. Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 226. See also Bunch, “Richmond History Project,” 283-311. 135 All quotes, Stave, 196. 136 Both quotes, Jewell, “Foreword,” 8 and 9. 137 Influential scholarship includes Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: the South 1820-1860 (1967); Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1975); John Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews and Autobiographies (1977) and The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1979) ; Claudia Goldin, Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820-1860: A Quantitative History (1976); Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: the World the Slaves Made (1976) and The World the Slaveholders Made (1988); Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race

69 that the blacks who lived and worked along white residents in antebellum Richmond

“formed a cultural community that was distinct from other southern cities such as

Charleston and New Orleans.”138 By virtue of its industrial and manufacturing

development, the Valentine argued that Richmond was a city set apart from the rest of the

South.

The local African American community welcomed the Valentine’s approach. Not

only did modern Richmond still have a significant African American population but also

the museum itself sat on the edge of a historic African American neighborhood called

Jackson Ward then beginning to experience significant gentrification. In an earlier

exhibition called “Second Street” about Jackson Ward, the museum worked closely with

a local community-based black history museum as well as African American residents

who lived in the area. In modern Richmond, the still conservative former capital of the

Confederacy, where black and white life remained if not segregated, then deeply divided, the Valentine’s inclusive tactics seemed revolutionary. Years later, when Jewell lost his

job, local African Americans would wonder whether the Museum’s focus on the black

community had played a significant role in his demise.

With the opening less than a year away, the “In Bondage and Freedom” project

officially began in January 1987, under the working title, “The Antebellum Black

Community in Richmond, 1790-1860.” The museum’s first ever grant awarded by the

National Endowment of the Humanities for $173,000 underwrote the costs. 139 Dr. Marie

Relations in the Urban South, 1865-90 (1978); Leon Lithwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1980) and David R. Goldfield, Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers (1982). 138 Jewell, “Foreword,” 9. 139 Gregg D. Kimball and Marie Tyler-McGraw, “Integrating the Interpretation of the Southern City: An Exhibition Case Study,” The Public Historian 12 (Spring 1990): 31-43, accessed January 15, 2014, doi:10.2307/3378686.

70 Tyler-McGraw, an independent historian formerly associated with the National Museum

of American History’s Afro American Communities project, and Valentine’s archivist,

Gregg D. Kimball, served as the exhibition curators.140 Kimball was largely responsible for the exhibition content and Tyler-McGraw the accompanying publication essay.141

The exhibition’s big idea---as presented to NEH---was to demonstrate that

industrial slavery in antebellum Richmond acted as the “glue that held together a highly

industrial southern city.”142 The grant narrative advertised the project as the first museum

exhibition undertaken on the theme of urban slavery but as the project developed, the museum broadened the emphasis to cover the lives of both antebellum slaves and free

African Americans in the city. As Jewell argued in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, “it proved impossible to separate free blacks and slaves. Neither free blacks nor slaves had real freedom in antebellum Richmond, but both had access to greater economic opportunities than in any other city north or south.”143

Tyler McGraw and Kimball divided the exhibition into discrete but related thematic sections focused on urban work; relationships between blacks and whites in

Richmond; the free black and enslaved community; private life as experienced by African

American individuals (focusing on material comforts and housing); and a final section that described racial controls in the city and blacks’ resistance to them. Each theme

140 Tyler-McGraw eventually became the Valentine’s staff historian for several years in the early 1990s (Bunch, “Richmond History Project,” 295). See also Kimball and Tyler-McGraw, “Integrating the Interpretation of the Southern City: An Exhibition Case Study,” 31-43. 141 Their roles are identified by Brent Tarter in his review, “In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black Life in Richmond, 1790-1860,” The Public Historian 10 (Autumn 1988): 91, accessed 16 January 2014, doi.2307/3377837. 142 Valentine Museum [Gregg D. Kimball], NEH implementation proposal for “The Antebellum Black Community in Richmond, 1790-1860,” 1988, “In Bondage and Freedom” Project files, Valentine Museum Archives. Cited in Meghan T. Naile, “Like Nixon to China, The Exhibition of Slavery in the Valentine Museum and the Museum of the Confederacy” (MA thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2009), 10. Copy provided by the author. 143 Jewell, “Foreword,” 9.

71 became a short illustrated essay published in the accompanying catalogue. The two

curators folded additional subjects into the exhibition script including the colonization

movement and subsequent emigration to Liberia by some black Richmonders, which also

appeared in the catalogue. The project’s academic consultants vetted the interpretation

and the catalogue copy that served as a source for the concise exhibition texts and

labels.144

For “In Bondage and Freedom,” the Valentine renovated its 2500 square foot,

downstairs (basement) gallery space and painted it a stark white to make the large room appear more modern.145 Within the gallery, the exhibition designer Patricia Chester created several small vignettes---located behind sheer muslin covered scrims (a device borrowed from theatre and seen in “After the Revolution”)--- that illustrated the lives of free and enslaved city residents; patronizing a tavern in one instance and, in another, at the Tredegar Iron Works where curators discussed its large enslaved labor force. A

Washington Post reporter described the scrims as creating a “ghostly aura [that] hints at their semi-invisible status but pervasive presence.”146 Other silkscreen life-size African

American figures portrayed in positions of work or leisure, bending over a rake or sitting

on a chair, also populated the gallery. Curators intended the figures to create a “black

presence” throughout the exhibition, although arguably their cartoonish appearance made

144 The principal consultants were Eugene Genovese, David Goldfield, James Horton, and Edgar Toppin. John Vlach also commented on the catalogue essay (Tyler McGraw and Kimball, “Acknowledgements,” In Bondage and Freedom, 7). 145 This description is based on several visits I made to the exhibition in 1988. The exhibition is also described in several reviews including Lonnie G. Bunch, “In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black Life in Richmond, Virginia,” The Journal of American History 76 (June 1989): 202-207, accessed January 15, 2014, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1908365. See also Bunch, “Richmond History Project,” 283- 311. 146 Kimball and Tyler-McGraw, “Integrating the Interpretation, “36; Pat Aufderheide, “Pointing Up Black History in Richmond,” Washington Post, July 10, 1988, accessed January 15, 2014, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Washington Post (1877-1997).

72 them somewhat jarring. In exhibitions, these elements work together to create what

Mieke Bal identifies as “a meaning-producing sequential, emerging from the viewer’s walk through an exhibition.” At least one critic complained that the gallery layout “does not invite visitors to pause and read and reflect.”147

“In Bondage and Freedom” utilized only a few three-dimensional artifacts but

they included a pair of iron shackles, a canal workers’ leather shoe rescued by an

archaeologist, and a banjo made by an enslaved man, installed together with a larger

assortment of engraved illustrations, broadsides, manuscript documents, daguerreotypes

and other photography. Jewell later recalled, “We had the iron workers’ tools behind the

scrims and the figures had their arms extended, showing how the tools were to be used. It

was impossible to come into that show, see those scrims, see those tools and not

understand that these were not a bunch of ‘dumb niggers.’ “148 Elsewhere in the gallery, visitors watched a video that featured an actor portraying the antebellum blacksmith and

local hero Gilbert Hunt who saved eleven white city residents from a theater fire in 1811,

and a decade later purchased his own freedom. In another video presentation, actors read

excerpts from the Virginia ex-slave narratives recorded by the Federal Writers Projects in

1930s.

The Valentine employed a unique label reading strategy that directed visitors on

how to look at the exhibition based on the amount of time they had to spend. The

exhibition text offered the main argument in large typeface so that a visitor could breeze

through the exhibition in a short amount of time. Many skipped the more detailed information provided in smaller typeface on the labels. An audio tour was available to

147 Mieke Bal, “Exhibition as Film,” Exhibition Experiments, eds. Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd, 2007), 71; Tarter, 92. 148 Stave, 201.

73 guide visitors through the exhibition but few took it, even after the Museum made it

free. 149 Although at least one reviewer observed that crowds in the exhibition seemed

indifferent to the contents, I myself witnessed attentive African American visitors who

carefully looked at the cases, read the accompanying wall text and labels, and watched

the videos. For this audience in particular the exhibition resonated.150

“In Bondage and Freedom” also encompassed areas of the nineteenth-century

Wickham-Valentine House. Visitors moved from to the museum galleries into the

house’s basement level where a final video called “Housework and Home Place” focused

on the Wickham family’s domestic slaves. The museum used one room in the house’s

cellar to recreate---based on a probate inventory--- the stark residence of a free black seamstress named Amanda Cousins, who rented out rooms to hired-out slaves in

Richmond. In other cellar spaces, the exhibition designer installed additional scrims that illustrated African Americans at work in the house, complemented at scheduled times by performances by actors who portrayed the household’s enslaved workers. Reproduction sleeping pallets similar to those perhaps used by the Wickham family’s slaves were stacked in the upstairs hallway and placed on some bedroom floors. The small service

spaces and back staircase effectively evoked “the restricted and limited life of the

slave.” 151 The interpretation of the intertwined lives of black and white Richmonders in the Wickham-Valentine House space apparently both surprised and engrossed white

visitors. “This came as a revelation, this intimacy, and we began to talk about the social

149 Tarter, 92; Tyler-McGraw and Kimball, “Integrating the Interpretation,” 41. 150 The positive reaction of visitors to the exhibition was reiterated in two days of formative evaluation that took place at the Valentine in the summer of 1988. See “In Bondage and Freedom” final report to NEH, May 23, 1989, 9, IBAF Files, Valentine Museum Archives. Quoted in Naile, 41-43. For negative comments, see Tarter, 92. 151 Bunch, 206.

74 significance of space,” Jewell later remembered.152 In the late 1980s, few American historic house museums or historic sites, outside of the Valentine and a handful of other sites like Colonial Williamsburg, recognized their enslaved residents openly in their

period room displays, interpretations, or tours.

Through these simple but effective accompaniments included within “In Bondage

and Freedom,” the Valentine began to restore the Wickham-Valentine House’s black

occupants to their rightful place within the Wickham household. The museum’s

Richmond History Project incorporated the house as a significant feature. In 1993 the

Valentine installed a more elaborate exhibition, “Shared Spaces, Separate Lives,” within the Wickham-Valentine House then under a multiyear restoration. “Shared Spaces,

Separate Lives” focused on white-black relationships within a domestic setting and integrated several videos and ambient audio dramatizations into the exhibition storyline.

Nevertheless, at least one critic observed that the accompanying docent-led house tour still concentrated heavily on decorative arts and historic preservation rather than social history.153

Although visitors and most commentators praised “In Bondage and Freedom,” at least one reviewer, Thomas J. Davis, an African American professor, criticized its content as too generic. He wrote that the exhibition epitomized the “‘they, too, were

152 Stave, 201. 153 Henry Chase, “Past due and on time!” A more critical review of “Shared Spaces, Separate Lives” by Eric Gable appears in American Anthropologist 96 (September 1994): 678-680. Among other negative comments, Gable suggested that the exhibition’s interpretation was unbalanced and he disparaged the alacrity with which the exhibition celebrated “the accomplishments of the downtrodden” rather than “criticize[d] any incisiveness of those who exploited them” (679). He found the five scripted audio “conversations” by actors portraying individuals who lived in the early 19th-century house, intended to enliven the empty spaces, laughable caricatures that promoted the worst stereotypes: whites were portrayed as idiotic and African Americans as heroic.

75 here’ “syndrome, an approach which he blamed majority museums for perpetuating when telling African American history. Davis continued, “It fostered little feel for the substance

and subtlety that marked the character and special features of black life in antebellum

Richmond. No specific context emerged to give dimension to what distinguished and

particularized this [emphasis in original] Afro-American experience. The black presence remained simply a fact of the city’s existence.” Although Davis’s essay singled out for praise other exhibitions he reviewed in the piece, he clearly did not like “In Freedom and

Bondage,” which he implied engaged in “stock black characterizations.” At the end of his review, Davis concluded, “exhibitions on the Afro-American experience need to press

beyond the images and objects of motionless black bodies standing in monolithic poses

the express little or nothing of the change, contrast, and individuality that set black life

and culture apart and infused it with own shape and substance.” 154 In direct response, the

Valentine curators fired back in the Public Historian that their main point was to show visitors that life for blacks and whites in antebellum Richmond demonstrated “an interdependence of unequals.” Their “concern for delineating the black community was combined with interest in the way in which black and white cultures were integrated in

Richmond and could never, in our view, be entirely separate. Religion, music, house construction, and medical practices are only a few of the areas where black and white worlds met. This is not the same as saying ‘They, too, were here.’ “155

154 Thomas J. Davis, “They, Too, Were Here”: The Afro-American Experience and History Museums,” American Quarterly 41 (June, 1989): 328-340, accessed February 24, 2009, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2713028. Davis unfairly compares “In Bondage and Freedom” with several other exhibitions that depicted 20th-century African American life including “From Victory to Freedom: Afro-American Life in the Fifties” at The National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center. 155 Kimball and Tyler-McGraw, “Integrating the Interpretation,” 42.

76 Reportedly, the exhibition had a potent effect on its audience. Jewell called it

“cathartic.” “I saw people more visibly affected in the galleries than I have for any show,”

he remembered. “In Bondage and Freedom” drew substantial numbers of black and white visitors to the museum; some of whom also participated in the accompanying, occasionally rancorous, public programs to discuss openly the city’s troubled racial history. According to Jewell, “In Bondage and Freedom” helped convince its white visitors “that you had to view these people in a very different light. That for a lot of white people was a revelation. I think that they had considered black people as essentially unskilled people who made very little contribution.” African American visitors reacted somewhat differently. Jewell met the wife of a local state senator, who was African

American, in the exhibition and found her in tears. “She said, “I always believed we had a history, but here it is. I can see it.”156 Not every audience member responded positively

to the exhibition. A Washington Post reporter overheard a black high school student

disputing part of his tour of the exhibition, “I never heard of a slave being able to make

money. I don’t believe you.” The nearby Medical College of Virginia Hospital removed a

small traveling version of the exhibition when African American staff became “overly

concerned about the negative content.” A white visitor told Gregg Kimball, “This exhibit

will make black people hate white people.” Another visitor accused the Valentine of

“rewriting history.” 157

Jewell understood that in order to implement complicated historical narratives, the

Valentine required community consensus, stakeholder involvement, and support. In 1992

he claimed, “In significantly expanding the subjects studied by the Valentine, the

156 All quotes, Stave, 200-201. 157 Aufderheide, “Pointing Up Black History in Richmond;” Kimball and Tyler-McGraw, “Integrating the Interpretation,” 41.

77 museum’s senior staff and board have had thousands of individual meetings with donors, politicians, educators, civic leaders, and the press. We have explained our plan of work for the decade, laid out our methods, introduced our consultants, and solicited advice and

criticism. We have spoken to scores of groups, in fact any group that would listen has

been---and is---fair game.”158 During the planning for “In Bondage and Freedom,” the

Valentine collaborated with Richmond’s African American community by creating a

Minority Affairs Committee, leading one city council member to comment that the

museum was “promoting good race relations more than any other [Richmond]

organization.” 159 The Valentine also introduced innovative community “editing” sessions

that occurred right after exhibition openings where audience members could debate

exhibition contents. The museum incorporated filmed excerpts from these public meetings into exhibitions “to make the public aware that conflicting authoritative

interpretations of the past exist.”160 By allowing the public to shape content directly, the museum created perceptible connections between the past and the present made by audience members themselves.

The Valentine did a masterful job in promoting their work. For “In Bondage and

Freedom,” the museum hired The Martin Agency, a respected local public relations firm with national clients who helped place the exhibition in national publications as well as local outlets including church bulletins. The museum invited the city’s African American

leaders to the opening. The Valentine also made a 28-minute film about “In Bondage and

Freedom” that combined the recreated story of Gilbert Hunt, tours that featured surviving local antebellum sites, and historic photography used in the exhibition, narrated by local

158 Jewell, “Audience and Museum,” 58. 159 “In Bondage and Freedom” final NEH report, May 23, 1989, 5, quoted in Naile, 56. 160 Jewell, “Audience and Museum,” 59.

78 news anchor, Sabrina Squires, who is African American. The film was shown 4 times on public television and also made available for loan. More than 128 groups borrowed the film and another 230 the Gilbert Hunt video.161 The fact that black and white viewers

literally rubbed shoulders with each other in the galleries (in a way that they perhaps did

not do elsewhere in the city at the time) no doubt contributed to the sense projected by

Jewell and other museum staff that they were breaking new ground. In response, the

Richmond City Council eventually increased the city’s annual allotment to the

Valentine’s budget.

At the same time, Jewell’s new interpretive direction initiated some negative

consequences for the Valentine. Some previous donors withdrew their financial support.

Others placed threatening messages in the galleries. Jewell claimed that the white supremacy organization National Association for White People “has left cards in the museum that say, ‘We are watching you.’ “ 162 Museum members who apparently felt

alienated by the museum’s new and resolute focus on African American history

questioned the number of exhibitions about black subjects that followed “In Bondage and

Freedom.” Jewell, however, considered attracting significant numbers of African

American visitors to the museum an important measure of his success. He responded to

disgruntled members that the Valentine’s African American visitation, at roughly 12%

annually, was “among the highest in the country,” and dismissed any naysayers as “racist.”

He added, “I’m very much of a mind that museums address their audiences, as historians

choose their audiences, by the topics they choose and the manner in which they choose to

161 “In Bondage and Freedom” final NEH report, May 23, 1989, 9, quoted in Naile, 40-41. 162 Stave, 202.

79 write.”163 For some conservatives, the Valentine’s emphasis on African American history

may have translated into audience pandering but, for Jewell and others, the success of “In

Bondage and Freedom,” and the exhibitions that followed it, represented a measure of

true success for a majority-run institution. Other critics may have felt that the Valentine

exhibited tokenism by embracing African American history so emphatically while

maintaining its own position of privilege, as anthropologist Eric Gable did when he

blasted Colonial Williamsburg for exemplifying “the new social history in

blackface…part of an assimilationist ideology… [in which] the already arrived majority

demonstrate that they are altruistic enough to accept the minority that is about to

arrive.”164

“In Bondage and Freedom” nonetheless made pioneering efforts not only to focus

a detailed interpretation of chattel slavery in a single location but also to base its primary

exhibition methodology on the academic scholarship that had emerged in the field since

the late 1960s.165 “In Bondage and Freedom’s” storyline described African American

hardships and suffering while simultaneously indicated the ways in which black

Americans persevered and retained their humanity. While the curators may have overstated aspects of the interpretation, the exhibition emphasized the interconnections that existed between slaves, free African Americans, and whites in the urban environment

while at the same time making distinctions about unequal power and authority in

antebellum politics, society, and economics. Although academic historians sometimes

163 Stave, 202-203; also Jewell, “Audience and Museum,” 56. 164 Eric Gable, “Making a “Public” to Remake the Past at an American Heritage Site,” Museum Anthropology 21 (Spring/Summer 1997): 63, accessed June 10, 2014. doi:10.1525/mua.1997.21.1.57. 165 See for example, the interpretations of slavery and free black experience within urban slavery in Richard Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), Claudia Goldin, Urban Slavery in the American South 1820-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) and Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975).

80 criticized history museums and their exhibitions for retaining a framework of what

visitors already know, rather than “making the dialogue more explicit than implicit, for

audiences that are more tangible and particular than imaginary,” “In Bondage and

Freedom” attempted to break through past practices in storytelling and exhibitry with its

interpretation and its presentation. 166 It delivered a story that was largely unknown to its

audience.

“In Bondage and Freedom” and the MOC’s “Before Freedom Came” were

significantly different in the way in which the two exhibitions employed artifacts to

represent ideas. Kimball and Tyler-McGraw found little in the Valentine’s existing collection to include in the exhibition and stated, “almost nothing remained in the city

that reflected daily life for blacks in antebellum Richmond.” Arguing that the close

connections between white and black in Richmond’s urban environment blurred “the

distinctiveness of black and white material culture,” the Valentine curators employed

generic artifacts throughout the exhibition to represent what might have been used by

antebellum African Americans.167 As Lonnie Bunch explained in 1992, the Valentine’s

exhibition curators “decided to reinterpret objects in light of new research in African-

American history. Objects without specific African American documentation, such as

blacksmith tools, were reinterpreted as examples of African-American material culture

because blacksmithing was a trade dominated by slaves and free blacks.”168 This solved a

chief problem in exhibitions about early African Americans discussed earlier in Chapter 1.

Jewell described the use of generic objects by the Valentine as characteristic of their idea

166 Michael Frisch, “The Presentation of Urban History in Big-City Museums,” History Museums in the United States, 61. 167 Both quotes, Kimball and Tyler-McGraw, “Integrating the Interpretation,” 35, 36. 168 Bunch, “Richmond History Project,” 305.

81 driven exhibition program: “Definitely the ideas drive the shows and the artifacts are a

vocabulary in which to express them.” 169 Bunch elaborated on Jewell’s representation,

“A strong idea driven exhibition…can be a liberating force that encourages a museum to

wrestle with richer, more complex issues such as race and class, that more traditional,

collections driven presentations might inhibit. Arguing for the primacy of ideas does not

denigrate or undervalue the importance of the artifacts, rather, it simply changes the

balance of the exhibition equation.” While at the time Bunch found this “a model of

collecting and reinterpretation transferable to other museum projects in black or ethnic

history,” it is interesting to note this is not the approach for collecting he later sanctioned at the Smithsonian Institution’s new National Museum of African American History and

Culture where he serves as the founding director.

To some extent, this approach to material evidence positioned the Valentine against the museum field’s general tendency to fetishize and privilege objects. On the other hand, the use of generic objects within “In Bondage and Freedom” arguably

decontextualized their significance as “real” evidence for African American material life

and the approach weakened the overall interpretation. Kimball and Tyler-McGraw

acknowledged as much when they admitted their “great difficulty…to arrange and label

objects in order to evoke new and complex understandings.”170 By depending on

surrogates with no history attached to them, “In Bondage and Freedom” neglected the authentic object’s ability to embody a powerful idea or in other instances when appropriate, to paraphrase Naguib, to act as a witness.171

169 Stave, 204. 170 Kimball and Tyler-McGraw, “Integrating the Interpretation of the Southern City,” 32. 171 Saphinaz-Amal Naguib, “The One, the Many and the Other: Revisiting Cultural Diversity in Museums of Cultural History,” 5.

Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South

By any calculation, the Museum of the Confederacy appeared unlikely to

incorporate new approaches in southern or social history into its public presentations.

The museum was founded in 1896 by a group of female descendants of Confederate

generals and leaders who banded together to save the residence known as the “White

House” of the Confederacy where President Jefferson Davis had lived and administered the Confederate government for most of the Civil War. Near the State Capital buildings in the same Court End neighborhood as the Valentine, the mansion stood in an area unscathed by the fires that consumed other parts of downtown Richmond during its capture by the Union army in 1865. During most of its long history, the Museum of the

Confederacy consistently framed the past from the perspective of elite white southerners who claimed that their ancestors formed the Confederacy to preserve individual state’s rights, not protect slavery. 172As a result, the museum located within the White House of

the Confederacy remained a shrine to the Lost Cause. It depicted the story of the war

(called the War Between the States in MOC placards and publications) as a gallant,

heroic effort by Confederate soldiers and politicians, supported by their women and their

slaves, against a larger, better equipped but barbarian enemy. Their exhibitions seldom

used the words “slavery” or “slave” or treated the institution as anything more than a

footnote. To paraphrase Tillet in a piece about slavery tourism in Africa, the Museum

172 For information about the MOC’s early history and interpretation, see Reiko Hillyer, “Relics of Reconciliation: The Confederate Museum and Civil War Memory in the new South,” The Public Historian 33(November 2011):35-62, accessed December 28, 2013. Doi:10.1525/tph.2011.33.4.35. See also John M. Coski and Amy R. Feely, “A Monument to Southern Womanhood: The Founding Generation of the Confederate Museum,” in A Woman’s War: Southern Women, Civil War, and the Confederate Legacy, ed. Edward D.C. Campbell Jr. and Kym S. Rice (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 131-164.

83 situated slavery and its legacy “in a bygone past” to “forget it.” Unlike the Valentine, the

MOC identified the Confederate South as a nation and therefore claimed a national focus

for itself, although the museum confined its storyline to the wartime period, 1861-1865.

In creating the MOC, the museum’s female founders collected throughout the

South, and acquired mostly objects related to the Confederacy dating to the Civil War era.

The resulting collection is eclectic: it ranges from examples of Parisian-made gowns

smuggled through the wartime blockade of southern ports to wartime substitutes for

coffee. It contains box after box of military regalia and battlefield flags. Like other U.S.

museum collections, artifacts that belonged to elite whites are overrepresented in MOC’s

holdings; bone fide African American artifacts are few. MOC’s separate Brokenbaugh

Library collection, which does contain important documentary and visual materials related to enslaved African Americans, mostly kept by slaveholders, remained uncatalogued until the late 1990s.

A change in leadership in the early 1980s initiated a long overdue process of modernization. The museum moved out of its headquarters in the Confederate White

House, built an adjacent facility that included exhibition galleries, collections storage, offices, and a research library. It hired its first professional staff. It changed its name from the Confederate Museum to the Museum of the Confederacy. Under the direction of its first professional Director, Edward D.V. Campbell, Jr., whose training included a PhD in southern history from the University of South Carolina, the museum actively began to

“modernize” its mission, which included initiating exhibitions and programs that moved the institution outside its identity as a Confederate shrine. Despite his genteel exterior,

Campbell was frequently outspoken. With respect to slavery, he told an interviewer in

84 1982, “I don’t see how anybody can say the war was not fought over slavery. It is beyond

my comprehension.”173

Under Campbell, the MOC adopted a long-range plan in 1985 that defined the

Museum’s mission to “collect, preserve and interpret aspects of nineteenth century

southern life.”174 As a result, MOC exhibitions started to openly acknowledge that

African Americans, largely enslaved, composed some 40 percent of the South’s

population in 1860. Curators incorporated some African American material into the main permanent exhibition, “The Confederate Years” where a case on slavery featured a whip

and a Charleston slave tag. Campbell recalled that at least one Board member protested

the inclusion of the whip identified in a label as one used to punish slaves and told him

“those things couldn’t be” but the objects remained on view. Eventually a small showcase

exhibition entitled “The People of the Confederacy,” presented a more nonthreatening

selection of slave-made objects---a basket, some toys, and a child’s chair--- from the

museum’s collections. In 1986, MOC received its first NEH funding for an interpretive

exhibition in the White House called “Victory in Defeat: Jefferson Davis and the Lost

Cause” that interrogated the Lost Cause and its resurrection of Jefferson Davis and

received praise from southern historians. Nonetheless, nearly all museum visitors

remained white tourists visiting Richmond who had an interest in the Civil War. Few

city residents, black or white, bothered much with the museum. Most considered MOC a

stagnant and old-fashioned period piece.

In 1986 Elizabeth Lux, Campbell’s successor, made plans for an extensive

restoration of the White House of the Confederacy building that included a new historic

173 Tim Wheeler, “Of Human Bondage: And other evidence that Tara wasn’t all it was cracked up to be,” Virginia Magazine, October 24, 1982, copy courtesy of John Coski. 174 Quoted in Naile, 21.

85 furnishing plan. The MOC recognized that the museum told only a small part of the

house’s story to the public. Subsequent research for the plan raised new questions about who had worked in the house for the Davis family during his presidency. Unsubstantiated stories had circulated through the African American community in Richmond for many years that the mother of early 20th-century bank president Maggie L.Walker, Elizabeth

Draper, worked for the Davis family and spied for the Union. This quickly evolved into a

plan to explore the possibility of organizing an interpretive exhibition on slavery in the

White House displayed in the adjoining museum when the house restoration was

completed. A public relations consultant hired by the MOC recommended that museum

“mount a major, definitive, scholarly, even-handed exhibition on slavery.” 175 The MOC

board approved an exploration of the project in the hopes that it would “foster a

constructive dialogue about a sensitive and still controversial issue, and create a bridge

between its white constituency and the black community.”176 Based on their experience

with the statewide “Share of Honour” exhibition project some years before that I curated,

which MOC participated in as a lender and hosted a complimentary satellite exhibition,

Lux hired me in February 1987 to prepare a preliminary report about the topic.

Lux set no firm parameters for the study, but my impression was that the MOC

clearly wanted a project comparable to Valentine’s “In Bondage and Freedom,” which

had just opened yet without duplicating it. During my association with MOC, I perceived

strong resentment among museum staff, some of whom were former Valentine

175 My knowledge of the 1970s and early 1980s MOC history comes from conversations with Kip Campbell, Elizabeth Lux, and Tucker H. Hill in preparation for the several NEH grants that we wrote for “Before Freedom Came.” See also John M. Coski, “Fifteenth Anniversary Puts Landmark Exhibit in Perspective,” The Museum of the Confederacy Magazine (Spring 2006): 13-15. John Coski organized the archival material for the BFC Archives in VI-19 and VI-20, Eleanor S. Brockenbrough Library, MOC. 176 Board minutes quoted in Coski, “Before Freedom Came Project Summary,” BFC Archives, VI-19, Brockenbrough Library.

86 employees, towards Jewell and his methods. Jewell showed little empathy with

Confederate history, going as far as organizing a small exhibition titled “Why the South

Lost the Civil War.” More influential on MOC were other important African American history projects in Virginia then receiving positive press. At their plantation site, Carter’s

Grove, some twelve miles outside of the Historic Area, The Colonial Williamsburg

Foundation (hereafter CW) was carefully constructing a slave quarter. Since the 1980s

CW’s interpretive staff included a separate department of African American interpretation that helped to create and run African American programming in the main town site. The recreated slave quarter represented the culmination of research undertaken by CW archeologists, architectural historians, and historians about the site as well as eighteenth-century plantation slavery in the Chesapeake region in general.177 At both

Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and George Washington’s Mount Vernon, two nationally

prominent Virginia historic house museums, staff were studying the lives of their slaves

including utilizing historical archaeology.

Through “BFC” planning, I wondered whether an institution whose name is

synonymous with racism for so many could plan a credible project that would attempt to

deal with slavery in an evenhanded way and at the same time engage a diverse

audience.178 More than any other, this essential question plagued the project from the

177 See W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 297-298; Edward A. Chappell, “Social Responsibility and the American History Museum,” Winterthur Portfolio 24 (Winter 1989): 247-265, accessed February 6, 2014, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1181238. Chappell is the head of architectural research at CW. 178 I served as the project director, chief organizer and guest curator, but a team of individuals at the MOC led by Tucker Hill, then Deputy Director for Interpretation, worked closely with me on the project. They included Malinda Collier, the Registrar; Howard Hendricks, the Curator; Robin Reed, Director of Education; and Guy Swanson, Director of the Library and Archives. During the project’s implementation phase, John Coski became the MOC’s historian and helped to edit the exhibition text. The MOC leadership changed over the course of “Before Freedom Came.” Elizabeth Lux resigned from the Museum’s directorship in 1989 and Lou Gorr became the executive director in 1990. Hill, the former State

87 beginning. The feasibility study completed in June 1987, included summaries of

discussions about exhibiting slavery with MOC board and staff as well as incorporated

the results from additional meetings with individuals (mostly suggested by the museum)

who represented different constituencies and perspectives in Richmond. Many white and

black Richmonders that I interviewed expressed great discomfort with MOC undertaking

anything to do with slavery because the subject itself was so highly charged, although

many conceded---albeit reluctantly--- that it was not inappropriate given the museum’s mission and history. At a meeting with Phillip Morris Corporation, the white man

employed as the head of their local grant office commented that American slavery was

comparable to the Holocaust but we should not discuss it in an exhibition. He then called

into the office his female African American employees and asked them on the spot what

they thought about discussing slavery at the Museum of the Confederacy. From this

incident and others, I discovered that the Museum of the Confederacy was a tough sell---

period. Some interviewees expressed discomfort with my background as a European

American, but there was more to it. In the former Capitol of the Confederacy, where

many African Americans continued to live in poverty and disadvantage while memories

of and monuments to the Confederacy were venerated, the mention of the word “slavery”

brought an almost palpable expression of angst and pain. From across the political

spectrum black and white residents said in our interviews--- do not open up these wounds.

They have not really healed.

At the same time, I researched other exhibition projects about slavery as well as

located potential museum collections for loans. I met with Gregg Kimball at the

Preservation Officer for Virginia, had curated “In Victory and Defeat” and handled all MOC publications. He served as the museum’s principal project manager for “Before Freedom Came” and remained an MOC staff member until his death in 2010.

88 Valentine and others in the museum community to discuss exhibiting slavery. Through my research, I found few museums had attempted exhibitions about southern slavery.

Through both inquiry letter and published sources, I surveyed museums throughout the

South as well as elsewhere in the United States, France, and Britain for materials related to slavery. While not exhaustive or complete, the research verified that objects---although widely scattered and sometimes with unreliable provenance---existed to tell the enslaved story. Perhaps most critically, my investigation indicated that despite intense research and publication by academic historians about African American life and southern history for several decades, few in the public were aware of their work. Outside of identifying key black individuals---Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman, to name two famous examples---white and black Americans knew little about slavery or slave life. Among the public, interest in slavery remained mostly negative. A survey taken in the early 1990s confirmed that although 81% of whites interviewed felt that slavery had little or nothing to do with them, some 73 percent of the same group acknowledged slavery’s importance but felt it only relevant to African Americans. Most African Americans interviewees either admitted to being ashamed of slavery or claimed to be disinterested in it.179

Because of all this, despite the real reservations expressed in Richmond, I

recommended to the MOC that they attempt to secure funding to plan an exhibition about

antebellum slavery---and they agreed. My presentation to MOC Board underscored that

the exhibition must be critical of slaveholders. It needed to discuss the brutal punishments

and cruel treatment endured by enslaved African American men, women, and children,

including miscegenation and sexual exploitation, which were commonplace. I was

179 Quoted in Lonnie Bunch, testimony before Committee on House Administration Hearing on “The Construction of the United States Capitol: Recognizing the Contributions of Slave Labor,” November 7, 2007, 3-4.

89 apprehensive about undertaking the project but recognized the opportunity to organize a

potentially far-reaching exhibition about such a critical topic.180

In 1987, I wrote a planning grant with the assistance of Tucker Hill that received

funding from NEH’s Division of Museums and Public Programs. It proposed organizing

a large traveling exhibition about slavery in the South from the period after the American

Revolution through to the beginning of the Civil War. The exhibition would consist

largely of loaned objects from many different collections, although the MOC would

contribute material where appropriate. The NEH award of $125,000, brought with it

national recognition of the project’s historical integrity and officially began the

undertaking that eventually resulted in the exhibition, programs, and a publication.181

We constructed the entire endeavor around an underlying “big idea;” to make the vital

contributions made by enslaved African Americans to American culture known to a

wider audience and to make clear to museum visitors that the roots of racism today date to attitudes instilled by slavery. 182 As proposed to NEH, the exhibition promised to draw

a diverse, multicultural audience to the Museum of the Confederacy for the first time.

Equally important to the project was the MOC’s stated hope to demonstrate to white

audiences that this was their history too.

180 The report is available in the BFC Archives, Brockenbrough Library, VI-19. This chapter is informed by extensive project files still in my personal possession (duplicates also available in the BFC Archives) as well as two unpublished papers presented about the project---one for the American Association of Museums annual meeting (Baltimore, 1992) and the other at the Southern Historical Conference (New Orleans, 1995). I’ve consulted a third paper about the exhibition, also unpublished, which focused on the archaeological content, co-authored with Theresa A. Singleton, and given by me at a Winterthur Conference on historical archaeology in 1991. 181 The project was called “African American Life in the Antebellum South” and also “Waiting for Freedom” (which no one liked) until about six months before it opened. Tucker Hill suggested “Before Freedom Came” as a title. 182 This phrase coined by exhibition developer Beverley Serrell has come to mean that the underlying premise of the exhibition can be reduced to a sentence or two that is readily apparent to the museum audience (Serrell, “The Big Idea,” The Exhibitionist 12 (1994): 4).

90 Both “Before Freedom Came’s” grants received high marks from NEH peer

reviewers. The identity of panelists remains unknown but a reviewer for the “Before

Freedom Came” planning grant was John Fleming, the now retired director of the

Cincinnati Museum System, former director of the Freedom Center Underground

Railroad Museum, and then director of the National Museum of African American

History at Wilberforce University. He recalled at a 2006 AAM session on museum

interpretations of slavery that reading the grant erased his original apprehensions because the project description was so neutral, detailed and comprehensive. Fleming’s museum eventually served as a venue for the MOC traveling exhibition.183

The NEH planning grant began in 1988. The funding allowed the project staff roughly two years to expand the initial project and bring it closer to fruition. A subsequent implementation grant for $250,000, received in 1991 from NEH, supported the exhibition’s design and physical fabrication, including completing other critical aspects such as loan negotiations with lenders.

I followed the customary avenues for exhibition research. 184 We sent a mass

mailing composed of a carefully crafted letter that mentioned the NEH grant, listed the

historical consultants involved, and stated the project’s goals. The letter emphasized,

“the project is not interested in offering a justification for slavery.” It garnered a strong

response, with more than 60% of the institutions/individuals contacted responding in

detail about possible objects for the exhibition in their collections or suggesting other

183 John Fleming, “Introductory remarks,” “Interpreting Slavery” panel, AAM Annual meeting, Boston, Massachusetts (May 1-5, 2006). I was in the audience and heard his presentation. 184 I searched many repositories for original objects as well as related historical materials, then followed up leads and traveled to collections across the South. In the days before email existed, I corresponded with museums and private collectors about what they owned related to slavery. Research through the American Association of Museum’s Museum Directory and the National Union catalogue helped to identify further other likely museum and historical society collections that might contain appropriate material.

91 sources. More than a few institutions, including the Historic New Orleans Collection

(which became a substantial lender to the exhibition), for example, responded that the

letter was so persuasive that they felt compelled to participate in the project. On the other

hand, some museums with Confederate-era collections, Lost Cause-inspired interpretation, or administered by the Daughters of the Confederacy or similar groups responded negatively or even with minor hostility. The director of Beauvoir, a historic house museum in Mississippi that commemorates the life of Jefferson Davis, scrawled across the original letter, which he returned, a hand-written note that stated, “I do hope you will portray black life in the antebellum South truthfully, avoiding the false stereotypes which Roots, Uncle Remus and Uncle Tom’s Cabin have presented to the public.”185 Some white museum professionals expressed concerns that the exhibition

would focus too heavily on brutality and punishment and portray slaveholders as evil.

During the early planning period, the exhibition’s thematic content took shape

with the participation of seven academic consultants. They were historians Drew Gilpin

Faust, Charles Joyner, David Goldfield, and Deborah Grey White who each had written

about southern and/or African American history in a path breaking way; cultural

anthropologist and folklorist John Vlach (curator of the earlier exhibition, “The Afro-

American Tradition in the Decorative Arts,” discussed in Chapter 2); historical archaeologist Theresa Singleton (a pioneer in the area of plantation archaeology); and architectural historian Edward Chappell, the principal architect for the planning and construction of the Carter’s Grove Slave Quarter project at Colonial Williamsburg. 186

185 VI-19, BFC Archives, Brockenbrough Library. 186 See for example, Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Charles Joyner, Down By the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986); David Goldfield,

92 The consultants signed onto the project during the preparation of the first NEH grant.

Only Drew Faust had a prior relationship with the MOC. Their collective knowledge kept the project focused on the larger ideas and context that informed current historiography.

At the first formal meeting, the consultants agreed that the project should also produce a full-length illustrated publication based on its work. Six out of seven consultants agreed to contribute essays, which ultimately provided the interpretive basis for the exhibition’s themes. The essays draw on each consultant’s own seminal work about southern slavery as well as offered a historiographical summary of the field as it

stood in 1989. Together, project staff and the consultants also discussed educational and

public programs that might accompany the exhibition, including a symposium following

the opening.

This first meeting with the consultants also set the historical perimeters for the

exhibition. In order to find enough material for the exhibition and the book, they agreed

that we should cast a longer time frame, include a larger geographic area, and interpret

slavery more generally (in part to be distinct from “In Bondage and Freedom” at the

Valentine which we visited as a group). With their approval, the project “formalized” our

intension to focus on the entire South between 1790 and 1865 (which stretched the

antebellum period frame both backwards and forwards in time). While the consultants

agreed that the project should pay particular attention to the South’s major growing

regions where most enslaved African Americans worked, whether on large plantations or

small farms, they recommended that the exhibition show that slavery was more than hard

Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Deborah Grey White, Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985); John M. Vlach, Charleston Blacksmith: The Work of Philip Simmons (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981); and Theresa Singleton, The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life (New York: Academic Press, 1985).

93 field labor. Consequently, the distinctive experience that enslaved African Americans

found in southern cities like Charleston, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Richmond became

a principal exhibition component (accompanied by a related catalogue essay written by

David Goldfield). In advising that the project include interpretive and historical material related to free African Americans, a population that museum visitors were likely unaware of, the consultants added that their ambiguous status might suggest to the audience the ways in which race defined ordinary daily life for blacks and whites in the antebellum south. Because some antebellum free blacks owned slaves who were not family members, their inclusion in the exhibition demonstrated the extent to which slavery’s tentacles reached into all southern society.

The consultants identified the exhibition themes selected for “Before Freedom

Came” as important to our understanding of the forces that shaped African-American culture in the south before the Civil War. Sections focused on community, family, gender, work, cultural values, resistance, material life, the urban experience, relationships between blacks and whites, and concluded with a look at the Civil War that concentrated on the black experience as Confederate conscripts, Federal soldiers, contrabands, nurses, laundresses, and spies for the Union.187 Taking its cues from the historiography of

slavery and slave life then emerging, the exhibition sought to balance its story between

the hardships of slavery and African American achievements under the system---without

making exaggerated claims for slave agency.

Because “Before Freedom Came” centered around the diverse experience of

African American slaves themselves, it said little directly about the institution of slavery

187 The two NEH narratives describe the exhibition themes in detail, V1.19, BFC Archives, Brockenbrough Library.

94 per se and the national political argument over it that consumed many white nineteenth-

century politicians, slaveholders, and abolitionists in the decades leading up to the Civil

War. Many visitors when surveyed at MOC responded positively to the exhibition’s

attempt to focus on real people.188 Even so, “Before Freedom Came” underscored the

larger national issues when they directly intruded into people’s lives or shaped their individual experience. The exhibition incorporated objects, images and didactic

information related to the intrastate slave trade and the dramatic population dispersals it created beginning in the late 1790s. In another instance, maps, together with a model of a cotton gin, discussed the agricultural changes precipitated by tobacco’s decline and cotton’s ascendency that moved enslaved workers from the Upper to the Lower South.

However, little in the exhibition text identified slavery as the leading cause of the

Civil War, a choice deliberately enforced by the museum, which admittedly was problematic. While MOC embraced change, it was not yet ready to make that admission openly and potentially alienate a core constituency. Through discussion of events such as

Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831 as well as the enactment of black codes and other legal

strictures against African Americans beginning in the early 1800s, the exhibition,

however, revealed the mounting paranoia and suspicion with which many southern whites viewed free and enslaved blacks in decades leading up to the war.

Although Kimball and Tyler-McGraw argued in “In Bondage and Freedom,” that ideas were more central to telling African American history than “things,” I hoped to create an exhibition that would powerfully invoke slavery through surviving evidence of

188 Visitor surveys, summer 1991, VI-20, BFC Archives, Brockenbrough Library. This focus on individual experience resulted in some critical comments from academic reviewers. See, for example, Gregg D. Kimball, “Exhibit Review: Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South, 1790- 1865,” American Historical Association Perspectives 30 (May-June 1992): 14-15.

95 enslaved material culture. Many museum experts and historians believed---and stated to

me during the project---that little or no African American material culture had survived slavery. As Fath Ruffins observes in her work concerning the long debate over the establishment of an African American museum on the national Mall, “The sense that

Black history had been lost was enormously powerful.” 189 In truth, the evidence had

been widely dispersed, and exhibition materials came from a variety of collections mostly

in the United States but included repositories in France and England. Project consultants

John Vlach, Edward Chappell, and Theresa Singleton, each of whom was knowledgeable about different aspects of slave material culture, helped MOC find exhibition materials.

Even with their expert assistance, the task of locating exhibition materials proved formidable. Although access to museum collections has improved with computerization and the Internet, collection catalogues were seldom accessible to researchers at the time.

Even with access, I found African American objects in museum collections are poorly catalogued or misidentified. Existing documentation is fragmentary. Few catalogs detail histories of artifacts that hold plantation histories of manufacture or use.190 Sometimes

researchers made bogus assumptions. For example, The Museum of Early Southern

Decorative Arts survey of southern collections in the 1980s routinely attributed southern furniture if crudely constructed to anonymous enslaved makers. Regrettably, even when a

legitimate African American provenance accompanied an artifact, records rarely included

189 Fath Davis Ruffins, “Culture Wars Won and Lost, Part II: The National African-American Museum Project,” Radical History Review 70 (Winter 1998): 83, accessed July 14, 2014, doi:10.1215.01636545- 1998-70-78. 190 For example, during “A Woman’s War,” a subsequent MOC project, I found slave-made items in their collection, including a spectacular group of plantation textile samples created in South Carolina during the Civil War not correctly identified in the museum catalogue (but described in an accompanying document) and therefore were not located for “Before Freedom Came.”

96 the maker’s name or he/she was identified only by an untraceable slavery moniker like

“Uncle Dave.”

Due to the nature of slavery, few enslaved African Americans left surviving

written records. By necessity, the project turned to major manuscript collections that

elaborated the enslaved world from the perspective of southern whites. This included

plantation account books that enumerated lists of slaves, organized by sex, age, and

family group; plats that mapped the locations of white and black housing and work areas;

legal documents that manumitted enslaved individuals who were sometimes the children

of slaveholders, and other documents such as travel passes for slaves and free black

freedom papers. The exhibition featured rare examples of letters from ex-slaves written

to former owners seeking missing family members after the Civil War, or biographical

such as James Carter who described his escape to Philadelphia in the 1780s from Landon

Carter’s Tidewater, Virginia, plantation.191

The exhibition also utilized illustrated sketches created by traveling nineteenth-

century professional artists or talented amateurs as well as other visual representations of

southern plantation or city life that included African Americans as picturesque

embellishments to scenes. For example, a rare (one copy known) engraving from the

Historic New Orleans Collection illustrated an antebellum New Orleans street scene that

included an African American woman wearing a pronged slave collar in the background.

In cases where the artist caricatured African American appearance or behavior, the

exhibition text tried to make clear to the audience not only the bias present in these

images but also to point out the ways that this material nevertheless offered important

191 James Carter, “An Account of His Suffering in Slavery,” 1807. Manuscript Collections, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

97 evidence for the exhibition’s ideas. Although photography only became more widespread

late in the period, photographic portraits of enslaved African Americans survive, usually

commissioned by their slaveholders and frequently posed with their children. The

exhibition drew extensively on private collections and museum photographic collections

that ranged from formal daguerreotype portraits to the wartime pictures of newly freed

individuals by photographers like New Hampshire’s Henry P. Moore, assigned to the

Union Army when it occupied parts of coastal South Carolina and Georgia in the early

1860s. Together with a smaller number taken by Timothy O’Sullivan, Moore’s images

offer up a vivid record of the Sea Islands wartime contraband experience.192

For the most part, the individuals and collections that I contacted generously

shared research files and made recommendations about other avenues to pursue. Jon

Kukla, then Director of the Historic New Orleans Foundation, lobbied his board to loan

the MOC an unprecedented number of “treasures” from their collection including John

Antrobus’s massive painting of a slave funeral in Louisiana. At the same time, others

who objected to the project refused their help. On a research trip to Historic Stagville in

Durham, North Carolina, their coordinator of African American programs refused to

meet with me because the MOC sponsored the project and I was white.

Although NEH funding largely supported the project, the MOC, however,

encountered difficulty in raising the additional funds needed for the project in Richmond,

and dipped into its own resources to pay for museum programming and publishing the

book. With a $50,000 subvention from MOC, The University Press of Virginia published

192 In his review of the publication (which included many images used in the exhibition), Gerald Sorin praised the way that the illustrations “capture the reader’s attention and imagination.” (Sorin, “Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South,” Journal of the Early Republic 12 (Spring 1992): 139, accessed February 6, 2014, doi:10.2307/3124007.

98 and distributed the companion book. In addition to essays written by the project’s consultants and heavily illustrated with items drawn from the exhibition, the book included a forward, detailed bibliography and checklist.193 In 1992, the American Library

Association named Before Freedom Came as among the year’s ten notable non-fiction

books, and it won an award from the Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Bigotry

and Human Rights for contributions in the study of human rights that same year.

MOC understood that it was essential for the exhibition’s positive reception that

the Richmond community endorsed the project on some level but the museum preceded

cautiously. Not surprising, given the institution’s uneven history, some local groups worried that the project would end up as an elaborate justification for slavery that the museum tricked them into endorsing.194 NEH’s funding (and the implied validation it carried) had little effect in Richmond. Although the Museum continued its efforts to bring people to the table in the months before the exhibition opened with slide talks and presentations, its position as a Confederate history museum put it firmly on the city’s margins. Hiring a community advisor proved to be the winning strategy that helped guarantee the project’s success in Richmond (or at the very least, prevented protests and pickets). Janine Bell who coordinated the museum’s efforts with local African Americans helped the MOC plan appropriate outreach and programming to accompany the exhibition. She organized a large African American summer “heritage” festival called

“Family Day” that MOC continued to sponsor for more than a decade. MOC public relations staff mounted a local and national publicity campaign that resulted in several

193 Former MOC director, Edward D.V. Campbell, Jr., editor of publications at the Library of Virginia, agreed to serve as the historical editor. MOC staff members Tucker Hill and John Coski undertook the volume’s copyediting. The book remains in print, and in 2006, MOC undertook its fourth printing. 194 For example, we gave multiple presentations to members of Richmond’s Urban League in an unsuccessful attempt to garner their approval.

99 national magazine stories, two features in the Washington Post, a story on United Press

International distributed nationally, as well as coverage in many Virginia papers. There

were at least 10 scholarly reviews published of the publication and/or book.195

Finally, nine months before the opening, the MOC (working with several key

board members) assembled a large group of ad hoc community advisors made up of black

and white Richmonders. The group included local academics, a television news anchor,

clergy, and other leaders who advised the project as it entered the final months.

Convening this group sooner would have benefited the entire project but their comments

influenced exhibition elements. Designers added listening stations because community

members expressed concerns that the exhibition did not include enough material that

reflected the everyday violence and punishment that many slaves experienced at white

hands.

Additionally, MOC staff members underwent extensive media training in

preparation for the exhibition opening, assisted by a Richmond public relations firm that

donated their services. With their guidance, the project developed a series of simple

questions that we guessed visitors as well as press might ask visitor services staff and

discussed possible answers. Some key examples: “Was slavery wrong?” “Was there any

justification for slaveholding?” and “Did slavery cause the Civil War?” Most MOC staff

members had never fielded these questions before (except, perhaps the latter) and these

sessions translated primarily into helpful sensitivity training. Everyone who participated

in the training emerged with the same set of agreed upon answers that the group had

brainstormed together. As the opening approached, community committee member,

195 Sarah Booth Conroy, “The Captive Nation of Slaves At the Museum of the Confederacy, African American Life, Before Freedom Came,” Washington Post, August 11, 1991, VI-20, “BFC” Archives.

100 Philip Schwarz, a historian at Virginia Commonwealth University who had published

extensive about slavery, disputed negative comments about the exhibition made by a

member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in letters published in the local

newspaper.196 Of course, not everyone who worked at MOC expressed enthusiasm about

the project in the days and weeks before the opening. The participation of the community

advisory group together with public relations training helped the interpretive staff feel

more comfortable with an exhibition about slavery.

“Before Freedom Came” opened in Richmond, July 12 1991, and consisted of some three hundred items borrowed from more than 70 lenders. The exhibition

highlighted some eighty archaeological artifacts representing seventeen urban and rural

sites from Florida to Maryland. Scholars now recognize the critical importance of African

American archaeology to the study of enslaved material culture. 197 Drawing on the work

of historian Paul Gilroy, John Vlach suggests understanding African American material

culture “as a transnational, even transcultural phenomenon that has defined itself through

a complex set of interactions over time.”198 The archaeological materials shed light on

foodways, living conditions, medical treatments, and provided intriguing evidence of

cultural beliefs. Archaeological artifacts included small brass figas (charms) shaped like

a clenched fist recovered at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage Plantation outside Nashville; a

carved head of a cane together with a conjurer’s kit (bones, beads, and crystals protected

196 HV Traywick, “Hopes Museum Will Dispel Myths, Letter to the Editor, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 10 June 1991 and Schwarz, 16 June 1991, VI.20, BFC Archives. 197 For a complete list of the objects, see Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South exhibition checklist (Richmond: MOC, 1992). For a discussion the role that historical archaeology may play in changing our understanding of African American material culture, see Theresa A. Singleton, “Facing the Challenges of a Public African-American Archaeology,” Historical Archaeology 31 (1997): 146-152, accessed February 6, 2014, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25616556. 198 John Michael Vlach, “Studying African American Artifacts: Some Background for the Winterthur Conference, ‘Race and Ethnicity in American Material Life,’ ” Winterthur Portfolio 33 (Winter 1998): 213, accessed February 6, 2014, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1215181.

101 by a case made from part of an iron pot) from Jordan Plantation near Houston, Texas; an

amulet carved from a raccoon’s penis bone from Mount Vernon; pierced coins, blue glass

beads and cowry shells from a number of sites; and a complete and partial carved ebony

ring from Monticello.199 The exhibition script interpreted these objects with testimony

collected from ex-slaves during the 1930s Federal Writer’s project, which reveal, among

other examples, the power that enslaved African Americans conferred on charms and

amulets, which they tied on strings and worn around the ankle or the neck. The extensive

use of oral histories in the text created a dialogic component within the exhibition that conveyed on the artifacts, most of which were small, a status that visitors might miss without close examination. In particular, many African American visitors expressed---in surveys and gallery observations---a kind of visceral filiopietistic reaction to the archaeological artifacts, particularly those that appeared as tangible evidence of African heritage. They recognized and frequently marveled at the object makers’ creativity,

resilience, inventiveness, and the like. In the exhibition, these objects seemed to serve as

powerful markers of identity for the exhibition’s black audience, and tellingly that

identity was located outside the United States.

Perhaps the most remarkable object in the exhibition was a Civil War-era carved ivory bust that portrayed a woman named Nora August, now owned by the Sea Island

Company, a land development company that holds real estate in coastal Georgia including the luxury hotel, the Cloisters. The Sea Island Company purchased “Nora” from a New York City auction house in the mid-1970s because a detailed history carved on the sculpture’s neck tied her directly to Retreat Plantation on St. Simon’s, now the site

199 Interestingly a similar charm from the same time has recently been uncovered at Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson’s rural retreat near Lynchburg, Virginia as well as additional examples at the Hermitage.

102 of a golf course and country club they owned. Until “Before Freedom Came” plucked her

out of obscurity, Nora occupied a glass showcase outside the golf shop. The inscription

on Nora’s neck represents her as an individual sold in the St. Augustine (Florida) Slave

Mart. By the time of the Union occupation of the Sea Islands, which begins in 1862, the

inscription identifies her as living at Retreat Plantation near to a Union Army contraband

camp; at the time of her portrait, Nora likely worked in a Union field hospital in nearby

Darien, Georgia. An antislavery medallion also carved on the sculpture’s neck suggests

the artist’s familiarity with abolition imagery and implies a possible identify as a Union

soldier (or perhaps a sailor familiar with scrimshaw) who likely was a patient there (the

portrait is dedicated to the hospital’s nurses). If Nora’s detailed history is not exceptional

enough, her 360-degree portrait in the round includes an amazing rendering of her hair,

sculpted with locks twisted in a star shape and tied with string, a style not seen in any

contemporary photographs of enslaved women but thought to be an African survival or

adaptation.200

Working with the PRD Design Firm in Fairfax, Virginia, the core team

deliberately chose a conventional exhibition design for “Before Freedom Came,” a

contrast to “In Bondage and Freedom’s” modern look. The relatively small galleries were crammed with materials. As Jim Horton noted in his 1992 review, density constituted the

200 My extensive efforts over the years to document Nora’s history have not resulted in anything definitive. An examination of pictures of the bust by Mary Jo Arnoldi, at the National Museum of Natural History, confirmed that her hairstyle is likely African in derivation but Arnoldi could not pinpoint the style to any particular tribe or area of Africa. Securing Nora for the cover of the book and as a centerpiece of the exhibition took an extraordinary effort that involved the assistance of Linda King, the director of the St. Simon’s Historical Society (who brought Nora to my attention initially) and John Vlach. Vlach wrote an evaluation of the piece, which convinced the owners of her historical importance. King spoke personally to the owners on our behalf and hand carried the statue to Richmond. Sitting alone in a pedestal case near the opening of the exhibition, she drew the attention of visitors who marveled at her intricate beauty and story.

103 exhibition’s “greatest strength and greatest weakness,” although he found the exhibition

“powerful and imaginative.”201 In discussions with the exhibition designers over the

course of the project, MOC rejected composite characters (made up as opposed to real

enslaved people), a reproduction auction block, and vignette scenes. It seemed important

to avoid Disney like fiction and make the exhibition as “authentic” as possible. In

addition to the objects, “Before Freedom Came” relied on photographic enlargements

(some post slavery), color, ambient music, and silkscreen designs based on African

textiles.

The exhibition opened with a short introductory text that accompanied a formal

painting of an 1860 Virginia slave auction by the artist Lefebvre Cranstone. Nearby, next

to a case that contained a collection of rare daguerreotype portraits of enslaved African

Americans, text and materials supplied content that related the establishment of southern

slavery in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The exhibition turned the corner

and moved into the 19th century South, highlighting cultural survivals, family and community life, and religious experience. A third gallery focused on the variety of work

undertaken by slaves and their living conditions. A section on urban life included an area

that concentrated on the different ways that individuals obtained their freedom. The final

large gallery featured relationships between African Americans and whites; resistance to

slavery; and the Civil War.

Because white slaveholders created most written materials that appeared in

“Before Freedom Came,” we sought to find the voices of the slaves themselves through

excerpts selected from the Federal Writers’ Project interviews that appeared displayed on

201 James O. Horton, “Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South,” The Public Historian 14 (Spring 1992): 110-111, accessed February 6, 2014, doi: 10.2307/3378287.

104 the walls and through audio dramatization at listening stations. “If you want Negro

History,” one ex-slave commented, “you will have to get it from somebody who wore the

shoe.”202 Visitors listened to selections from the narratives read aloud by actors recruited

from the African American Interpretive Program at Colonial Williamsburg. The excerpts

personalized the exhibition for visitors while elaborating on the complex relationships

between blacks and whites including rape and miscegenation. Exhibition text pointed out

that these memories of slavery came from individuals who were young children in

slavery, recorded long after the event, and informed visitors of historians concerns about

the veracity of the narratives. After internal discussion, we decided to leave these

selections “as is,” which meant that they included language that might be offensive to

modern audiences---the use of the word “nigger,” for example---but surprisingly no

audience members complained. 203

According to MOC visitor surveys, the audience commented positively on this

device. They connected these “imperfect” but remarkable oral histories with the

compelling large-scale portraits of African Americans on the gallery walls. In a review of

the accompanying book, a reviewer commented positively on the same images’ ability to

demonstrate “pride, determination and resolve.” Many visitors also liked the long tape of

work songs that played in the section related to work, which also helped to enliven the

exhibition.204

202 The Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Accounts of Negro Ex-Slaves. Comp. Ophelia Settle Egypt (Nashville: Fisk University Social Science Institute, 1945), 24. 203 I selected Ex-Slave narrative excerpts from George P. Rawick’s multi-volume collection, The American Slave: a Composite Biography (Westport, Ct: Greenwood Press, 1972) that reproduces them and also used compilations including Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves, ed. Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976). Also, I benefited from conversations with John Vlach about the narratives. 204 MOC audience surveys of “Before Freedom Came,” 1991, VI-20, “BFC Project Archives, Brockenbrough Library. The quote comes from Alonzo T. Stephens, “Before Freedom Came” book review,

105 Because the written material was extensive, “Before Freedom Came” perhaps

created the dreaded “book on the wall” exhibition effect. Jim Horton’s review jokingly

suggested that diligent visitors who read all the exhibition text deserved college credit for

their efforts. Yet MOC museum guards reported that many visitors read all the labels; on

one occasion, I watched one father who read each label aloud to his young children. It

appeared that many families used the exhibition as an opportunity to teach their children

something about slavery. 205 The number of black and white visitors that the exhibition

attracted indicated that both groups wanted a context for better understanding slavery.

After Richmond, “Before Freedom Came” traveled in 1992, to the McKissick

Museum in Columbia, South Carolina, and the National Afro-American Museum and

Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio. John Fleming, the National Afro-American

Museum’s director, first been introduced to the project as an NEH panelist, secured the

exhibition for his museum, which is located at a historically black university. Following

this, a Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) sponsored version

of “Before Freedom Came” (that followed the interpretation very closely and included a

selection of same artifacts used in the original exhibition) toured the United States

between 1993 and 1996 with a smaller panel exhibition available for loan until 1999.

No protests took place in any of the participating museums. Calls by local activist

Sa’ad El-Amin’s for a boycott of the Richmond exhibition never materialized. The

exhibition received overwhelmingly positive local and national press coverage including

Journal of Negro History 78(Winter 1993): 28, accessed February 7, 2014, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2717742. Interestingly, Shane White who reviewed the book favorably, but did not see the exhibition, commented on the slavery photographs ability to convey a “sense of difference or otherness.” See White, “Digging up the African-American Past: Historical Archaeology, Photography and Slavery,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 11 (July 1992): 46, accessed February 7, 2014, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41053630. 205 Horton noticed this too. See his review, 112. Alonzo Stephens suggested that the book’s illustrations were a teaching tool for families (30).

106 a review in Americana magazine that characterized the exhibition as an “unromantic,

uncompromising view of the lives of slaves and free blacks.”206 It dramatically increased

museum visitation at the MOC. Nearly 91,000 visitors saw the exhibition at the Museum

of the Confederacy during a six-month period: about 40% of those individuals were

African Americans. Until “Before Freedom Came,” the MOC’s educational programs

attracted mostly white children from the counties surrounding Richmond. Because the

museum lacked credibility with the local African American community, the mostly

minority Richmond City school population stayed away from the museum by choice.

During the show’s duration, educational programs for school-age children at the MOC were completely booked and nearly 38% of those children came from the Richmond public school system. Public programs held in conjunction with the exhibition included the previously mentioned Family Day, cosponsored with Richmond’s Black History

Museum, attracted an audience of 3000 people. For the first time in the museum’s history,

African American first person character interpreters brought Jefferson Davis’ slaves and servants to life on the grounds and inside the White House of the Confederacy.

Visitor surveys indicated that both white and African American visitors alike criticized the exhibition for failing to show enough brutality; although overall these percentages were small--- only 2.61 percent of all visitors surveyed. About 1% of white visitors thought that the exhibition unjustifiably critical of whites: more than a few whites

wanted the exhibition to point out more examples of benevolence or friendship that

existed between whites and African Americans. Recent studies of exhibitions show that

visitors bring their own conceptions and memories to an exhibition, and they usually look

206 Ed Grews, “On Exhibit: Southern Blacks: Before Freedom Came,” Americana, June 1991. VI-20, BFC Archives. More than 300 articles about “BFC” appeared in the press while the exhibition was in Richmond.

107 for confirmation of their ideas, rather than challenges to them. Museums do not yet have hard data to indicate whether exhibitions are capable of truly transforming deeply held beliefs among their publics, although visitors sometimes make comments that suggest this can happen.207 Several visitors to the Richmond exhibition wrote the museum directly:

I am not sure what combination of events caused my reaction to your exhibit…but I found myself standing in the middle of it crying. I’ve seen attempts at such a collection many times before, and as an African American woman, I have objectively viewed those collections with a cool distance. Such was not the case on Saturday, September 21st. I am trying to figure out just what moved me so much on that afternoon. Perhaps it was the…gigantic effort to collect so many artifacts from around the country. Or, perhaps it was the music playing almost in a distance the way the slave voices must have sounded from out in the fields. Or, perhaps it was the awed, respectful silence of the other visitors, both Black and White, as they made their way through the winding exhibit. I think, finally, it must have been the faces of all those magnificent slaves…with hopes for a future they would never see. Whichever is the case, it is an experience, I will not soon forget.208

“Before Freedom Came’ attempted to illustrate the overwhelming realities of everyday life for African Americans in a world where all whites (even those who were not slaveholders) were accorded power and authority by virtue of their skin color. Yet a notable interpretive failure was the exhibition’s less than direct discussion of the power relationships that existed between whites and blacks within slavery. Likewise, a different arrangement might have made the institution’s brutality more overt. Several cases displayed the whips, chains or slave collars used by slaveholders (or their surrogates) for punishment or social control, yet other materials included in the exhibition that implied genuine affection could exist between some slaveholders and their slaves received too little analysis. Without a subtle reading, certain highlighted art works depicting plantation

207 For more about this, see John H. Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, Inc., 2009), 17ff. 208 Geraldine Seay, undated letter, VI-20, BFC Archives, Brockenbrough Library. Other positive letters from African American citizens of Richmond complementing the MOC for the exhibition were published in the Richmond Times Dispatch. See for example, Anita Showers, Letter to the Editor, Richmond Times- Dispatch, August 26, 1991, VI-20, BFC Archives.

108 slavery appeared to perpetuate stereotypes. Selected as a conscious counterbalance to this, “Before Freedom Came” featured documents that also illustrated the sexual exploitation of female slaves by owners as well as examples of whites who excused miscegenation. The adjacent audio kiosks contained excerpted recollections that reinforced these points. Of course, not all visitors read the exhibition text or listened to

the narratives.

Whether these relationships supplied further evidence of complicated coercion or

blatant paternalism, “Before Freedom Came” left that interpretation largely up to the

viewer. By critically omitting what Pieterse calls the “oppositional voice,” the exhibition

perhaps appeared to romanticize the master-slave relationship. Some reviewers and visitors rightly criticized it as unconvincing, for what they termed a less than successful effort to unpack these relationships. To Gregg Kimball, for example, “the exhibit scrupulously avoided controversy by rooting itself firmly in the positive story of cultural survival and by avoiding some tough historical issues of the relationships between blacks and whites.” Among other things, he expressed concern about missed opportunities to discuss African survivals as well as took issue with some of the interpretation and language as it appeared in the exhibition script.209 Additionally, the exhibition ended in

1865, and made only indirect reference to the continued legacy of slavery in the

American present in the concluding exhibition text. Nevertheless, writing in an essay

published in 2006, Fath Ruffins complemented the Museum for its “intricate picture of

the intimate relations between southern gentility, social status, and slavery. While

including and critiquing sentimental touches so dear to southern mythology such as the

loyal slave who stays with the family after freedom, Rice presented the predominant

209 Nederveen Pieterse, 125; Kimball, “Before Freedom Came.”

109 conflictual elements of the slave experience. Her exhibition demonstrated how owners

and enslaved people saw the world in radically different ways.”210

Dissatisfaction with “Before Freedom Came” was not confined to any one camp.

For many museum members the MOC represented a sacred memorial to a lost and much

sentimentalized era. Several individuals returned their invitations to the opening with

racist comments sprawled across them, including someone who wrote, in part, “Cant

Whites Have Anything? Without Blacks Pushing in.” Because of the exhibition, several

long-time MOC funders withdrew their annual contributors to the museum (in excess of

$25,000). They undoubtedly agreed with the person who wrote the MOC in 1992, “Please

have the courage to ignore the trendy (Negro history) and keep to your original

purpose.”211 MOC guides reported to me a group of white visitors that deliberately began

the exhibition at the end because, according to one, they wanted to end on a positive note

(with slavery intact). Despite the detractors, “Before Freedom Came’s” success conveyed

on the MOC much desired local and national respect that museum staff saw as helping

them to transcend their Confederate identity.

A few individuals asked the hard question: what gives an institution like the

Museum of the Confederacy the authority to interpret or otherwise “control” memories of

southern slavery? An article in the Richmond Afro-American newspaper accused the

museum of profiting financially and professionally from “an exploitation of our

dehumanization.”212 Others considered an exhibition about slavery by a white curator an

210 Fath Davis Ruffins, “Revisiting the Old Plantation: Reparations, Reconciliation, and Museumizing American Slavery,” Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, eds. Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz et. al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 405. 211 VI-20, BFC Archives, Brockenbough Library; John Coski, “Fifteenth Anniversary Puts Landmark Exhibit in Perspective,” 14. 212 Hazel Trice Edney, “Confederate Museum preserves pre-Civil War mentality,” Richmond Afro- American, July 27, 1991, VI-20, BFC Archives, Brockenbrough Library.

110 affront or a pitiable effort to assuage white liberal guilt. Although many had not seen the

exhibition, some museum professionals disparaged it on principal because in their eyes,

MOC co-opted a story that belonged in the hands of descendants or told in a different,

less tainted venue. On the latter point, local activist Sa’ad El-Amin complained, “This is

sort of like the Museum of the Holocaust was located in some Nazi Shrine.”213 Writing

about the fight over establishing a national museum of African American history on the

Mall, Fath Ruffins attributes this thinking to the influence of Black nationalists who

accuse white America of “systematically loot[ing] Black expressive culture.”214

Whatever the source, complaints of co-option are legitimate. As Canadian curator, Gerald

R. McMaster, of Native American descent, observes about Native Americans

representation in exhibition creation:” “Lacking opportunities to represent ourselves,

Native people have had, historically, to play the role of the subject/object, the observed, rather than the observer. Rarely have we been in a position of self-representation. Native

peoples have always been the informant, seldom the interrogator or initiator.”215

Yet differing views of the past likewise clearly can maintain their own integrity.

For its makers and many audience members, “Before Freedom Came” represented a pioneering effort to survey southern slavery that brought together a rich synthesis of objects, images, and historical materials to tell the story. Quite possibly, its early public

success encouraged other museums to begin to interpret slavery.216 Years later, Ruffins

213 El-Amin quotes in Brundage, The Southern Past, 299. 214 Ruffins, “Culture Wars Won and Lost,” 90. 215 Gerald R. McMaster, “Indigena: A Native Curator’s Perspective,” Art Journal 51(Fall 1992), 66. Accessed January 28, 2014. doi:10.2307/777350. 216 “Before Freedom Came” is listed among other groundbreaking exhibitions in “Museums Telling History of All the People,” CQ Researcher, 5, 36 (1995): 858 and also in Patrick Hagopian, “Race and the Politics of Public History in the United States,” in Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground, ed. Grey Gundaker (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998): n.1. However, not all exhibitions about slavery avoided controversy. See Stephen Dubin, Displays of Power: Memory and

111 declared, “ ‘Before Freedom Came” was a landmark exhibition, presenting not only what a southern museum could say but also what it should say about those historical connections.” 217

Although exhibition reviewers expressed plausible concern that “Before Freedom

Came” “may not have a long-term effect on museum exhibition policy,” the exhibition changed MOC in some important ways.218 Soon afterwards, the museum diversified its board and staff, adding African American members. After its tour was completed, the educators reinstalled a portion of “Before Freedom Came” at the museum where it served as a backdrop for educational programs and continued to attract visitors for more than five years. Immediately following “Before Freedom Came” African American visitors accounted for some 7% of the MOC’s annual visitation. NEH supported another MOC exhibition in 1996, based on research by Drew Gilpin Faust, Thavolia Glymph, and others on southern women’s wartime experience that featured African American women prominently. Although MOC leadership changed in the late 1990s and became more conservative, today the museum is in the process of merging with the American Civil

War Center located at the Tredegar Iron Works to become the Museum of the American

Civil War, and possibly discard its Confederate associations.

Who has the right to tell this history is not easily resolved and the representation of difference in museums generally remains a contested terrain. “In re-identifying themselves, as modern nonpartisan history museums, both the Valentine and the Museum

Amnesia in the American Museum (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 55-62 for a description of what happened to John Vlach’s panel exhibition, “Back of the Big House: The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation,” when it opened at the Library of Congress in late 1995. Vlach also documents the controversy in “The Last Great Taboo Subject: Exhibiting Slavery at the Library of Congress,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, eds. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton (New York: The New Press, 2006), 57-74. 217 Ruffins, “Revisiting the Old Plantation,” 405. 218 Crew and Horton, “Afro-Americans and Museums,” 226-227.

112 of the Confederacy presumed that they had the right to represent enslaved experience as

part of their overall mission to interpret the history of the 19th-century South. However, the Valentine’s director, Frank Jewell, articulated clear connections between the museum’s exhibition program and present day racism and inequality in Richmond and beyond. The MOC may have genuinely wanted to leave mythology behind and interpret the enslaved part of its history, but in some ways---as commentators pointed out---it stood on the backs of enslaved African Americans. At the same time that the museum undertook “Before Freedom Came,” the museum continued---in its other exhibitions, tours of the Confederate White House, and programs for members--- to embrace the

Confederate part of its heritage. As the poet Audre Lorde put it, “The master’s tools will

never dismantle the master’s house.”219 In hindsight, “Before Freedom Came” might

have appeared a more “honest” and transparent effort, if it had openly addressed in the

exhibition the dilemmas of representation and subjectivity that it faced in undertaking the

project, which reflected the contradictions expressed in its own history.

Other repercussions followed the museumization of African American subjects.

Rhett S. Jones writing about the African-American Museums Association (founded in

1978) in the late 1980s, notes, “White museums with far greater resources than their

black counterparts experienced increasing public pressure to reflect in their exhibits

America’s racial diversity, and they began to compete with black museums for funds to

support programs about African Americans.”220 National funding organizations and the

219 Lorde is quoted in Bernadette T. Lynch, Samuel J.M.M. Alberti,”Legacies of prejudice: racism, co- production and radical trust in the museum,” Museum Management and Curatorship 25 (2010): 110, accessed February 11, 2014, doi:70.1080/09647770903529061. Their article discusses a 2007 exhibition at the Manchester Museum during the British bicentennial of the 1807 law abolishing the slave trade. 220 Rhett S. Jones, “African-American Museums Association,” ed. Nina Mjagkij, Organizing Black America: An Encyclopedia of African American Associations (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2005), 10-11, accessed electronically February 7, 2014, IBSN: 0-203-80122-9. Fath Ruffins mentions that in 1992

113 museum profession characterized African American museums as “small, obscure and

often ephemeral undertakings,” and often privileged more established museums with

professional staffs.221 That changed in the following decades with the construction of

several large-scale African American museums in historic locations including the

National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis (1991), among others. Salamishah Tillet observes that by re-claiming the very same “myths, monuments, narrative, icons, creeds, and images” that white American historically excluded them from; African Americans

are “revising and reconstructing these very same constitutive elements of national

identity.”222

As “firsts,” “In Bondage and Freedom” and “Before Freedom Came” merely

pushed open the door of national memory by fixing slavery more firmly to the museum purview. Challenges soon emerged from the 1990s public discourse over multiculturalism that ultimately contested museum orthodoxies and resulted in transformations in the ways that museums represented or constructed the histories or cultures of particular groups. A new cooperative approach defined as “reflexive museology” emerged, “informed by the premise that exhibits of other cultures are neither neutral nor tropeless, despite claims otherwise. Rather, exhibits are informed by the cultural, historical, institutional, and political contexts of the people who made them.”223

the African American Museum Association lobbied members of Congress for a 50 million dollars appropriation to be distributed to black museums throughout America (perhaps because continued competition with better funded and longer established white history museums) but the legislation failed. (Ruffins, “Culture Wars Won and Lost,” 91.) 221 Brundage, 301. 222 Salamishah Margaret Tillet, “Peculiar Memories: Slavery and the American Cultural Imagination” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2007), 6. 223 Shelley Ruth Butler, Contested Representations: Revisiting into the Heart of Africa (Amsterdam: Social Sciences, 1999), 3.

114

Chapter 4: “At Freedom’s Door”---experiments in exhibiting Slavery

Since the early 1990s, museums have desired to “reimagine” themselves (to borrow Andrea Witcomb’s characterization) in ways that recognize our rapidly changing world. This includes questioning closely the old authoritative methods of displaying knowledge and representing culture in museums, and seeking to replace them with more open and inclusive models that acknowledge the museum’s civic and social responsibilities to engage with a diverse society and embrace new audiences.225 Fiona

McLean observes, “In particular, narrating the nation in the museum increasingly becomes a task of narrating the diversity of the nation and for engaging in a politics of recognition.”226 Kratz and Rassool describe this state of the modern museum as

“remapped:” by this term, they mean an institution that functions simultaneously on

225 This forms the basis of most critical writing about modern museums. See, for example, Eileen Hooper- Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992); Ivan Karp et .al.,eds., Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992); Peter Vergo, The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1993); Reesa Greenberg et. al., eds., Thinking About Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 1996); Sharon MacDonald and Gordon Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums (Oxford: Blackwell/Sociological Review, 1996); Moira Simpson, Making Representations: Museums in the Post-Colonial Era (London: Routledge, 1996); Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Sharon MacDonald, The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London: Routledge, 1998); Steven Dubin, Displays of Power: Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Christina Kreps, Liberating Culture: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation and Heritage Preservation (London: Routledge, 2003); Andrea Witcomb, Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (London: Routledge, 2003); Bettina M. Carbonell, Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Sharon MacDonald, ed., A Companion to Museum Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006); Kylie Message, New Museums and the Making of Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2006); Chris Healy and Andrea Witcomb, eds., South Pacific Museums: Experiments in Culture (Victoria, Australia: Monash University Press, 2006); Griselda Pollack and Joyce Zemans, ed.,Museums after Modernism: Strategies of Engagement (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); Richard Sandell, Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference (London: Routledge, 2007); Ivan Karp, et. al., Museum Frictions: Public Culture/Global Transformations (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), and Fiona Cameron and Lynda Kelly, eds., Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010).

226 Fiona McLean, “Museums and National Identity,” Museum and Society 3(2005): 1, accessed April 27, 2014, ISSN:1479-8360. 115

many levels--- sometimes in ways that are contradictory or overlapping--- “as site, as institution, as category, as a set of social processes, as a technology through which values are produced, and a domain of interaction.” 227 In particular, exhibitions serve as stages

where national, local and community identities and memories are constructed, contested, negotiated, renegotiated, defined and/or redefined by different groups including African

Americans. Scholars began to urge museums to leave spaces for “disorder” within exhibitions or permanent galleries, as Ivan Karp advised in a 2008 symposia held at the

Walters Art Museum.228

While the interpretations and methodologies by which slavery was best presented

in the museum were far from settled by the twentieth century’s end, the topic “began to be repositioned in the museum as the basis of national narration” through exhibitions, public programs, and other educational activities. 229 Contributing to this reposition is a

growing group of African American visual artists, among the earliest of these is Fred

Wilson, now featured in museums or galleries, whose work draws directly from the

African American historical past. Salamishah Tillet argues that these artists use images of

slavery and other related representations as tropes to interrogate the ways in which the

legacy continues to resonate in contemporary America.230 In the museum, this oftentimes

powerful and evocative work takes on a new role attempting to remap national memory

and identity with respect to slavery.

227 Corrine A. Kratz and Ciraj Rassool, “Remapping the Museum,” in Museum Frictions: Public Culture/Global Transformations (2006), 347. 228 Ivan Karp, “An Anthropologist’s Perspective,” paper presented at “The Public Object: Facing Contemporary Challenges in the Art Museum” symposia, February 1, 2008, sponsored by The Walters Art Museum and Johns Hopkins University. Karp advocated increased avenues for public comment not usually found in art museums. 229 Kratz and Rassool, 350. 230 Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 2. 116

Beginning with the conceptual artist Wilson’s influential 1992 installation at the

Maryland Historical Society, “Mining the Museum,” which focused mainly on slavery, this case study evaluates a later collaborative project on Maryland slavery entitled “At

Freedom’s Door” at the Maryland Historical Society and the Reginald L. Lewis Museum

of Maryland African American History and Culture. A group of college students from the

Maryland Institute College of Art and Morgan State University working closely with

historians, curators, and artists conceived of a multi-venue exhibition that melded fine art

and historical artifacts to create its interpretation. By not fixing slavery firmly in the past,

participants employed its legacy as a means to explicate ideas about race in contemporary

America.

As described at the end of Chapter 2, by the early 1990s, both museums and their

publics increasingly viewed representations of cultural groups in museum exhibitions as

problematic, suspect acts of appropriation. 231 In a well-known example, black Canadians

condemned the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in 1992 for its portrait of Africa (and

Africans) in the exhibition, “Into the Heart of Africa.” Although the anthropologist guest curator intended that visitors read the exhibitions contents ironically as a condemnation of colonialism, the interpretation completely misfired due to the ROM’s failure to consult with Toronto’s black community about the project. The firestorm that subsequently engulfed the museum seriously damaged its credibility but ultimately changed national exhibition practice. As a direct result of “Into the Heart of Africa,” Canadian law now

231 See, for example, the work of anthropologists who study museums: James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Ivan Karp and Stephen Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Michael Ames, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: the Anthropology of Museums (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1992); Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Genre, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1993). 117 requires all exhibition projects that concern indigenous communities and use government funding, to seek their formal consent and participation throughout their entire process.232

In museums, the “politics of recognition” generally imposed new requisite procedures that required institutions to negotiate directly with stakeholder groups or make actual partnerships for exhibitions jointly with them.233 These collaborations encompass a significant element in what Clifford famously intended when he envisioned museums as “Contact Zones.” As the Canadian anthropologist Ruth Phillips summarizes,

“Museums pursue collaborative exhibitions…because of their faith that the directness of voice the exhibit privilege will remove distorting lenses and correct mistranslations, enabling rather than obstructing authentic communication across the boundaries of difference.”234

These projects privilege community/stakeholder voice, perspective, and opinion over the museums. South London’s Horniman Museum and Gardens, for example, recruited residents from its local neighborhood as central content advisors for their

“African Worlds” exhibition (the first exhibition devoted to Africa in the UK), and as

232 For a detailed analysis, see Shelley Ruth Butler, Contested Representations: Revisiting Into the Heart of Africa (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1999). There is a similar law in Australia concerning museums and aboriginal communities. 233 See, for example, Anthony Shelton, “Curating African Worlds” in Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, eds. Alison K. Brown and Laura Peers (London: Routledge, 2003), 181-193. In 1998, the American Association of Museums (the trade association which sets standards for U.S. museums) (now called the American Alliance of Museums; hereafter, AAM) funded a “Museums and Community” initiative that formally urged museums as evidence of their “expanded civic role in society ”to establish a clear connection to their communities. According to AAM, closer relationships with the public (however created) will “anchor [the museum], revitalize its mission and sense of purpose, and enrich its understanding of what is possible to accomplish.” (Robert R. Archibald, “Introduction,” Mastering Civic Engagement: A Challenge to Museums (Washington, D.C.: AAM, 2002), 2.) 234 Ruth Phillips, “Introduction, Community Collaboration in Exhibitions: Towards a Dialogic Paradigm,” Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, 167. For an additional example, see the Glenbow Museum’s exhibition project with local Blackfoot tribe members who developed the exhibition contents and wrote large parts of the exhibition text (produced in English, French and Blackfoot). The project is described in Cara Krmpotich and David Anderson, “Collaborative Exhibitions and Visitor Reactions: The Case of Nitsitapiisinni: Our Way of Life,” Curator 48 (October 2005): 377-405. Accessed January 28, 2014, doi:10.1111/j.2151-6952.2005.tb00184.x. 118

part of the display, transcribed their community committee members’ voices onto the

exhibition panels. Before completing their new “Africa Hall” in 1992, the Field Museum

held public meetings throughout Chicago to ask African American residents in particular

what they wanted to see on display. Because many attendees expressed a strong interest

in “Africa in the New World,” the museum subsequently added a large exhibition area

dedicated to the African Diaspora. Direct community participation in shaping the Africa

Hall helped to launch stronger relationships between the Field and its nearby urban

audience. In planning their own new Africa Hall to replace the museum’s outdated and

antiquated exhibitions on Africa, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History curators consulted multiple times with advisors from the local African American and

African community on exhibition organization, contents, and themes. When the resulting

“African Voices” opened in 1996, the new version enjoyed mostly praise.235 Reciprocal

dialogue between museum and stakeholders on representational strategies during

collaboration can reduce what “African Worlds” curator Anthony Shelton terms “cultural

colonialism,” which he defines as that persistence of “a long and tortuous history of

direct and indirect capitalistic colonialism; ideological effacements occasioned by

empiricist social sciences; and the contemporary political and economic alignments of

dominant and subordinate polities.”236 On the other hand, Australian museum critic Tony

Bennett voices some skepticism about claims that these museum-community collaborations, whatever their nature, either allow for a significant transfer of authority or

235 Michael Atwood Mason, “African Voices: Smithsonian Project Brings Africa Alive,” AnthroNotes 22 (Fall 2001), accessed April 3, 2014, http://www.nmnh.si.edu/anthro/outreach/anthnote/fall01/anthnote.html. A more contested example is the National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in 2004 on the Mall and utilized community curators in its exhibition planning. See Jennifer Shannon, “The Construction of Native Voice at the National Museum of the American Indian,” Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives, ed. Susan Sleeper-Smith (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 218-247. 236 Anthony Shelton, “Curating African Worlds,” in Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, 184. 119

achieve real, meaningful change in an institution’s hegemony. Drawing on Foucault,

Bennett observes that “this process is simply an extension of the role of the museum as an instrument of governmentality, this time, however, clothed in such rubrics such as multiculturalism.” Other critics point out that alterations in museum practice too often reside only on the surface and merely represent the substitution of one mode of authority for another.237

Even if some boundaries appeared to grow more fluid or mutable, many modern

museums nevertheless remain closely enmeshed in the politics and policies of the nation

state. In 1990s, which initiated America’s so-called Culture War, conservative politicians

and their allies visited unwelcome media attention and public scrutiny on museums--- chiefly institutions whose exhibitions challenged the status quo national narrative--- labeling them as revisionist or derisively as “politically correct.” Exhibitions now well known as ideological battlegrounds include the Smithsonian’s National Museum of

American Art’s “West in America” art exhibition (1991) and the National Air and Space

Museum’s failed history exhibition around the Enola Gay (1994-95) intended to commemorate World War II. 238 At roughly the same time, some African Americans had begun to problematize representations of slavery in museums. In 1994, a local Virginia branch of the NAACP protested the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s plan to hold a living history reenactment of a slave auction. That same year, the Library of Congress removed their traveling exhibition, “Back of the Big House,” curated by John Vlach after

237 Bennett quoted in Julia Harrison, “What Matters: Seeing the Museum Differently,” Museum Anthropology 28 (September 2005): 31, accessed April 3, 2014, doi: 10.1525/mua.2005.28, 2 31. Amy Lonetree has been a consistently thoughtful voice on this issue and others related to museum representations of native cultures (See her “Museums as Sites of Decolonization: Truth Telling in National and Tribal Museums,” in Contesting Knowledge, 322-337). 238 Roger Stein, “Visualizing Conflict in ‘The West as America,’ “The Public Historian 14 (Summer 1992): 85-91, accessed March 12, 2004, doi: 10.2307/3378233 and Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and other Battles for the American Past (New York: Holt Paperback, 1996). 120

complaints from black employees (who had nicknamed the Library the “Big House” to

characterize their employment). In each instance, protestors ultimately did little more than temporarily disrupt the event or project in question. Colonial Williamsburg held their auction, despite protestors in the audience, and “Back of the Big House” found a new home at the D.C. Public Library and continued on its successful exhibition tour. In

the long run, both projects benefited considerably from the media coverage.239

Increasingly, indigenous or ethnic communities solved the thorny problem of

representation by establishing their own institutions. A recent survey counted approximately two hundred African American museums in the United States, a number that had doubled in about a decade.240 They range in size, mission, and governance

structure, from Baltimore’s privately run National Great Blacks in Wax museum (1983)

to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (2004), now part of the municipal

Cincinnati Museum System. Community-based ethnically specific museums commonly embody a philosophy that Buntinx and Karp term “tactical” museology, whereby the museum defines itself through programs or other means that are set intentionally (and sometimes contentiously) against the established order.241 A recent international example

is the District Six Museum near Cape Town, South Africa, which interprets the forced

removals of nonwhites from a previously mixed urban neighborhood under Apartheid.

239 Cary Carson, “Colonial Williamsburg and the Practice of Interpretive Planning in American History Museums,“ The Public Historian 20 (Summer 1998): 11-51, accessed April 4, 2014, doi: 10.2307/3379773; John Michael Vlach, “The Last Great Taboo Subject: Exhibiting Slavery at the Library of Congress“ in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, eds. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 56-73. 240 U.S. Department of State, “Growing Number of Museums Preserving Black History, Culture,” February 14, 2007, accessed April 4, 2014, http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2007/02/20070214153821xlrennef0.7142298.html#axzz2x wYEqoE7.

241 Gustavo Buntinx and Ivan Karp, “Tactical Museologies” in Museum Frictions, 207. 121

Local black residents who survived that rigid system of segregation developed the

museum’s contents. Positioning itself outside the traditional mission of most museums,

the District Six Museum “sees its work as a locus of social organizing and

mobilization.” 242

Mining the Museum

“Mining the Museum” at the Maryland Historical Society (hereafter, MHS) was

an early experimental exhibition that concentrated on African American history, with a

particular focus on slavery. Widely acclaimed by the public, museum professionals, and

many scholars, it brought the institution to national attention. 243 A venerable historical

society founded in 1844 and located in Baltimore, Maryland, MHS epitomized the elite,

white-run state historical society, which placed greatest emphasis on its special library

and manuscript collections. In the early 1990s, its museum staff included antiquarian

curators who concentrated on fine objects made or used in Maryland for their acquisitions

and exhibitions. As a result, MHS museum galleries chiefly displayed handsome oil

portraits of genteel white men or women hung above finely crafted examples of local

furniture, textiles, silver, and other decorative arts that the curators arranged according to

style and chronology. The museum’s small insular audience seemed to share MHS’s

focus on object connoisseurship and antiques. Although MHS stood close to a

neighborhood with a large black residential population, it seldom attracted African

American visitors. Although it successfully weathered several severe financial crises in

242 Ciraj Rassool, “Ethnographic Elaborations, Indigenous Contestations, and the Cultural Politics of Imagining Community” in Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives, 106-126. 243 The 1992 AAM annual meeting coincided with the opening of “Mining the Museum,” which gave the exhibition (and Fred Wilson) instant visibility within the museum world, as AAM conferences usually attract 5000 or more museum professionals from all over the globe. In 1993, MHS, The Contemporary, and Fred Wilson jointly received AAM’s Curator’s Committee award for Exhibition of the Year. For an enthusiastic exhibition review, see Noralee Frankel, “Mining the Museum. Fred Wilson, installation artist,” The Public Historian 15 (Summer 1993): 105-108, accessed April 7, 2014, doi: 10.2307/3378741. 122

the 1970s and 1980s that shut the institution for a time, the MHS remained apart from

transformations going on in museum practice.

In 1991, however, MHS agreed to participate in a joint project proposed by

Baltimore’s Museum of Contemporary Arts (known locally as The Contemporary) with

then emerging conceptual artist, Fred Wilson, inspired by a chance conversation between

MHS’s director, Charles Lyle, and the Contemporary’s curator and assistant director,

Lisa Corrin. Lyle had observed to Corrin in a meeting that he needed to find a way to

make ‘Chippendale relevant to a child in the projects.’244 The Contemporary cultivated a

very different reputation than MHS. Founded in 1989 by art educator George Ciscle, The

Contemporary, without a building or a collection, regularly sought out new venues across

Baltimore where it could present temporary experimental exhibitions and related

programs that were intended to ‘expand the idea of “museum.”‘ According to Ciscle, by

selecting an essentially moribund institution like MHS for the project, the Contemporary

“wanted to illustrate how its new model for museum practices could be applied to any

type of museum.”245

Under the terms of MHS’s arrangement with the Contemporary, the institution

agreed to host Wilson as an artist in residence for a year with the understanding that his

residency would result in the creation of an installation in which the museum’s collection

supplied the essential component for his artistic vision. In a 2013 discussion of the

exhibition’s legacy, Ciscle remembered it took many months to negotiate the project’s parameters with MHS including drawing up a formal contract between Fred Wilson and

MHS to protect Wilson’s rights as a contemporary artist. As a starting point, MHS agreed

244 Judith E. Stein, “Sins of Omission,” Art in America, 81 (October 1993): 112. 245 Lisa G. Corrin, ed., Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson (New York: The Contemporary, 1994), lxxi. 123

to give Wilson unfettered access to their holdings. 246 Wilson’s project at MHS, which he

named “Mining the Museum” (a play by the artist on the phrase, “my museum” that also

referred to his process) launched his career and made him famous.

In his art, Wilson characteristically interrogates museum-held collections to

explore racial absence, bias, and stereotypes. As he explained in an interview about

“Mining the Museum,” ‘I sort of look at everything and try to distill it and re-use it [to] squeeze it of its meaning and try to reinvent [it].’247 The juxtapositions that Wilson

invents by placing traditional museum objects in unusual situations, on the wall, in a case,

or on a pedestal, are sometimes startling, sometimes amusing but always compelling to

look at. Among other methods, he incorporates props (that closely resemble museum

objects) and paints them surprising or unusual colors. Wilson locates audio tracks within

the installation that cause voices to emerge seamlessly from behind or within a canvas or

uses video creatively. Taken together his arrangements and assemblages create new

meanings that not only subvert the traditional interpretations that museums typically

place on objects (like silver chalices or elaborately carved chairs) and twist the

reverential way that museums treat collections. His labels omit the standard curatorial

information and instead ask provocative questions about the objects they accompany.

Through various playful, inventive yet barbed ways, his art calls into question the

museum’s controlled and frequently rigid environment of authority and authenticity. To

borrow from Donald Preziosi (who writes about museums in general, not on Wilson),

Wilson’s work directly challenges how institutions function “as semiotic instruments for

246 George Ciscle, remarks, “Talking about Race: ‘Mining the Museum’ after 20 Years,” panel discussion, AAM Annual Meeting, May 22, 2013, Baltimore, WE09 audio, accessed March 1, 2014, www.prolibraries.com. 247 Quoted in Corrin, 8. 124

the creation, maintenance, and dissemination of meanings by fielding together and

synthesizing [alternate] objects, ideas, and beliefs.”248 Wilson’s art pieces reinvent

museum meanings in what are exciting new ways.

Usually Wilson initiates his projects by assuming his version of the curatorial

persona. He visits the institution, strolls through the galleries, examines the collection on

display, looks at pieces in storage, talks to all staff (including guards), and then returns to

the studio to plan his work.249 In describing his research process Wilson says, ‘I go in

with no script, nothing whatsoever in my head. I try to get to know the community that

the museum is in, the institution, the structure of the museum, the people in the museum

from the maintenance crew to the executive director. I ask them about the world, the

museum, and their jobs, as well as the objects themselves. I look at the relationship

between what is on view and what is not on view. I never know where the process will

lead me, but it often leads me back to myself, to my own experiences.’250

To create “Mining the Museum,” MHS provided Wilson with an onsite office and

access to a group of researchers (ultimately nearly one hundred individuals, many of

whom were volunteers) who investigated MHS object/collection provenance or aspects of

Maryland history under his direction. Wilson then selected objects from MHS collections

that included items from storage, never before on view. By all accounts, MHS staff had

little direct involvement in what Wilson created, some of which apparently occurred on

the spot during installation. MHS waited to produce a gallery guide until after the

exhibition had been open to the public for several weeks. To create it, Wilson prepared a

248 Donald Preziosi, “Museological Myths of Nationality,” Museum History Journal 2 (January 2009): 38. 249 For further details, see Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979-2000, eds. John Alan Farmer and Antonia Gardner (Baltimore: UMBC Center for Art and Visual Culture, 2002). An exhibition of the same title traveled in the US between 2002 and 2004. 250 Quoted in Corrin, 13. 125

series of short answers to what guards and docents reported were visitors’ frequently

asked questions.

“Mining the Museum” was the first exhibition of its kind. 251 All in all, it created

a provocative and lively trope that stood in stark contrast to the traditional displays (read,

dull, boring and predictable) that visitors encountered elsewhere in MHS (and contrasted

sharply to what other museums displayed, as well). Through its content and design

arrangements, Wilson’s installation exposed the racial preferences that MHS’s collections

embodied and their exhibitions exemplified, and he skillfully revealed how museum

classification practices generally tend to render people of color or ethnic origin invisible.

Although MHS supplied the specific case study for “Mining the Museum,” Wilson’s

universal critique applied to many different kinds of institutions, which explains why

many museum professionals embraced the exhibition with enthusiasm. 252

“Mining the Museum” treated slavery poignantly and poetically. In marked

contrast to other institutions, Wilson’s gallery arrangements created an African American

presence that came powerfully alive. Through the unexpected and unusual ways that he employed museum collections, sometimes in vignette settings, objects seemed to shed

their usual passivity, became active, and pointed. I offer a few memorable examples drawn from my visits. To arrive at the exhibition, visitors stepped out from an elevator into a dramatic vignette where a series of white marble busts that portrayed Henry Clay,

Napoleon Bonaparte, and Andrew Jackson, none of whom could claim any direct

251 I first visited “Mining the Museum” in June, 1992, after Fred Wilson asked me a question at the annual AAM meeting in Baltimore in response to a presentation about “Before Freedom Came.” Wilson suggested the appearance of traditional history exhibitions (their design and approach to objects) could benefit from the creative sensibilities of an artist. Although I initially thought “Mining” a bit contrived, over time, I came to appreciate the exhibition’s originality. 252 Even today, when I show slides from “Mining” in class, Wilson’s arrangements intrigue and frequently move my students. 126

connection to Maryland, stood on highly ornate pedestals. Next to them sat three

conspicuously empty carved marble pedestals marked Harriet Tubman, Frederick

Douglass, and Benjamin Banneker that immediately made the point that MHS owned no

portraits of these native (and famous) black Marylanders. Nearby, a trio of painted “cigar

store” Indians turned their backs to the audience. A little further in the exhibition proper,

a voice seemed to emerge from within an early 17th-century portrait of a young white

child waited on by an African American boy, to ask in an African American child’s

plaintive voice questions like “Who combs my hair?,” “Who makes me laugh?” or “Who

calms me when I’m afraid?” A label noted that while the records identify the white child

as Henry Darnall, the slave’s name is unknown. Close to the Darnall image, other

nineteenth-century portraits featured white families wearing elaborate dress and seated on

a carved upholstered sofa in one case, each attended by a presumably enslaved African

American child. In close proximity, an exhibition case displayed hand-written estate

inventories and bills of sale that listed individual slaves’ monetary value.

Wilson covered the fronts of neighboring paintings and prints with opaque paper

sheets that he pierced with cutouts to call attention to the African Americans who made

up the images’ background. This clever technique effectively rendered the whites who

usually occupied central positions within the complete images invisible. Wilson also gave

the African Americans previously listed as “unknown” in MHS records fictional “new” names such as “Job and Joseph Chew,” in one instance, stenciled onto the painting frame or glass. Through methods like these, Wilson created individuated portraits by pushing back at the non-individuated way that museums treated persons marginalized in works of art.

127

Those who wrote about the exhibition’s focus on race remarked on several memorable pairings. In an exhibition case, Wilson placed several elaborately decorated

Rococo-style silver goblets, teapots, pitchers, and tankards, representing the celebrated

Kirk silver collection owned by MHS, together in a case where they sat in close and seemingly uncomfortable proximity to a dilapidated pair of iron shackles. Elsewhere, he pointed a long rifle originally used for bird hunting on Maryland’s Eastern Shore ominously at a series of framed runaway slave broadsides hung in a line across the gallery wall. In yet another area, a whipping post from a Baltimore prison stood alone on a platform labeled “Cabinetmaking” surrounded by empty ornately carved Victorian chairs that seemed to be awaiting spectators to a whipping. A pristine white Ku Klux

Klan robe complete with a peaked hood carefully folded inside a baby carriage suggested a small child’s body. Near to a dollhouse where Wilson rearranged black and white dolls to simulate a plantation massacre inspired by Nat Turner’s Virginia rebellion, the artist projected the names of Harriet Tubman and others who escaped slavery in Maryland.

Finally, near “Mining’s” end, a computer interactive projected astronomical calculations made by the surveyor Benjamin Banneker (who challenged Thomas Jefferson on his racist statements in the Notes on the State of Virginia) that swirled beautifully onto exhibition walls near a case that displayed Banneker’s “Dream” diary as well as his

original astronomical journal.

For visitors, “Mining” effectively conveyed the cruelty, the racial discrimination,

the marginal treatment and the inhumanity that marked slavery in Maryland (and by

inference, elsewhere in America). A white visitor who filled out an audience survey

reacted as many others did: “The whole exhibition is powerful, moving, enlightening---

128

to see people named and to see things given a history…Baltimore’s streets & names will

be different for me now.” An African American attorney noted, “This exhibited [sic]

reflected my history which was a switch from the usual Eurocentric displays…This

exhibit shocked my conscious and made me angry simultaneously.”253 Interviews conducted by the Contemporary and MHS staff with thirty-nine docents who led regular tours of “Mining” underscored that many African American adult visitors, like the lawyer quoted above, reacted differently to the exhibition than white individuals. Some reported they were offended by white docent-led tours. One guide who was African American told the interviewers, “There were many African-Americans who came to me after tours who said they were very angry. No matter what, they felt the hostility of whites to blacks.

They were offended by the attempt to pretend that whites know our history better than we do.”254 Clearly, for some visitors, the overall “whiteness” of MHS undermined the

exhibition’s messages as well as Wilson’s own identity as an African American or as an

artist.

Even though Fred Wilson never portrayed himself as a historian, the stratagem

behind “Mining the Museum’s” troubled a few museum professionals and academics. By

employing the same elements commonly used in museum exhibitions, some felt Wilson

co-opted the notions of authenticity intrinsic to history museums. MHS allowed him to

play with artifacts and their meanings in a way permitted few curators. Wilson re-wrote

the artifacts’ histories, giving them new identities of his own that sometimes bore no real

relationship to actual provenance. However, Wilson maintained that historical

authenticity was critical to his work: he commented in a 2010 interview about “Mining

253 Reproduced in Corrin, 65, 62. 254 Corrin, 53. 129

the Museum:” “I am very concerned that what I end up with cannot be discounted on

factual grounds, so my research and my conversations with curators, scholars, and

graduate school research assistants are important, no matter how tangential they are.”255

Wilson’s video introduction to “Mining,” which Corrin called a signed curatorial statement, made it clear that the exhibition resonated for the artist as a deeply felt personal statement. On the video Wilson appeared as an artist provocateur flying from museum gallery to museum gallery at night, grabbing pieces; in his words, “In one

sequence I had my shirt off and was walking through the galleries saying things like ‘I

dreamt I was at the Maryland Historical Society, and everything was the same but

different.”256

Unfortunately, nothing explanatory about Wilson, his methods or philosophy

appeared anywhere in the main installation space. From my observation, most audience members clearly missed the irony. Many took “Mining” at face value as a history show and read it as authentic “museum truth.” As a docent noted, “people on my tours were sure that blacks had been beaten on the whipping post. But it was never used for that purpose. Fred was using his particular background, sometimes substituting his emotions for fact.”257 As “Mining’s” audience surveys indicate, Wilson’s underlying point

concerning the museum’s fundamentally duplicitous nature eluded most visitors. Not

unlike Wilson himself, the museum uses objects and design arrangements to perform

certain ideas as well as to establish essential hierarchies. Making reference to Hal

Foster’s The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (1996), art

255 Marjorie Schwarzer, ed., “ ‘Mining the Museum Revisited’: A Conversation with Fred Wilson, Paula Marincola and Marjorie Schwarzer,” in Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, eds. Benjamin Filene, et. al. (Philadelphia: The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, 2011), 217. 256 Schwarzer, 220. 257 Corrin, 49. 130

historian Erika Doss disapprovingly labeled Wilson as an artist-cum-ethnographer. She warned that his “subversive and oppositional practices may collapse into their own authority and become resurrected as their own ‘real’ and ‘original’ objects…it

[potentially] derails the original questioning of museum culture and institutional authority.”258 Docent interviews and other questionnaires collected and published by

Corrin later confirm that this, in fact, happened in “Mining” to a degree and perhaps to some extent moderates its long-term success.

Yet in 1992, few critics shared Doss’s reservations: many echoed the curator

Philip J. Ravenhill’s impressions, “I left thinking of histories. Partial. Hidden. Distant or

present. The artist’s visual tableaux did not deliver history, but provided questions about

it.”259 In a long essay included in the exhibition’s publication, the noted historian of

slavery, Ira Berlin, supplied the historical context conspicuously missing in the exhibition

itself:

Mining the Museum speaks to history’s truths and the many paths to reach them. The exhibition proceeds from the postmodernist assumption that history is first a front for power; that historical accuracy can be found only by unmasking authority; that events, objects, and individuals have no meaning outside their context; that the given is contingent; and ---finally---that the search for truth in history requires energy, cumming, and a good measure of intellectual derring-do. Mining the Museum thus debunks and denounces not in the service of historical certainty but in an effort to expand the field of historical inquiry. It seeks questions, not answers.260

The success of “Mining the Museum” created a high level of public expectation

for MHS with respect to African American history. Fred Wilson claimed the exhibition

258 Erika Doss, review of “Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage by Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett, Winterthur Portfolio 34 (Summer-Autumn, 1999): 181, accessed April 7, 2014, http:www.jstor.org/stable/1215355. 259 Philip L. Ravenhill, “Mining the Museum, “African Arts, 26 (July, 1993): 73, accessed April 7, 2014, doi: 10.2307/3337154. 260 Corrin, 35. 131

had a profound effect on MHS, “It put the museum’s feet to the fire a bit…Issues of race

had never been brought up in Baltimore. They were always just beneath the surface, but

everyone was afraid of what would happen if someone started to talk about it.”261 African

American visitation at the museum rose substantially due to the exhibition, which

attracted more than 55,000 visitors overall. Spurred by “Mining,” MHS’s education

department launched a vigorous series of programs targeted at the local African

American community that eventually included, among other things, after school activities

designed for at risk populations. These programs attracted a younger, more diverse

audience to MHS.

Yet in terms of exhibitions, MHS’s efforts did not quickly replicate either

“Mining’s” accomplishments or its experimental approach. As Frazer Ward complained

in a 1995 review that speculated on “Mining’s” overall effect on MHS, “It remains to be

seen whether the museum’s exhibition practices have been permanently altered in its

wake.”262 The institution borrowed a traveling exhibition entitled “Sankofa,” circulated

by African American collector Derrick J. Beard but its contents offered little new related

to Maryland. Staff actively began looking for an exhibition to duplicate its success.

At Freedom’s Door

In 1995, discussions began at MHS about possibly creating a traveling exhibition

to focus on the abolition movement in the United States, about which there was renewed

261 Judith Barry, Renée Green, Fred Wilson, Christian Philipp Mǘller, Andrea Fraser, “Serving Institutions,” October 80 (Spring, 1997): 121, accessed April 7, 2014, doi: 10.2307/778812. 262 Frazer Ward, “The Haunted Museum: Institutional Critique and Publicity,” October, 73 (Summer, 1995): 88, note 38, accessed April 7, 2014, doi: 10.2307/779009. 132 academic interest. 263 After several failed steps, organizers refocused the exhibition now called “Bound by Conscience” on the history of antislavery activity in the Chesapeake region. It planned to tell a complicated story that concentrated on the different ways black and white participants worked separately as well as together to end slavery. Maryland had a complex early history as a borderline state where African American freedom and enslavement existed side by side. In 1996, MHS received a grant from NEH to plan the exhibition, working in partnership with the Virginia Historical Society and the Delaware

Historical Society.264 Project consultants included historians Barbara Fields, Jean

FaginYellin, Jim Horton, and T. Stephen Whitman.265

At an early planning meeting, Fields enthusiastically endorsed the project as one that, in repositioning African American history in the Chesapeake “from the margins to the center” would finally raise public consciousness. MHS hoped that the exhibition, renamed “At Freedom’s Door: Antislavery in the Chesapeake 1776-1865,” a title adapted from a Winslow Homer Civil War-era painting, would serve as the linchpin in efforts then underway to refashion MHS into Maryland’s state history museum.266

263 Originally, the New York Public Library asked me to investigate the abolition project but the exhibition never materialized. I began working on the exhibition for the Maryland Historical Society in 1995. 264 The MDS NEH planning grant ran from September 1, 1996 to January1, 1998. I also received a Junior Scholar’s Award from The George Washington University to work on the project during the summer 1997. The MHS Chief Curator when the project began, Nancy E. Davis, served as the project director. 265 Among their publications and articles, see Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Jean Fagin Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); James O. Horton, Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993); and T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997). 266 The title came from a comment made to me years before by historian Deborah Grey White about Homer’s painting, “At the Cabin Door,” which shows an African American woman standing in the door watching Union troops march by. White remarked that she liked the painting because the woman was standing “at freedom’s door.” Because Maryland lay geographically between the North and the South, and many enslaved people escaped through the state to reach freedom in Pennsylvania or beyond, the phrase inspired our title. 133

Information gathered during a planning charrette moved slavery into the project’s

vanguard. MHS made subsequent revisions to “At Freedom’s Door’s” storyline based on data collected from a focus group that included African American community members and local teachers. While the term “antislavery” (particularly as it related to antebellum

African Americans) interested and intrigued African American participants, they strongly recommended that the exhibition also provide, as a counterpoint to the abolition story, substantial information about slavery in Maryland. At the meeting, several individuals spoke eloquently about the need for museum audiences to experience the “real” thing with respect to slavery. One teacher wanted her students to see shackles, whips, and chains so that they could better understand what their ancestors endured as slaves.

Conversation with the focus group established for the exhibition team that the public would expect slavery to be a significant component. At that moment, “At Freedom’s

Door” approached what Barbara Fields had earlier envisioned, a reflexive narrative centered around the enslaved African American experience in 19th century Maryland, and organizers adjusted the title to “At Freedom’s Door: Challenging Slavery in the

Chesapeake” to signal this shift.

However, for several years following the planning grant, the exhibition

languished. It failed to secure needed implementation funding from NEH. It suffered

from conceptual problems too. It consisted largely of dull manuscript and printed

materials, together with a few portraits and other visual representations. Casting around

for more innovative ways of approaching the topic, MHS approached the Contemporary

about a possible collaboration that included a parallel exhibition focused on

contemporary visual artists’ responses to freedom but nothing definitive happened.

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Elsewhere, other exhibitions were happening that brought art together with historical interpretation less traditionally to “initiate a conversation between the present and the past.” Unlike “Mining the Museum,” historians and curators who sought new strategies and techniques to explore history played the major role in organizing these exhibitions. For example, the curator Peter Emmett delved into an unexplored part of

Australia’s past through a series of artistic installations that occurred between 1990 and

2000, first at the Hyde Park Barracks (now part of the Powerhouse Museum) and later at the Museum of Sydney. To demonstrate convict life, Emmett, an academically trained cultural historian, harnessed a combination of art, theatrical environments, and soundscapes to create a thought-provoking tableau. At the Hyde Park Barracks, where convicts were held in the early 19th century, Emmett imagined the building’s historic spaces as “a contrived ruin,” as opposed to creating a pristine (and, to his mind, lifeless) restoration. Even though he made the Barracks safe for visitors, Emmett left the paint buckling on the walls. His recreated spaces told stories about people whose individual histories were now lost, in unusual ways, often working with artist collaborators to create a visual narrative. He described his work at the Barracks as “represent[ing] the unrepresentable.” Visitors moved through many different reordered spaces that included the prisoners’ ward where men slept together in very cramped quarters. As the audience walked among hammocks hung claustrophobically close together, they overheard imaginary conversations between the prisoners that included fictional accounts of their dreams and nightmares that Emmett commissioned from two audio artists. In another room intended to evoke the Barrack’s mid-19th century history as a female asylum,

Emmett suspended nineteenth-century women’s dresses, shawls, and bonnets on fishing

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line in front of large reflective glass panels so they appeared to float ghostlike through

space. With this, he created, in the words of a reviewer, “a haunting environment into

which the visitor’s own reflection is incorporated.” Later at the Museum of Sydney, working with the artist Narelle Jubelin, Emmett made an exhibition called “Collector’s

Chests,” that located provocative museum objects accompanied by documentary materials like letters and old maps together in drawers where a visitor might open, examine, and interpret them in his or her own way. For instance, within the drawer that

Emmett and Jubelin titled “Lost Souls,” they placed the leather soles of children’s shoes

excavated from an archaeological dig in Sydney together with a handwritten passenger

list of a ship where everyone on board drown when it sunk on its way to New South

Wales. A visitor recalled “the feeling that simply envelops you on opening those

drawers…was simply inspired.”267

A unique annual exhibition development seminar led by George Ciscle at the

Maryland Institute College of Art (hereafter, MICA) in Baltimore offered a chance to

rethink “At Freedom’s Door” and set it on a more experimental course. For more than

two decades, Ciscle has been a major figure in Baltimore’s contemporary art scene. He

holds a graduate degree in art education and has had careers as both a gallery owner and

an artist. In 1989, Ciscle founded the Contemporary as a new art space because he

“questioned what a museum was…and what it could be.” During his tenure, the

Contemporary created exhibitions that sought to “connect artists to everyday life experiences,” a philosophy Ciscle continued to champion after he left the Contemporary

in 1996 and began teaching at MICA, among the oldest art colleges in the United States,

267 All quotes from Kate Gregory, “Art and artifice: Peter Emmett’s Curatorial Practice in the Hyde Park Barracks and Museum of Sydney,” Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 16 (June 2006): 1-22; accessed April 8, 2014, ISSN-1033-1867. 136

offering undergraduate and graduate degrees. At the behest of Fred Lazarus, MICA’s

then president, Ciscle became the school’s first Curator-in-Residence. 268 In his work at

MICA, Ciscle created a professional practice class that he called the Exhibition

Development Seminar, which stretches over an academic year and welcomes MICA

students from all backgrounds. Under Ciscle’s close supervision, the students collaborate

directly with a museum, featured artist, or group of artists to organize and create an

exhibition with all its supporting parts. Depending on the theme, Ciscle recruits designers

and other professionals with appropriate experience to work with the students as paid

mentors and supervisors. Ciscle himself usually serves as the official curator.269 Past

Exhibition Development Seminar exhibitions include “Joyce J. Scott: Kickin’ It with the

Old Masters,” at the Baltimore Museum of Art (2000) and “Everlasting,” within which

the artist Ann Fessler explored her identity as an adopted child, displayed at MICA’s

Decker Gallery (2003).

Acquainted with Ciscle from his work at the Contemporary, MHS first

approached him about “At Freedom’s Door” in late 2004, and Ciscle expressed interest in

reconfiguring the “At Freedom’s Door” project as the centerpiece for an upcoming MICA

Exhibition Development class but with a longer two-year period to allow students time to

fully develop the project. Intended to consider “what it meant to be free in the early

United States and what it means to be free in the world today,” MHS consented that the

268 Rafael Soldi, interview with George Ciscle, May 25, 2009, accessed April 14, 20014, http://rafaelsoldi.com/2009/05/interviews-george ciscle.html. 269 The class is now the centerpiece of an official minor in exhibition practice with MICA’s Fine Arts Department and Circle has recently established a Curatorial Practice MFA at MICA. 137

exhibition should utilize a combination of art and history displayed together as a sort of

re-history.270

Ciscle pushed MHS to locate a partner institution in the local African American

cultural community. After lengthy negotiations, MHS, MICA, and the Reginald Lewis

Museum of Maryland African American History (hereafter, the Lewis), a new state-

supported museum nearing completion on the edge of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor,

eventually reached a formal partnership agreement. The institutions consented that “At

Freedom’s Door” would comprise two thematically distinctive but complimentary

exhibitions divided between MHS and the Lewis. Each exhibition was to consist of

historical materials and contemporary art, some of it commissioned, some borrowed, and

some created by two artists in residence, whom Ciscle planned to select with the approval

of the partners. 271 As part of the partnership agreement, the three institutions created an

overall project budget and agreed to contribute staff time and other resources in-kind to

the exhibition’s development.272 Ciscle would serve as the curator for the exhibition’s

contemporary art portions and the Lewis’s curator, Dr. David Taft Terry, shared

responsibility with me for the historical content.

Eventually thirty-six individuals, undergraduates and graduate students, with

backgrounds that ranged from graphic design to fine arts photography participated in “At

Freedom’s Door.” 273 Ciscle approached the History Department at Morgan State

270 Author, “At Freedom’s Door,” prospectus statement, 2005. “At Freedom’s Door” project files are maintained by MICA and available through Ciscle. After many staff changes, MHS no longer appears to have project records. 271 Ciscle supplied basic project financial support through funds budgeted by MICA for his classes. 272 Nancy Davis, representing MHS, and Margaret Hutto, the exhibition coordinator at the Lewis, acted as the original project managers. 273 George Ciscle, class list for “At Freedom’s Door,” undated (circa February, 2007), courtesy, George Ciscle, Exhibition Development Program, MICA. I am grateful to Ciscle for making the project’s 138

University, a historically black university near Baltimore where he recruited five students to join the class (including a direct descendant of Frederick Douglass). Additionally, the artist Sam Christian Holmes, a Morgan State University faculty member, not only contributed his work to the exhibition but also served as a mentor for student-led Media

Team. Each student admitted to the class agreed to commit to the project for at least two consecutive semesters, and, actually, most students remained for the entire two-year period.274 Several also interned in summer at each museum to help sustain the project.

The Exhibition Development class officially met as a group for three hours once a week

but students put in many additional hours of time working on the project. In assuming

dual roles as exhibition curators and primary advocates, the students inhabited as critical

a place on the exhibition’s center stage as the objects, the art, or the ideas.

During the project’s first semester, David Terry and I played a key role in the

exhibition’s initial development.275 Because the students largely lacked formal training in

either American or Maryland history, we devised a research tutorial to help them acquire

basic knowledge of chronology, events, and meaning.276 MHS and the Lewis introduced their respective institutions with tours of exhibitions and visits to storage collections.

Students visited local historic sites with connections to slavery including the National

Park Services-run Hampton Plantation, originally the Ridgeley family’s estate, whose

unpublished archival files available to me. I also benefitted from our conversations about the project during and after it concluded. 274 Some students did drop out of the class after the first year and Ciscle allowed a few others to take their place and join the class in year 2. 275 Rice and Terry’s class appearances appear on the class syllabus, fall 2005-spring 2007. This serves as a chronological record of all class work, George Ciscle, Exhibition Development Seminar, MICA (hereafter, GCEDS-MICA). 276 This included reading T. Stephen Whitman’s book, Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage, 1775-1865 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2006).

139

antebellum residents included an enslaved community that numbered more than three

hundred individuals. Teams of students created exhibition resources that included files on

contemporary artists whose artistic vision drew directly from the enslaved African

American past. Ultimately, the class chose (and interacted with) seven principal artists

whose art was integrated into the exhibition narrative.277 They also selected other

appropriate works created by fourteen other artists held in museum and private

collections that MHS and the Lewis hoped to borrow for the two exhibitions. Regardless

of their team assignment, every student had the opportunity to work closely with the two

artists in residence, Arvie Smith, a painter and MICA alumnae now living and working in

Portland, Oregon, and Joan E. Gaither, a textile artist based in Maryland who serves as

MICA’s Chair of undergraduate art education. Smith’s brightly colored canvases belie his somber subjects that feature slave auctions and corporal punishments, among other things.

In a different artistic medium, Gaither’s beautifully embroidered and intricately decorated large-scale quilt pieces portray similar historical realities for African Americans.

For the class, slavery served as both a catalyst and a lens. Class conversations quickly migrated to the subject of race and sometimes-tense discussions occupied many session. It proved unsettling for Aidah Aliyah Rasheed, a student from Morgan State, who remembered: “So in this class, everything we were doing was around slavery and race and racism, so it kind [of] took over our lives, and I went through a really hard time just taking this all in---and this is our subject matter, this is what we are going to be addressing.” Gaither who attended many classes likewise recalled, “It was like at one point in the class you could just see it on everybody’s face: What have I gotten myself

277 The artists selected by the class were William Christenberry, Linda Day Clark, Maren Hassinger, Sam Christian Holmes, Whitfield Lovell, Michael Platt and Joyce J. Scott. 140

into? This is really big.”278 At first, the students tested each other through lengthy,

occasionally uncomfortable debates about matters like language. The group discussed the use of words like slavery, slave, slaveholders, owners, masters, and enslavement in exhibition texts or project materials. Some students objected to the term African

American and wanted to use the expression, “Africans in America.” Others thought the exhibition title sounded too celebratory. What did “Challenging Slavery” really mean?

Debra Sturm, then Chief of the National Park Service Visitors Center at Hampton, stirred up one early class with her impassioned defense of the slaveholding Ridgely family.

While the African American students struggled with their own feelings related to slavery in a different and more personalized way than the white students did, both groups initially left class each week feeling frustrated that the “other side” was not listening to them.

By the end of the first semester, the class dynamic had changed and students now appeared to welcome (and even relish) these conversations. The MICA students generally felt that the insights, questions, and comments consistently raised by the Morgan State students elevated their own “real world” awareness because the African

American students pressed their classmates to think harder about inequality and see, as one individual put it, the “Absence of Freedom” then and now. The white students I interviewed characterized these conversations as not divisive or awkward but unusually frank and invigorating.279 A turning point for the black students seemed to occur when

the Lewis Museum’s Project Coordinator, Margaret Hutto, fielded one evening’s

discussion and several Morgan State students reiterated their opinion that only African

278 Bret McCabe, “Risk/Reward: MICA and Morgan State Students Learn More Than Professional Expertise During Exhibition Development Seminar,” Baltimore City Paper, January 31, 2007, accessed April 8, 2014, http://www2.citypaper.com/news/story/.asap?id=13204. 279 Author’s conversations with students Sarah Hanson and Piero Spadaro, research trip to Sotterly Plantation, December 2005. 141

Americans had the right to interpret African American history, especially slavery. While

she emphatically wacked her hand up and down on the table, Hutto responded to them

that this is everyone’s history and did not belong to any particular group. Hearing this

response directly from an African American museum professional appeared to quell this sentiment among the students (at least outwardly). Even though emotional or contentious moments never disappeared, all the students began to exhibit a palatable sense of shared personal investment in the project and real comradeship with each other. Later, when sharp disagreements arose between the students and Ciscle about how to acknowledge

Morgan State’s contributions in the exhibition credit panel, the white students largely diffused the situation in a long meeting held privately outside the class.280

Collaboration is a hallmark of Ciscle’s Exhibition Development seminars. In

brainstorming sessions, the class worked first to articulate and then reach consensus on

the exhibition’s broad themes---identity, power, and authority---which they identified as

emblematic of past and present struggles. Challenged by Ciscle to make their exhibition

messages tangible and explicit, the students wrote phrases like “Change,” “Community

Progress” and “Claiming Power” on the blackboard. Expressing his doubts about whether

African Americans could possibly achieve equality and/or parity in 21st-century

Maryland, one African American student wrote on the blackboard, “Are we knocking at the door or walking through it?” As Ciscle put it later, “The students always repeatedly confronted the question: How did their ideas contribute to connecting the exhibition’s

280 Bret McCabe, “Risk/Reward,” 20-21. 142

goals to the larger community?”281 Slavery served as the locus where the student

discussions about the impact of racial oppression in Baltimore came together.

By the academic year’s conclusion, the students now working in groups

collaborated on a proposal that described the exhibition in historical terms but also

positioned it as a dialogue between the present and the past, intended to “shed new light

to the past and [provide] a more comprehensive evaluation of the present.” 282 In an

initial thesis statement, the historical curatorial student team echoed that they wanted “to

demonstrate through the juxtaposition of historical objects and contemporary artworks

that the ills of slavery, i.e. racism and stereotypes, continue to plague our society.”

Although their historical knowledge was not extensive, the students directly assigned to

develop the exhibition content did not, however, give the storyline a nostalgic gloss or

make it upbeat. Even as the team firmly attached the exhibition messages to slavery, their

overall learning objectives stayed wide ranging:

-Strive for continuity between the contemporary and historical exhibitions -Create an exhibition that engages both adults and children -Incorporate the iconography used during the antebellum period (language, symbols and music) -Choose themes and sub-themes unique to slavery in Maryland -Challenge the viewers [sic] perceptions of African/African Americans during the period of slavery -To be truthful to the enslaved and free experiences of African/African Americans and to explore different perspectives -Choose objects for their relevance, without fear of their connotations or the viewers [sic] emotional response -Collaborate with the exhibition [design] team to insure the vision for the exhibition is achieved283

281 George Ciscle, “Project Overview,” At Freedom’s Door: Challenging Slavery in Maryland (Baltimore: Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, the Maryland Historical Society in collaboration with Maryland Institute College of Art, 2007), 3. 282 Curatorial team (contemporary and historical members), “At Freedom’s Door: Challenging Slavery in Maryland,” final proposal, undated (April 2006), GCEDS-MICA. 283 Both quotes are from the Curatorial Historical Team’s concept paper, undated (Fall 2006), GCEDS- MICA. 143

Early on, Ciscle divided the class into nine teams to complete the remainder of

“At Freedom’s Door.”284 Each student received a team assignment in either art education,

contemporary curatorial, historical curatorial, exhibition design, graphic design, media,

public programs, website, or writing. Required to cross collaborate, most groups

shouldered multiple tasks.285 The writing team, for instance, wrote grant proposals and

press releases, edited the wall texts, labels, and the brochure copy, and helped to prepare

all other written materials including the docent tours. At least one professional assisted

each team. David Terry and I divided duties as the curators for the exhibition’s historical

components and as such, worked closely with the historical curatorial team as their

mentors. Ciscle also provided each team with other “resources” (individuals to answer

questions or give advice).”286 All participants understood the project as shared equally

between the students, mentors, advisors, and institutional sponsors and agreed that the

exhibition contents and organization (together with all its related parts) were finalized only through group consensus.287

As the class planned it, “At Freedom’s Door” began at the Maryland Historical

Society. The exhibition there considered two large “primary” themes----Slavery in

Maryland (divided into sub-themes including the Middle Passage, Building Slavery in the state, and relationships between slaves and slaveholders) and Resistance to slavery, which featured antislavery sentiment among whites and freedom-seeking activities by

African Americans. Because Terry requested that “At Freedom’s Door” not duplicate

material already presented in his museum’s permanent exhibition, the Lewis’ opening

284 The original historical curatorial team members were Jennifer Lee, Charlotte Albertson, Myrtis Bedolla, Katie Dobbins, and Sally Massad. 285 Team tasks, April-May 2006, GCEDS-MICA. 286 For everyone involved, see “Credits,” At Freedom’s Door, 18 287 Ciscle, “Project Overview,” At Freedom’s Door, 3. 144

section concentrated on how African Americans developed community through work and involvement in emerging early 19th-century African American independent educational and religious institutions. The Lewis’s second theme, “Imagining Slavery: freedom in mind, body & spirit,” integrated long-standing stereotypes about African Americans that

“perpetua[ted] the institution of slavery” together with objects that demonstrated “the inner resolve and communal resilience of African Americans.”288 At the Lewis, student

curators juxtaposed historical objects and imagery that revealed the survival of African

cultural traditions in Maryland food, language, music, and spiritual practices) with art

and popular culture objects that displayed stereotypic imagery including mammy

saltshakers and other racially based caricatures.289 This included a powerful drawing

from the 1860s in India ink and wash drawing by David Claypoole Johnston (1799-1865)

entitled “Early Development of Southern Chivalry.” It illustrates a young well-dressed

white boy flogging a black female doll, tied by the wrists to a chair with her dress bodice suggestively pulled down while his sister, holding a partially clothed male slave doll, awaits her turn with the whip.290

The historical curatorial team created a preliminary historical object list that

totaled about 125 items.291 The contemporary curatorial team and the historical team

worked together in an effort to match the exhibition’s contemporary art selections as closely as possible to the historical material. For example, at the Lewis, they paired a cast iron bootjack circa 1880 that depicted a nude African American woman on her back with

288 David Taft Terry, “Beyond the Door: The Challenge to Freedom After Slavery,” At Freedom’s Door, 13. 289 Curatorial Team Themes statement, 4/25/06 and revised version, 5/2/06, GCEDS-MICA. 290 An identical drawing attributed to Johnston is in the Johnston Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society. “Southern Chivalary” was never published by Johnston. Nancy Davis purchased this example for the MHS collection. 291 See untitled document that begins “I. Bringing Slavery to Maryland—MDHS.” Also Rice and the Historical Curatorial Team, “At Freedom’s Door Object List,” revision 3, undated (ca. March 2006), both GCEDS-MICA. 145

legs splayed out (accessioned at MHS as “Naughty Nelly”) with Alison Saar’s 1990s

sculpture “Strange Fruit,” whose title brings to mind the Billie Holiday song, as the piece

evokes images of lynching and the sexual exploitation of African American women.

Using found metal objects including rusted tin roofing, Saar creates a life-size nude

female figure with a face marked by large pursed red painted lips, who hangs upside

down from a rope tied around her ankles.292 Together the pieces articulated the

dehumanized and subordinate position of African American women that extended past

slavery.

Even as their sense of Maryland’s complicated enslaved past grew, the

students’ grasp of methodology and interpretation remained overly simplistic. The class

frequently conflated the exhibition storyline by regarding past events in the context of

their own life experience. Often they treated historical objects and works of art as the

same. As the first academic year concluded, however, the students passionately embraced

what had become their shared vision for the exhibition. “The making of history never

stops; we are making history at this very moment,” the class declared in a written

statement.293 That determined focus on activism and advocacy gave “At Freedom’s

Door’s” its freshness and evident relevance.

As the MICA spring semester closed in 2006, everything appeared to be on

schedule for the February 2007 opening. Several setbacks occurred, which placed the

project in jeopardy. The Lewis Museum’s registrar failed to process any loan requests in

the agreed upon timeframe and this eliminated some important historical objects and

works of art from the exhibition. More seriously, MHS suffered severe financial setbacks

292 Due to budget cuts and a late loan request, the Saar piece did not appear in the actual exhibition. 293 Historical Curatorial Team, “At Freedom’s Door: Challenging Slavery in Maryland,” undated Power Point (ca. April 2006), GCEDS-MICA. 146

due to its overexpansion from different building and acquisition projects and a new

director who lasted less than three months on the job. To cut expenses, the MHS Board of

Trustees initiated employee lay-offs that removed key staff members involved in “At

Freedom’s Door.” In order to save the project, MICA assumed complete responsibility

for the finances and subsequently raised the remaining funds needed to complete “At

Freedom’s Door.”

As budget reductions reduced the historical content further, the art prevailed---as

the more striking, dynamic, and powerful presence within the exhibition.294 As Bettina

Carbonell points out in her review of the exhibition series, “Slavery in New York” at the

New-York Historical Society, there is a difference between “art and artifacts as cultural

witnesses” and “At Freedom’s Door’s” conceptual framework also failed to recognize

this difference. 295 Quite possibly, the scattered objects and historic images related to

antislavery possibly sent the wrong message to some viewers. Writing about exhibitions

part of the UK abolition of the slave trade bicentennial, Margot Minardi suggests that

abolitionist objects---decorated with idealized or contrived portraits of slaves and the

like---in actuality can project a “racialized nostalgia” that threatens to sentimentalize

slavery.296 On the other hand, the art ironically created to challenge deeply held

stereotypes ran the risk of perpetrating further the same racist ideas.

294 For example, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania was willing to lend William Still’s original manuscript record for his Underground Railroad station, which many Maryland enslaved fugitives passed through but it needed thousands of dollars of conservation. 295 Bettina M. Carbonell, “The Syntax of Objects and the Representation of History: Speaking of Slavery in New York,” History and Theory 47 (May 2009): 126, accessed April 28, 2014, doi:128.164.170.99. “Slavery in New York” took place at The New-York Historical Society 2005-2006. It included two historical exhibitions and a separate art exhibition. 296 Margot Minardi, “Making Slavery Visible (Again):The Nineteenth-Century Roots of Revisionist Recovery in New England” in Ana Lucia Araujo, ed., Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (London: Routledge, 2012), 93. 147

Conversations about the project between the students and different community organizations in Baltimore began a full year before the opening. The Public Program team sent letters to various groups that promised to accept all public suggestions

“enthusiastically… because our purpose is to create effective programs that will educate,

motivate, and unify the community.”297 Throughout spring and fall 2006, students

organized a series of open forums to begin a dialogue with the public about the exhibition’s ideas. These meetings directly addressed the legacies of slavery, and sometimes provoked angry commentary from community members, although attendees

appeared to appreciate the efforts made by these young students who also served as each

session’s moderators. In March 2006, for example, at a crowded meeting held at the

MHS, a racially diverse audience discussed at some length the national problem of young black men languishing in prison, often for petty offenses. Several young African

American men in the meeting talked openly and movingly about their own past

incarcerations. Individuals applauded the two student moderators (one white and the other African American) who spoke openly about how they reconciled difficult moments in their partnership.

The exhibition opened on February 3, 2007, and remained on view for 10 months.

In total, the exhibition consisted of about 200 objects and art pieces loaned from thirty- one different institutions. Art critic Deborah McLeod described the entire show as

“thought-provoking, comprehensive, and potent.” She described the two exhibitions as establishing “a fluid conduit between past and present as the artwork and artifacts cross back and forth over the line that divides time. It transports all who wish enlightenment

297 Form letter from the Public Program group to community groups, undated (fall 2006), GCEDS-MICA. 148

with the grave efficiency of Harriet Tubman repeatedly crossing the North and South to

assist the travelers on the Underground Railroad.” 298

A striking entrance sign created by the exhibition design team unified the crisp

and modern design presentation at each museum. The MHS installation opened with a rusty, spiked slave collar (ca. 1820), a sobering and emblematic artifact that represented power, subordination, and physical punishment, which set the stage for the exhibition’s messages. Visitors passed through a gallery that established slavery shortly after

Maryland’s founding. It discussed the Middle Passage, the traumatic voyage from Africa across the Atlantic, involuntarily undertaken by millions of enslaved Africans to the New

World. Accompanied by a photo enlargement of a Maryland Gazette advertisement that announced the arrival and sale of “country people” at the Annapolis dock paired with an original nineteenth-century antislavery broadside, two contemplative art pieces, a Romare

Bearden silk screen print and a watercolor by Jerry Pinkney called “The Old African,” illustrated slave ships off the African coast.

In the next room, an 1805 painting by Francis Guy offered the serene and untroubled view of slavery projected by Maryland’s white slaveholders. The image shows Perry Hall Plantation slaves diligently at work in the fields under the supervision of their white owner and his overseer. Nearby cases held slave-made or used pieces reflecting several Maryland plantation locations, grouped together with handwritten slave rosters and other documentary items. Dominating an adjacent wall, Whitfield Lovell’s large-scale painting, inspired by a post-slavery studio portrait of female domestic workers at Hampton Mansion, portrays several African American women. In an overt reference to

298 Deborah McLeod, “Never Forget: At Freedom’s Door Reminds Viewers that Slavery’s Cultural Chains Haven’t Been Completely Unshackled,” Baltimore City Paper, March 21, 2007, accessed April 18, 2014, http://www2.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=13407. 149

“Jim Crow,” Lovell applied several sinister-looking taxidermied crows along the painting’s lower edge. The piece complimented William Christenberry’s nearby installation, “Works from ‘The Klan Room,” which, together with a series of Klan drawings by the artist, features a small tableau of doll-like burlap figures wearing flowing white Ku Klux Klan robes and pointed hoods (some dipped in wax) plus other items mounted on wooden stands and platforms.299 On first glance, the Christenberry piece

seems benign, but on closer inspection, it becomes more disturbing, speaking directly to what the artist calls “strange and secret brutality” against African American by white supremacists. Through its ability to conceptualize and illustrate slavery more concretely, the art assumed a formidable moral authority absent from the less compelling looking historical objects/documents.

A series of framed original runaway slave broadsides launched the exhibition section entitled, “Resistance to Slavery,” accompanied by historical objects including a long and striking -looking corn knife used by a runaway slave as a weapon during the

1851 raid on Christiana, Pennsylvania. Close to a large and vibrant painting by Arvie

Smith, that depicts Maryland freedom seekers, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, two large and striking quilts made by Joan Gaither (who describes herself as a documentary storyteller) dominated this gallery. Especially beautiful and moving was her piece called “Maryland, My Maryland” that hung from the ceiling in the middle of the room. Ornately decorated with gilt, beads, and feathers, made in rich cranberry and gold velvets, Gaither embroidered the quilt on both sides with a chronology of slavery in

Maryland as well as excerpts from different Black Codes and related laws.

299 “The Klan Room” is a piece that Christenberry began working on in 1979. He displays the drawings, dolls, and signs differently at different venues. 150

Approaching the exhibition’s conclusion, another striking art installation evoked

the enduring legacy of slavery. Artist Maren Hassinger’s 13-minute video projection,

which the project commissioned, applied labels such as “Nigga,” “Uncle Tom,” and

“Welfare Mothers,” onto a single image, Henry P. Moore’s 1862 photograph of ex-slaves harvesting sweet potatoes in the Sea Islands; while a musical sound-track ranging from

spirituals to hip hop plays in the background. Hassinger’s wall-size piece seemed almost to mock a final case that displayed historical materials that documented the end of slavery in Maryland during the Civil War era. These included a U.S. Colored Troop roster book that registered African Americans from the state who served in the Union Army. Entries listed many individuals as “runaway slaves.” A sketchbook by a Confederate prisoner of war illustrated African American guards at Point Lookout, Maryland, open to an image

captioned “Bottom Rail’s on Top Now,” portraying an African American soldier who

now guards his former master. As visitors exited the exhibition, they passed a large photographic enlargement that showed hundreds of jubilant African Americans gathered in nearby Mount Vernon Square in 1866 to celebrate emancipation. To counter this expressive image of hope, the exhibition sought to remind visitors that the battle for freedom did not end with slavery’s demise. Located across from the photograph, Benny

Andrews 2006 “Still Here,” a large-scale drawing referencing St. Sebastian, illustrates an

African American man, hiding behind a shattered tree stump pierced with arrows on a foreground littered with slingshot stones and more arrows.

At the Lewis, the exhibition opened with a large (and arresting) sculptural iron gate commissioned from the artist, Sam Christian Holmes, which stood across from an early nineteenth-century portrait of Congressman Alexander Contee Hanson and his

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family posed together with their unidentified female slave who stands passively at their side. Close by but in sharp contrast to the cozy Hanson family portrait was the small but striking, well-known carte de visite portrait of Gordon, a former Louisiana slave, whose whip-scarred back made him a minor celebrity in 1863. Holmes called his piece

“Freedom’s Gate,” which echoed the exhibition’s title and themes. McLeod, writing in

Baltimore’s City Paper, interpreted the gate as reminiscent of the clanking of slaves’ chains but also found it suggestive of the salvation that perhaps lay on slavery’s other side. She observed, “To encounter this ethereal gate going in is to see fully the journey ahead, the manner of hardship, faith, and fortitude providing the necessary code to key into its lock. To encounter this gate going out is to consent to its provisional terms of awareness, justice, and benevolence.”300 Although visitors could choose their own

pathways through the large gallery space, they glimpsed the Holmes gate whenever they

turned or looked back through the exhibition.

Like MHS, the art included in the Lewis installation offered explicit social or political commentary on the American present that directly referenced the enslaved past.

Linda Day Clark’s photographs of surviving plantation architecture include shadowy

portraits that suggest a ghostly slave presence. To create his triptych, “Man, Spirit and

Mask” (1999), Willie Cole scorches paper with a flat iron, the kind he recalls used by

women in his family who worked as laundresses, to make imagery suggestive of African

scarification patterns. Michael Platt’s print “Tattoos in the Wall,” commissioned for the

exhibition, draws inspiration from the artist’s experiences visiting Ghana and the slave

quarters at Hampton Plantation. According to Platt, his work “represents a survivor of the

300 McLeod, “Never Forget.” 152

Middle Passage, who carries the marks of the past and bears memories and marks of a

new life in Maryland.” 301

In another area, designers grouped images from David Levinthal’s “Blackface”

series together. Using a large-scale glossy Polaroid format, Levinthal photographs

arrangements of different toys and other objects (usually strange ones) that exaggerate

aspects of American popular culture. He uses African American memorabilia to reveal,

“how prevalent stereotyping has been” in modern popular culture and this part of his work has proved controversial in the past. In the mid-1990s, the International Center for

Photography cancelled plans to exhibit the entire “Blackface” series, amid protests over

Levinthal’s racial caricatures but they raised no objections at the Lewis, perhaps because we recognize today the conscious deployment of negative racial stereotypes by African

American artists.302 Curators placed objects that reflected 19th-century abolitionist

sentiment (English Staffordshire illustrating “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”) with plastic stock

figurines of Mammy and Sambo in a sort of ironic dialogue between each other and the

Levinthal work.

At each museum, working under the motto, “Art is Communication. Art Can

Create Change,” the Art Education team helped to shape the visitor experience within the

exhibition by fulfilling the dialogic element that the entire class imagined as a part of the

exhibition interpretation. They developed a series of contemplative questions intended to work as textural triggers for the audience. Silkscreened high on the walls, the queries

included, “How does this exhibition make you feel?”; “How would you feel if you were

not allowed to see your family and friends again?”; “What do you do in your family to

301 Artist’s statement, Platt Studio, accessed April 18, 2014, http://mplattstudio.com/home.html. 302 Horace Brockington, “David Levinthal: Black Face,” Plexus/ Review, undated (1997), accessed April 18, 2014, http://www.plexus.org/review/brockington/Levinthal.html. 153

remember your family history and heritage?” and “How can you help others?” These

simple interrogations effectively connected the narrative threads layered within the

exhibition, through which the students hoped visitors would consider “the [larger]

questions that the exhibition raises: ‘where have we been?’ ‘where are we now?’ and

‘where are we going?’” 303

Both installations included video presentations made by the Media team that were located at the exit. At MHS, the film documented the project itself and featured

interviews with participants. A short performance piece at the Lewis titled “Greed” ran

for about two minutes. Made in collaboration with a local Baltimore organization called

Kids on the Hill that sponsored media training for at-risk teens, it attempted to relate the

effect of slavery’s legacy on today’s African Americans by linking it to the easy but

addictive and corrupting money made in the drug trade. The video opens with a young black man walking through a door. He is carrying a small suitcase. The voiceover (a

young black male voice) says “Greed: the root of slavery.” A pulsing drum beat plays as

the man runs through a decaying Baltimore neighborhood decorated with graffiti and

trash. He falls down on the ground and appears to be unconscious. In the next frame, the

viewer sees a ripple of water, followed by a dock with a pile of money stacked on it,

which the man---now awake and smiling---turns over in his hand, waves, and kisses.

Then suddenly the viewer hears the sound of a whip cracking. Now the same man is

standing with his exposed back to the camera while the lash continues to fall repeatedly.

Next, we see him on the ground, his skin covered by bloody lash marks. The young man

303 At Freedom’s Door press release, December 5, 2006, GCEDS-MICA. All 12 questions that appeared on the walls in “At Freedom’s Door’s” are reproduced in the pamphlet created by the Art Education team, Fun Facts and Freedom: A Young Visitor’s Guide to At Freedom’s Door: Challenging Slavery in Maryland”[p.5].

154

resumes his run across the docks holding the bag but when he stops and opens it, a rusty

chain and shackle are inside. He drops the bag suddenly to his feet, as if it is too heavy to

carry any longer. As the video ends, the voice speaks again, “Can we escape our roots?”

Through its drama and fast pace, the film managed to captivate (in some cases, puzzle or

even dismay) visitors as they left the exhibition, usually stopping them in their tracks to

watch it. By assigning blame to white society for the drug economy devastating black

America and urban Baltimore, the video took a sharper tone largely absent from much of

the rest of the exhibition. If the exhibition design had accorded “Greed” a larger physical

presence within the Lewis installation, it might have repositioned the overall

interpretation. 304

By several different measures, “At Freedom’s Door” achieved a reasonable

success. In addition to praise from local critics, Baltimore Magazine named it “Best

Exhibition of the Year” and the Baltimore City Paper, “Best Museum Experience.”

Visitors found it engaging. During the show’s run, the entire class took turns giving tours almost every day to the public who responded positively to the student guides, remarking that their tours stimulated considerable reflection.305 Of course, a single museum or

exhibition’s ability to enact actual change is limited. Yet, in May 2007, as part of the

global bicentennial commemoration of Great Britain’s abolition of the slave trade, the

UK’s Deputy Prime Minister John Leslie Prescott visited the Lewis and toured the

exhibition. At a press conference Prescott stood near the Holmes gate where he

apologized for the “active role Britain played in the slave trade…Britain’s rise to global

304 Kids on the Hill closed in 2009 but a group named New Lens doing similar work in Baltimore maintains the organization’s video archives. 305 Due to changes in personnel at both MHS and the Lewis, I have been unable to get access to visitation figures or the visitor comment books. Ciscle does not have copies in his project archives. 155

pre-eminence was partly dependent on a system of colonial slave labor.” Giving the exhibition’s mission a further global spin, Prescott called on the modern world to end the

“unspeakable cruelties” of slavery (such as child prostitution) that linger today across the

world.306 Inspired by “At Freedom’s Door,” Maryland State Senator Verna L. Jones,

chair of the state’s Legislative Black Caucus, sponsored Senate Joint Resolution 6 and

House Joint Resolution 4 (each entitled “Slavery in Maryland”), which passed both

houses. The legislation requires the State of Maryland to acknowledge the institution of

slavery and its lingering effects. Under Senator Jones’ leadership, the Legislative Black

Caucus of Maryland co-sponsored “At Freedom’s Door’s” final weekend and used the

occasion to launch “The Conversation Continues,” an ongoing educational initiative on

race relations inspired by the exhibition. A passionate dialogue about inequality and

parity led by activists, academics, and artists including Danny Simmons, cofounder of

Def Poetry Jam, moderated by the students, closed the exhibition.307

Slavery continues to holds its currency as a critical subject for consideration and

debate within the public sphere, in which museums belong. In closing her discussion of

Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s imagery, Tilett declares, “a confrontation with the complex past of

slavery is the only path toward a sustainable practice of American democracy.”308 In its

entirety, the project underscores the direct role that the history of slavery can play in

interrogating, complicating, and potentially dislocating/dislodging present and seemingly

settled notions of racial and national ideology in the museum. “At Freedom’s Door’s”

strengthen as an exhibition derived from the students’ powers to authorize, shape, re-

306 Glenn McNatt, “British Leader Conveys Slavery Regrets” Baltimore Sun, May 22, 2007, accessed April 23, 2014, http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/baltsun/doc/406169221.html?FMT=AB. 307 Press release for “At Freedom’s Door” closing events, 26 September 2007, GCEDS-MICA. 308 Tilett, Sites of Slavery, 93. 156

narrate, and frame the racial hegemony of nation in distinctly personal ways, as they

“examine[d], challenge[d], analyze[d], contrast[ed], and, most important, question[ed]

where we come from, where we are today and where we are headed.”309 Although

admittedly an unusual example, the project emphasizes that strategic and productive

partnerships can occur between “majority” and “minority” museums and may offer one

avenue in negotiating challenging subjects like slavery in public. As was the case in “At

Freedom’s Door,” Tracy Teslow suggests that exhibitions about race that “frame their

claims through some form of local and personal authority” generally find a more positive

reception.310

The students who created “At Freedom’s Door” left the project believing that

it gave them a unique opportunity to broker much-needed conversations about race nationally and locally. Many claimed new stronger ties to their adopted home, Baltimore.

A MICA student, Alex Matzner summarized her feelings, “Just to understand the social, economic, and political forces that have affected this city and still affect this city---that has been really important for me in what I know about myself, recognizing how I am part of the situation and community now. I think a lot of us found how we were connected to this city through this.”311 Some expressed a new appreciation for the museum’s capacity

to promote social change. Rebecca Nagle who served on the student design team commented, “People often overlook artwork and a museum’s capacity to instigate change.

It is exciting to be part of that process.”312 Several students reported that they hoped to

309 Exhibition development students, “Exhibition Overview,”At Freedom’s Door, 4-5. 310 Tracy L. Teslow, “A Troubled Legacy: Making and Unmaking Race in the Museum,” Museums & Social Issues 2 (April 2007): 37, accessed January 28, 2014, doi:10.1179/msi.2007.2.1.11. 311 McCabe, 20. 312 “MICA course allows students to receive experience in building a major gallery exhibition,” MICA press release, December 5, 2006, GCEDS-MICA. 157

pursue museum careers. In an optimistic statement published in the catalogue by the

entire class, they forecast a sanguine future for American democracy, as the country

moved beyond its slave history to establish a de-racialized society that they described as

“unified, compassionate, and holistic.” The group went on to characterize the process of nearly two years of collaboration between themselves, artists, and museum professionals as a “true meeting of the minds” and concluded optimistically, “Through these conversations wounds can heal and empowerment may begin.”313

313 Class statement, “Exhibition Overview,” At Freedom’s Door, 4-5. 158

Chapter 5. “Slavery at Monticello: Paradox of Liberty”: An Exhibition Collaboration between the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation

Sometime during summer 2016, the Smithsonian Institution will open its National

Museum of African American History and Culture (hereafter, NMAAHC) on the

National Mall. The building, together with its collections and exhibitions, will represent the most significant American national museum dedicated to African American history built to date. Lonnie Bunch, the founding director, and his staff plan to develop the museum to tell an inclusive story with which to attract the broadest possible audience.314Although its methodology and exhibition objects are yet unidentified, the institution promises to devote substantial space and resources to interpreting slavery

(what Bunch calls the “last great unmentionable”). Bunch, whose father’s great- grandmother was a slave, declares that NMAAHC plans to focus on the institution’s

“human dimension,” arguing that it will “tell the unvarnished truth, the pain as well as resiliency…Slavery had a ripple in all aspects of America.”315 Bunch’s interest in

American slavery is longstanding; he curated the slavery section included in the National

Museum of American History’s permanent exhibition on nineteenth-century communities

(now closed) earlier in his career. With respect to slavery, NMAAHC hopes to strike a resonant yet delicate balance that speaks to insider African American audiences as well as groups less familiar with its history and legacy. Bunch is seeking a forum within his

314 This has long been the NMAAHC’s charge. See Fath Davis Ruffins, “Culture Wars Won and Lost, Part II: The National African-American Museum Project,” Radical History Review 70 (1998): 93, accessed July 14, 2014, doi:10.12.15/01636545-1998-70-78. In addition, Calvin Tomkins, “A Sense of Place,” The New Yorker, September 23, 2013, 76, accessed July 18, 2014, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/09/23/130923fa-fact-tomkins. 315 Maria Recio, “National African American History Museum grapples with slavery,” Detroit Free Press, February 17, 2013, accessed June 30, 2014, http://www.freep.com/article/20130217/302170204/National- African-American-History-Museum-grapples-with-slavery. 159 museum “to discuss—candidly and openly---the impact, legacy, and contemporary meaning of slavery.”316 In 2009 Bunch and his museum entered into a collaborative exhibition project with Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia estate Monticello that produced a traveling exhibition, “Slavery at Monticello: Paradox of Liberty,” which Bunch described as rehearsing NMAAHC’s arguments about slavery employing Monticello as a lens. In an interview Bunch gave the Associated Press at the exhibition’s opening, he affirmed,

“This is a story we know we have to tell, and this is a story we know is going to be difficult and going to be challenging, but this new museum has to tell the story. In many ways, the Smithsonian is the great legitimizer, so if we can wrestle with slavery and

Jefferson, other people can [too].”317 Bunch’s statements suggest that he intends that the national narrative conveyed by NMAAHC feature a forthright interpretation of slavery.

This chapter evaluates the exhibition and its co-creation, situated against Monticello’s decades-long struggle to interpret slavery that took on a greater urgency in 2000 when the institution publicly acknowledged Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with the enslaved woman, Sally Hemings. Yet, as this case study suggests, Monticello’s current approach to

Jefferson and slavery remains selective, and “Slavery at Monticello” inclines towards the conventional and the celebratory. In general, the exhibition may be representative of a recent trend towards uncritical exhibition representations by museums identified by critics, which relates this new timidity to factors such as increased competition for audiences, donor preferences, and risks associated with negative publicity. Yet with

316 Lonnie Bunch, “Embracing Ambiguity: The Challenge of Interpreting African American History in Museums,” Museums & Social Issues 2 (2007):47-48, accessed July 17, 2014, doi:10.1179/msi.2007.2.1.45. 317 Brett Zongker, “New Smithsonian Exhibit Explores Jefferson’s Slave Ownership,” Huff Post, January 25, 2012, accessed December 30, 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/25/smithsonian-jefferson- slave_n_1231138.html. 160 respect to slavery, the 2007 bicentennial commemorating the abolition of the British slave trade established the new International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and resulted in more than 100 temporary (some experimental) museum exhibitions and educational programs across the United Kingdom. 318 The Jefferson-Heming relationship offers the potential to reframe our understandings of our divisive racial history. By recognizing the far-reaching “moral and symbolic meanings” attached to the union, museums may find the means to redefine long-standing “historical myths that constitute national identity” to integrate a multiracial America.319

Most Americans value, even venerate, the early political figures who founded our country. Chief among them is Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President and the author of the

Declaration of Independence, among other accomplishments, celebrated for his intelligence and creativity yet a slaveholder. There may be no better place to contemplate the inherent contradictions created by slavery in American democracy than at Monticello,

Jefferson’s home, which is open as a museum. Since the late 1980s, Monticello, administered by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (hereafter, the Foundation), has interpreted slavery to visitors through a growing set of guided tours and programs, permanent and special exhibitions, and ongoing archaeological investigations. Thanks to extraordinary documentary records combined with extensive archaeological collections, historians know a great deal about both white and black residents during the Jefferson

318 Anthony Alan Shelton, “The skeptical curator. Reflections on Nuno Porto’s ‘Offshore’ (Museu de Antropologia, Institituto da Antropologia, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal. 6th March-7th April 2006),” Museum Management and Curatorship 23 (2008): 213, 226-227, accessed July 14, 20014, doi: 10.1080/09647770802233740. See also Laurajane Smith, Geoffrey Cubitt, and Emma Waterton, “Guest Editorial: Museums and the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade,” Museum and Society 8 (2010):122-127, accessed July 18, 2014, ISSN: 1479-8360. 319 Herman Belz, “The Legend of Sally Hemings,” Academic Questions 25 (2012): 224, accessed May 5, 2014, doi: 10.1007/S12129-012-9287-6. 161 occupancy from the mid-eighteenth century until the 1830s. Yet the extent to which the

Foundation’s interpretation equally recognizes “the owners and the owned, linked together by slavery’s law and blood” distinguishes Monticello from other historic sites associated with early slaveholder-leaders such as James Madison’s Montpelier or George

Washington’s Mount Vernon.320

Nearly half a million visitors visit Thomas Jefferson’s historic plantation,

Monticello, outside Charlottesville, Virginia, annually. Designated a World Heritage site in 1987 and illustrated on the U.S. nickel coin for much longer, the main house is situated in a bucolic spot at the top of a small mountain (hence the Italian name). Designed by

Jefferson, an amateur architect, the house reflects influences gathered from his European travels and architectural design books found in Jefferson’s extensive library. Docent-led tours take visitors through the spacious and elegant first floor that includes Jefferson’s library and bedroom; the parquet-floored parlor that displays his art collection; a dining room equipped with a dumb waiter for food service; and the entrance hall decorated with historic maps and artifacts collected by Lewis and Clark that features a clever Great

Clock. Tourists view intact and recently restored service spaces such as the kitchen, wine cellar, laundry, and stable, which Jefferson placed below the main structure or adjacent to it, to mask household sounds and odors created by his enslaved help from family and guests. Soon physical recreations of enslaved housing and workshops will join a recently opened outdoor exhibition that describes the Mulberry Row slave quarter. It is difficult to visit Monticello today without grasping how slavery sustained every aspect of

Jefferson’s life.

320 Annette Gordon-Reed, remarks on the opening of the Smith Visitors Center at Monticello, April 15, 2009, accessed May 9, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReoiJiAImks. 162

Historians have determined that Jefferson owned some 600 plus enslaved individuals over the his life time: at any one time, the largest group were field hands who lived on scattered quarters adjacent to areas under agricultural cultivation that belonged to the plantation. Located very near the main house is the Mulberry Row quarter (only one original building survives), home to Jefferson’s artisan and domestic slaves who resided and in some cases, also worked there. Upon his death in 1826, Jefferson’s heirs sold most slaves, along with the house and other possessions, to settle his massive debts, although his will freed a handful of favored individuals. What we know today about slavery at Monticello comes from analyses of Jefferson’s extensive surviving archives, archaeological investigations over three decades, and other research conducted by independent scholars or the historians and curators employed by the Foundation, which has owned and operated the site since 1923. 321 However, comparatively little direct information exists to describe Jefferson, his family or life at Monticello from the perspectives of his slaves.322

At Monticello, staff interest in presenting slave life to visitors dates back to the mid- 1980s when the Foundation prepared an exhibition about the plantation for their first visitor’s center, which opened in 1986 at the foot of Monticello mountain. Also influential were studies by Jim Bear, the former Curator and Director and others into

Jefferson’s records for Monticello. Beginning in 1987, their work resulted in publication

321 My familiarity with the Foundation’s approach to slavery comes from my work as a consultant to several projects, beginning with “The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello” exhibition in 1993. I also was part of a consultant team for the re-installation of the service areas and later, exhibitions in the new Visitor’s Center. The extent of my involvement, however, consisted of attending meetings and commenting on interpretive materials. 322 A notable exception is a memoir by Isaac Granger, a Monticello nail maker and blacksmith, who took the surname Jefferson in freedom. See Isaac Jefferson, Memories of a Monticello Slave. Ed. Raymond W. Logan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1951). 163 of his detailed “Farm Book” that essentially documents daily work by the plantation’s slaves. More recently, under the direction of Lucia (Cinder) Stanton (who served as the

Foundation’s resident slavery expert and spokesperson until retirement), a series of initiatives about slavery at Monticello began in earnest in 1993 during the 250th celebration of Jefferson’s birth. These included the first outdoor tours of Mulberry Row focused on enslaved life; the formation of an African American Advisory Committee to consult on the site’s interpretation of slavery; and the establishment of the “Getting

Word” project by Stanton, intended to locate descendants of Jefferson’s slaves and interview them. Nevertheless, for at least the first twenty years, Stanton acknowledges that Monticello staff viewed slave life primarily through the eyes of Jefferson, his overseers, and close family members like his daughters or guests, seldom from the viewpoint of the enslaved African Americans who lived and worked there. 323 As

Stephen Hanna generally observes, “white-centric narratives containing an often hidden

Africanist presence” frequently construct the interpretation at many of America’s historic sites and history museums.324 This certainly was the case at Monticello: the site focused on Thomas Jefferson and his white family. The African American interpretation appeared halfhearted. Employing the term “servant,” docents briefly (sometimes only when prodded) recognized the slaves’ roles in the house and on the estate but gave

323 Lucia Stanton, “Slavery at Monticello,” March 23, 2012, talk sponsored by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., accessed May 5, 2014, http://www.span.org/video/?305062-1/slavery-Thomas-Jeffersons-Monticello. See also Lucia Stanton, “A Life’s Work at Monticello: Thomas Jefferson, Enslaved Families, and a Historian,” Common-Place 13 (2013), accessed May 6, 2014, http://www.common-place.org/vol-13/no-03/author/. Scholars generally hold Stanton’s work in high esteem. See, for example, Frank Cogliano, “ ‘Those Who Labor My Happiness’: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello by Lucia Stanton,” Journal of the Early Republic 33 (Summer 2013): 350-353, accessed December 28, 2013, doi: 10.1353/jer.2013.0031. Cogliano states, “Cinder Stanton, more than any other scholar has revolutionized our understanding of Jefferson and slavery” (352). 324 Stephen P. Hanna, “A Slavery Museum? Race, Memory, and Landscape in Fredericksburg, Virginia,” Southeastern Geographer 48 (2008): 319, accessed June 11, 2014, URL:http://search.proquest.com/proxygw.wrlc.org/docview/218137294?accountid=11243. 164 visitors little detail. Exhibition area signage, for example, discussed Jefferson’s innovations in design (even in the household arena) or concentrated on his food and wine preferences. Monticello offered little to no context about the system of slavery or drew comparisons to other Virginia plantations similar to Monticello. Stanton’s painstaking slow research pace may have been partially to blame for what information educators conveyed to guides during training but in truth, the Foundation’s administration remained satisfied not to break any new ground with their interpretation of slavery. Their position started to shift in 1998 by necessity when DNA testing demonstrated a direct link between descendants of Sally Hemings, a Monticello slave, and Jefferson himself.

The story of the liaison between Jefferson and the enslaved Hemings first surfaced almost two hundred years ago. Rumors about their relationship appeared in

Virginia newspapers in 1802, circulated by his enemies in writings that mention a mistress named “Dusky Sally” and a single surviving political cartoon by James Akin provocatively called “A Philosophic Cock,” that depicts the couple as a rooster and hen

(now owned by the American Antiquarian Society). Outside of routine recordkeeping notations, Jefferson himself never addressed the mistress rumors publically or apparently commented on Hemings in his private correspondence. Sally Hemings left no known written records. She makes her first significant appearance as an enslaved 14-year-old girl who accompanied Jefferson’s daughter to Paris in the 1780s when he served as the

U.S. minister to France. Hemings herself was biracial, the product of what seems to be a long-term relationship between her mother Elizabeth (called Betty) (the daughter of a slave and an English sea captain) and Jefferson’s father-in-law that eventually produced six children. During slavery’s two and half century duration, this type of liaison persisted

165 and owners frequently took sexual advantage of female slaves. Because no image of Sally

Hemings survives, speculation abounds about her possible resemblance to her half-sister,

Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, who brought the Hemings family to

Monticello as part of her inheritance but died tragically in 1782. Beginning on her return to Monticello from France in 1790, Hemings went on to have at least six children with

Jefferson---some of whom, according to visitors to Monticello in the early 1800s, closely resembled their father. After working most of her life as a household domestic servant,

Jefferson’s heirs informally freed Heming after his death in 1826. Jefferson’s white descendants (joined later by his male biographers) denied that any sort of intimate relationship existed between the two: they instead offered up several nephews as potential fathers for Sally’s biracial children. Following most twentieth-century Jefferson scholars

(including Dumas Malone, Jefferson’s biographer), the Foundation officially denied the union. The first challenge to their position emerged in 1974 with the publication of Fawn

Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, which took seriously Jefferson’s possible intimate relationship with Hemings. Later Brodie described the widespread renunciations her book faced from professional historians and biographers, the

Foundation, and Jefferson descendants as “Historical Silence.” 325 Following Brodie,

Barbara Chase-Riboud’s historical novel, Sally Hemings, published in 1979, later inspired several Hollywood films including the lush Merchant-Ivory production,

“Jefferson in Paris.” Several documentary films including the multi-episode Jefferson biography made by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns that aired on national American public television in 1997, also speculated about the relationship. The enduring rumors

325 Brodie’s book garnered considerable publicity. It was a “Book of the Month” Club selection, which guaranteed its wider circulation. 166 and the discussions they prompted helped position Sally Hemings conspicuously in the public imagination, and she became, as Mia Bay suggests, the most notorious “black woman who lived out her life in the slave South.”326

Particularly after Brodie’s book appeared, Monticello’s “guests” began asking docents openly and on a daily basis about the relationship---chiefly at the point when the tour reached Jefferson’s bedroom. Visitors saw a compartment above his bed where some imagined he had hidden Sally: others speculated aloud about secret passages located elsewhere within the house.327 Foundation docents became skillful at turning away tourists queries, saying no concrete evidence existed related to Hemings. This did not stop questions surfacing from many different quarters about Sally Hemings or Jefferson’s treatment of his other enslaved workers.328 Rather, the Foundation continued to construct an “exceptionalism” facade around Jefferson that directed and pervaded their interpretive approach.329 Most African American visitors to Monticello probably agreed with the

Reverend Jesse Jackson’s feelings that the Foundation was ‘throwing sand on the fires of history” by presenting such a lilywhite portrait of Jefferson as well as a one-dimensional picture of life at Monticello. Criticizing the nation’s general inability to admit Jefferson’s flaws, Roger Wilkins publically declared, “Mighty late in the day for Americans still to

326 Mia Bay, “In Search of Sally Hemings in the Post-DNA Era,” Reviews in American History 34 (2006): 407, accessed May 8, 2014, doi:10.1353/rah.2006.0000. 327 I witnessed this myself on several occasions. See also Eric Gable and Richard Handler, “Persons of Stature and the Passing Parade: Egalitarian Dilemmas at Monticello and Colonial Williamsburg,” Museum Anthropology 29 (March 2006): 9, accessed June 10, 2014, doi: 10.1525/mua.2006.29.1.5. 328 For more on this, see Eric Gable, “How We Study History Museums: Or Cultural History at Monticello,” ed. Janet Marstine, New Museum Theory and Practice (Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 109-128. Gable bases his study on observations of Monticello from 1988-1992, prior to the DNA study. 329 I remember asking myself about the latter in a 1992 planning discussion for the exhibition, “The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello,” where Monticello staff (and some historians present as well) simply refused to view Jefferson as in any way comparable to other slaveholders of his time and place. Former Monticello curator Elizabeth Chew describes the museum’s departments as silos with little or no collaboration between them (Telephone interview with Elizabeth Chew, June 19, 2014). 167 be living by myth.” 330 While the Foundation welcomed former slave Thomas Woodson’s descendants to a reunion at Monticello with great fanfare in 1993, it ignored the

Woodson claim that directly linked the family to Jefferson through Hemings (on the basis of family oral history, descendants believed Woodson to be Jefferson and Heming’s first son. His last name came from a subsequent owner). In analyzing the larger significance of Jefferson’s possible children with his female slaves, Eric Gable perceives,

“Monticello’s squeamishness was symbolic of the inability of white America to accept black America as part of the same overarching national family.” 331 In Annette Gordon-

Reed’s 1997 publication, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American

Controversy, the legal scholar asked pointedly why white historians were quick to discount evidence provided by Hemings-Jefferson children or other 19th-century African

American and argued that this failure was in itself a “legacy of slavery.” 332 As Gordon-

Reed’s book began to persuade some historians to reconsider the relationship, Dr. Eugene

Foster completed an independent DNA study of Jefferson, Hemings, and Woodson descendants.

In response to Foster’s discovery of positive DNA evidence that supported the

Jefferson-Hemings connection (but not Woodson) published in Nature magazine in 1998, the Foundation immediately issued a statement that tentatively accepted the findings. It convened a group of historians and staff, led by Cinder Stanton, to review the known evidence regarding the pair, which included correlating Hemings’ pregnancies to periods of Jefferson’s residency at Monticello and revisiting previously discounted testimony

330 Gable, 120; “Did Thomas Jefferson Have an Affair with One of his Slaves?” Recorded talk by Gordon- Reed, Stanton and Roger Wilkins, Virginia Festival of the Book, April 14, 1997, C-Span 2, accessed June 10, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=davI_EZInAE. 331 Gable, 120. 332 Gordon-Reed remarks, “Did Thomas Jefferson Have an Affair with One of his Slaves?” April 14, 1997. 168 collected from other Monticello slaves including several Hemings children who told interviewers directly that Jefferson was their father. In 2000, the Foundation issued a detailed report concluding that Jefferson was likely the father of Heming’s six children.333 In the wake of the DNA results, other Jefferson scholars, many of them closely associated with Monticello through their work, began to explore the Jefferson-

Hemings relationship focusing on the long denial through a series of conferences and publications that considered associated themes like race, white privilege, and historical memory. 334

Not everyone accepts the Jefferson-Hemings familial connection.335 After the

DNA study, a counter group formed the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, mostly funded by white Jefferson descendants but including some historians, that launched its own investigation that exonerated Jefferson. Their 2001 report (published 2011) suggested that Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph, was Hemings’ partner.336 The

Monticello Association, founded in 1913 by Jefferson’s “lineal descendants” to preserve the family cemetery on Monticello’s grounds, has angrily denied Heming’s descendants the right to belong to their group, attend their annual meeting, and to be buried on the

333 A more detailed timeline and summary can be found on the Monticello website, under “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings” A Brief Account,” accessed May 6, 2014, http:///www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings-brief-account. The Monticello 2000 report is available at http:///www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/report- research-committee-Thomas-Jefferson-and-Sally-Hemings. 334 See Peter Onuf and Jan Lewis, eds., Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999) and Scot A. French and Edward L. Ayers, “The Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson: Race and Slavery in American Memory, 1943-1993,” Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 418-456. 335 The DNA study also disproved the connection kept alive by many generations of former slave Thomas Woodson’s descendants in their oral history. Their dismay and efforts to disprove the tests are described in Sloan R. Williams, “Genetic Genealogy: the Woodson Family’s Experience,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 29 (June 2005):225-52, accessed June 10, 2014, doi: 10.1007/s11013-005-7426-3. 336 Robert F. Turner, ed., The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission (Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 2011). 169 property. Conversely, an offshoot group of Jefferson-Hemings descendants came together in 2003 to form a restorative organization known as the Monticello Community.

They received “Common Ground’s” annual award in 2010 in recognition of their mutual efforts to promote interracial healing.337

Some critics observe that the Foundation skillfully avoided a public relations debacle by refusing to deny the Jefferson-Hemings relationship while at the same time maintaining control over the story’s trajectory. This strategy conferred on Monticello the power to characterize the Jefferson-Hemings relationship to the public and therefore, to avoid addressing the miscegenation, rape, and sexual exploitation that characterized many master-slave liaisons, among other issues.338 To Monticello administrators, Annette

Gordon-Reed’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account, The Heminges of Monticello: An

American Family (2008) which casts the Jefferson-Hemings relationship fundamentally as a romance, must have come as a relief.

However, over the last fifteen years, the DNA evidence together with the museum field’s growing interest in interpreting slavery has prompted a change at Monticello that essentially recast enslaved African American labor and lives as critical to the site’s storyline. A recent study by Howard Schuman and Amy Coming recognizes that an important outcome of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship “is the interest it has stimulated

337 Their leaders include David Works, a white sixth generation great-grandson of Jefferson. The group used the “Coming to the Table” conflict resolution process promoted by the organization, “Coming to the Table-Facing History,” that brings together descendants of slaves and slaveholders. A short program about the Monticello Community group is at https//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhc1xr3CEM4 (accessed May 9, 2014). 338 Eric Gable accused Monticello of using the DNA results as a “public relations windfall because, out of the hundreds of articles that were in the national press, most would remark favorably about Monticello’s admirable lack of defensiveness in accepting with alacrity the verdict of science on an old and festering controversy” (Gable,125). 170 in slavery at Monticello and in slavery in the USA more generally… “339 The Foundation generally embraced slavery’s new prominence at their site. In a speech Dan Jordan made to the Monticello Association in 2009, the Foundation’s former president reiterated the institution’s new position, “You cannot understand Thomas Jefferson without understanding slavery, and you cannot understand Monticello without understanding its

African-American community.” 340 For some, the Foundation’s decision to remove the term “Memorial” from its name confirms Monticello’s move away from its previous uncritical celebration of Jefferson. British historian Sharon Monteith suggested that these cumulative changes at Monticello represented that “the Jefferson of African American counter-memory was gaining cultural credence over the ‘official’ historical narrative.-

This Jefferson makes slavery visible in the ideology of the nation…” 341 For many observers, Monticello’s programs and exhibition signaled a new era in the public presentation of slavery.

Scholars generally praise the Foundation’s current undertakings focused on slavery. In remarks she made at the 2009 opening of the new visitor’s center, Annette

Gordon-Reed proclaimed Monticello the “best known slave plantation in the world,” and congratulated the Foundation for its recognition and interpretation of the enslaved

African American story “to an extent unmatched” elsewhere. 342 Echoing Gordon-Reed,

Monticello today proudly professes to be among the few American museums that

339 Howard Schuman and Amy Corning, “The roots of collective memory: Public Knowledge of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson,” Memory Studies 4 (April 2011): 147, accessed May 1, 2014, doi: 10.1177/1750698010381671. 340 Jordan’s entire remarks are at http://www.monticello.org/site/planation-and-slavery/remarks-daniel-p- jordan-president-tjf-meeting-monticello-association-may. 341 Sharon Monteith, “Sally Hemings in Visual Culture: A Radical Act of the Imagination?” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 29 (May 2008):234, accessed May 5, 2014, doi: 10.1080/01440390802027889. 342 Gordon-Reed, opening remarks, April 15, 2009. 171

“paint(s) a full picture” of slavery for its visitors.343 Among other features, the new visitor’s center includes a permanent exhibition on the Monticello plantation that focuses on the enslaved community (to the exclusion of Jefferson, the traditional center of attention). A new tour called “Waiting on Liberty: Slavery in Jefferson’s Great House” debuted in 2012.344 According to Elizabeth Chew, Monticello’s former curator, the site’s docents now convey very specific information about the African American experience to museumgoers. Tours recognize enslaved workers by name, discuss their daily work and living situations at Monticello, and communicate the story of what happened to slaves and their descendants after the sale that followed Jefferson’s death in 1826.345

The Foundation’s other African American research project “Getting Word” is nearly invisible to Monticello visitors. Initiated by Stanton in 1993, researchers have located and made contact with descendants of former Jefferson slaves, taken their genealogical information, and recorded interviews. About half the individuals discovered thus far are from the Hemings family line. While other plantation sites sponsor African

American reunions for slave descendants or organize “healing events” that unite them with descendants of their slaveholders, no other museum has traced generations of their enslaved community to this extent. Stanton acknowledges that her post Gordon-Reed investigations of Sally’s son, Madison Hemings (who named Jefferson as his father in an

1873 account) ---“once he became a real person to me”--- convinced her that the

343 Elizabeth V. Chew, “Institutional Evolution: How Monticello faced and interpreted a legacy of slavery,” Museum 92 (September/October 2013):36. 344 Megan Saunders Faulkner, “Slavery at the University of Virginia: A Catalogue of Current and Past Initiatives,” unpublished report, (2013), 1, accessed December 30, 2013, www.Virginia.edu/vpdiversity/documents/SlaveryatUVA_FAULKNER_001.pdf. 345 Chew, 35. 172 memories preserved through African American oral history held real value.346 Stanton envisioned the project to “go beyond Thomas Jefferson’s own monumental archive, which neglects the human dimension of the lives of Monticello’s slaves.” 347 Primarily researchers have learned about that “human dimension”---family stories that recount descendants successful “individual lives” post slavery. As participant, Virginia Craft

Rose eloquently stated in her interview,” “We couldn’t forget slavery but we could overcome it.”348 As Jefferson’s and Heming’s daughter Harriet did (disappearing from historical record), some interviewees escaped their past completely and pass themselves off as white. As a result, the research team uncovered some painful family secrets that had concealed mixed race identities over many decades. As of 2013, “Getting Word” has interviewed more than 183 people.

Even though Stanton never intended “Getting Word” to focus “on the story of oppression” (e.g. Jefferson’s treatment of his slaves), little new information about

Monticello has surfaced from the interviews. Beyond their identification as slaves, interviewees know few details about their ancestors’ associations with Jefferson. For most “Getting Word” contributors, Stanton concludes, “slavery has erased great swaths of historical memory.”349 However, Hemings family descendants across many generations kept alive the fact of their Thomas Jefferson ancestry (even among those who lost track of other relatives) and related it to Stanton and her associate, Dianne Swann-

346 Stanton, “Slavery at Monticello” talk, March 23, 2012. See also Stanton’s remarks, “Did Thomas Jefferson Have an Affair with One of his Slaves?” April 14, 1997. Here, she recounts her lengthy first meeting with Gordon-Reed, which helped Stanton to begin to reconsider Jefferson and Hemings. 347 Lucia Stanton, “Some boilerplate text, in no particular order, for Getting Word website funding proposal,” February 4, 2011, [1]. Unpublished document provided to the author by Elizabeth Chew. 348 “Getting Word” online exhibition accessed May 7, 2014, http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and- slavery/gettingword. 349 Stanton, “Slavery at Monticello” talk, March 23, 2012. 173

Wright, with pride. 350 To date, the project has connected mostly with individuals related to Jefferson’s former artisans, household staff, and his biracial children. Presumably,

Monticello’s field hands, less intimate with Jefferson and also widely dispersed by the

1827 slave sale, felt less motivation to remember, preserve, and pass on their past.

Because “Getting Word” collects life experiences of individuals far removed from slavery at Monticello, its usefulness in furthering the museum’s understandings of plantation slavery may be limited. Additionally, the oral history archive---as evidenced by its presentation on the Monticello website--- offers a mostly uncritical celebration (and perhaps, in some cases, highly selective versions) of the post-slavery African-American experience by a relatively privileged group. Stanton herself notes, “What remains today is what was most important to the tellers and listeners, what validated their identities and preserved their values.” 351 As such, the project creates a “feel good” history that perhaps authorizes the Foundation’s lack of engagement with the national significance of the

Hemings-Jefferson relationship.

Monticello’s first exhibition venture to tackle the subject, “Slavery at Jefferson’s

Monticello: the Paradox of Liberty” opened at the National Museum of American History on January 28, 2012 and closed there on October 13, 2012. In slightly altered form, the exhibition later traveled to the Atlanta History Center (Feb 1-July 7, 2013), the Missouri

History Museum in St. Louis (August 10, 2013-March 2, 2014), and ended at its final

350 Other descendants (including others in the Heming line) claim a similar relationship to Jefferson. Jefferson’s possible sexual associations with African American women apart from Sally Hemings are discussed in Stanton’s essay, “The Other End of the Telescope: Jefferson through the Eyes of His Slaves,” William and Mary Quarterly 57 (January 2000): 144-45, accessed June 19, 2014, doi: 10.2307/2674362. 351 Lucia Stanton, “Fulfilling the Declaration: Descendants of Monticello’s African American Families,” undated, 1 (unpublished draft supplied the author by Elizabeth Chew). 174 venue, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on October 2, 2014.352 In its representational strategy, the exhibition manifests the complex history, the missteps, and the apparent contradictions that mark Monticello’s interpretation of Jefferson and slavery over some fifty years.

The exhibition’s genesis came out of a 2009 conversation between Monticello’s then new president, Leslie Greene Bowman, and NMAAHC’s Lonnie Bunch. Their discussion resulted in a tentative plan for the two institutions to co-organize an exhibition for NMAAHC’s galleries in the National Museum of American History, where the

African American Museum mounts exhibitions regularly while its building is under construction. Throughout 2010, the two institutions worked together to plan the exhibition’s themes and select its contents.353 Staff members Elizabeth Chew,

Monticello’s Curator, and Elaine Nichols, NMAAHC Curator of Culture, originally acted as co-curators for the exhibition. Towards the end of 2010, NMAAHC replaced Nichols with Rex Ellis, their Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs. Formerly the Vice

President for the Historic Area at Colonial Williamsburg, Ellis originated CW’s original

African American interpretive program in the late 1970s. Chew organized the permanent

352 The Atlanta History Center changed the exhibition’s name to “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: How the Word is Passed Down” to connect to their own African American oral history program. At both the St. Louis and Philadelphia venues, it appears as “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello,” with the sub-title, “The Paradox of Liberty” dropped. Although not unheard of, changing the name of an exhibition during travel (even partially) is unusual. Chew is not sure why the title was changed (telephone interview, June 19, 2014). 353 The exhibition start-up meeting with the exhibition designers, the PRD Group Ltd, took place on December 1, 2010. The general themes outlined in the planning meeting document reflect those that appear in the current exhibition (PRD, Startup Meeting Notes, December 6, 2010, Chew Archives). I am very grateful to Elizabeth Chew who has kindly supplied me with access to unpublished documents in her possession that concern the exhibition’s organization and interpretation. Hereafter, referred to as the Chew Archives. However, the ideas expressed here are my own. 175 exhibition that focuses on the enslaved community for Monticello’s new Visitors Center, which opened in 2009. 354

The partners agreed almost immediately on the exhibition’s “big idea:” “The history of Monticello is an American story that demonstrates how slavery simultaneously buttressed colonial ideas of liberty while depriving one group of its freedom solely on the basis of race. Slavery and the issues of race were more than a contradiction of notions of

American liberty; they shaped and continue to shape American culture.” According to an early outline, the team planned the exhibition to provide the first “comprehensive look at the lives of …hundreds of African Americans who played a major role in building, servicing [,] maintaining and developing Monticello,” thus using Jefferson’s plantation as a microcosm for exploring issues surrounding American slavery and freedom. 355

NMAAHC initially took the lead in flushing out the exhibition content details while

Chew selected the objects and wrote the script, or exhibition narrative.

Some differences arose concerning how to frame Jefferson and slavery, and where to position the exhibition’s emphasis on Monticello’s enslaved community. NMAAHC proposed that the exhibition chiefly focus on the “contradictions between Jefferson’s human rights philosophy and the institution of slavery…against the daily lives of the people whom he owned…” Under this organization, the exhibition opened with sustained attention to daily life at Monticello for enslaved individuals and families and

354 Chew is now the Betsy Main Babcock Director of the Curatorial and Education Division, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I interviewed Chew about the project in her office at Reynolda House on December 17, 2013, and by telephone on June 19, 2014. 355 [Elaine Nichols] “Monticello Brief” (draft), undated (ca. June 2010), Chew Archives. 176 then proceeded to Jefferson. 356 In rejecting NMAAHC’s plan, Monticello recommended that the exhibition supply greater “historical context for slavery in the early republic or for Jefferson’s activities at Monticello.” Chew subsequently redrafted the outline to add thematic sections that stressed Jefferson’s humanist education and included other influences that affected his views on slavery but Nichols countered that the redraft

“contains too much Jefferson.” 357 With Monticello starting to question the project’s continuation, the two museums reached a compromise that preserved both emphases but began with Jefferson. NMAAHC noted in agreement, “It is incumbent upon us…in partnership with the Monticello Foundation, to examine the ways he [Jefferson] affected his personal environment, and the ways his personal environment affected him.”358

Rather than encouraging organizers to develop a less traditional framework that portrayed

Jefferson and Monticello through his slaves’ perspective, the compromise in effect awarded Jefferson the exhibition’s leading role.

Both institutions agreed that the “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello’s” entrance should signal to museumgoers the exhibition’s intended counterbalance between

Jefferson, the individual, and his many slaves. Therefore, it opened dramatically at

NMAH with a life-size bronze statue of Jefferson, starkly lit and commanding, standing in front of a red curved wall titled “Remembering those enslaved at Monticello” personalized with 607 names arranged alphabetically—also reiterating Monticello’s considerable research efforts in recovering the family names and surnames of the

356 [Elaine Nichols] “NMAAHC and Monticello Exhibit Outline, Collaborative Draft/National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Monticello Foundation,” July 15, 2010 revision, 1, 2, Chew Archives. Earlier drafts of NMAAHC’s brief (5/31/2010; 6/3/2010 and undated) are in the Chew Archives. 357 Elizabeth Chew, “Chronology of NMAAHC Project,” June 9, 2010, Chew Archives. Chew recommended that Monticello “abandon the project,” if a compromise could not be reached by the end of June 2010 (Chew, “Chronology”). 358 [Rex Ellis [?]], “NMAAHC Preliminary Exhibition Outline,” October 4, 2010, 15, Chew Archives. 177 enslaved individuals cited in Jefferson’s records. 359 Originally, the exhibition designers planned to surround the statue with a translucent metal web-like apparatus that Bunch rejected because the device looked too much like “Jefferson was in prison.” 360 The installation recalls a traditional memorial with the title sign and the inscribed names yet at the same time, the arrangement portends a remote slaveholder located at some distance from the enslaved. At the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, a more cutting- edge introduction emphasizes a different point. Visitors walk down a darkened hall beside an outsized video screen that projects the final Declaration of Independence document on one side (the screen shot lingers over the words) together with a large-scale copy of a formal portrait of Jefferson at its end. Directly facing the Declaration, another video cycles a list of slaves in Jefferson’s handwriting from the Monticello Farm Book. A photographic blow up of Isaac Granger Jefferson, his former slave, taken from a surviving daguerreotype hangs opposite to Jefferson’s formal portrait. The arrangement effectively personalizes the story while the juxtaposition makes it clear to visitors that a conflict existed between Jefferson’s public ideals and his private reality at home.

Co-curator Elizabeth Chew describes the exhibition’s opening two sections as portraying “slavery as the unfinished work of the American Revolution, with opening sections surveying the context for Thomas Jefferson’s views on slavery as well as his action and inaction in abolishing it.”361 A case set immediately in front of the statue holds the small lap desk where Jefferson composed the Declaration of Independence (NMAH owns the original) together with copies of the Declaration of Independence in draft and

359 I visited the exhibition at the National Museum of American History on October 12, 2012, and the National Constitution Center on June 28, 2014. Unless specified, my analysis refers to the NMAH installation. 360 Telephone interview with Elizabeth Chew, June 19, 2014. 361 Elizabeth Chew, “Institutional Evolution,” 35. 178 the carefully curated list of slaves taken from the Monticello Farm book. As nearby text points out, Jefferson disliked slavery calling it “this deplorable entanglement” yet his most celebrated work preserved it. For roughly the exhibition’s first half, “Slavery at

Monticello” struggles to reconcile Jefferson and slavery--- the “paradox” of its subtitle--- seeking to illustrate (in Stanton’s words), “TJ [[as] an enduring personification of contradictions inherent in American society since its founding.” 362 New York Times museum critic Edward Rothstein argued that the exhibition failed to capture Jefferson’s true complexity here. Perhaps preferring a Jefferson biopic approach, he complained that the exhibition needed “a more deliberate elaboration of [Jefferson’s] ideas and life.”

Rothstein wondered, “What does it mean that such a man not only held slaves but also devoted considerable attention to their status, their mode of life and, yes, their profitability? What was the connection between his ideals and the blunt reality? These are not just biographical questions; they are national ones.”363 Employing largely the written word together with groupings of metaphorical objects owned by Jefferson---depicting the

Enlightenment’s influence, for instance, with personal items from his desk and influential books such as Herodotus’s Histories---the exhibition tries to communicate with mixed success a set of complex ideas about the source of Jefferson’s views on liberty and race.

Unfortunately, the design locates critical explanatory texts on reader rails or maroons them behind walls where all but the most conscientious visitors overlook them. How

Jefferson reconciled his own culpability as a slaveholder, particularly in relationship to

362 Lucia Stanton, “Cinder comments (on the exhibition brief),” January 27, 2010, Chew Archives. Chew’s script went through several versions. In final form, Section 1a.1 Introduction Panel text states, “Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence and called slavery an ‘abominable crime,’ yet he was a lifelong slaveholder.” Section 1a.3 text concludes “His way of life depended on the labor of people he held in slavery”(Elizabeth Chew, “Exhibition script (final),” Chew Archives). 363 Edward Rothstein, “Exhibition Review: Life, Liberty and the Fact of Slavery,” New York Times, January 27, 2012, accessed December 30, 2013, www.nytimes.com2012/01/27/arts/design/smithsonian-and- monticello-exhibitions-on-jeffersons-slaves.html?_r=0. 179 the national economic engine that propelled the institution of antebellum slavery is left unexplored.

Section two positions slavery as essential to maintaining Jefferson’s patriarchal lifestyle at Monticello (he referred to his enslaved workers as “family” and famously described them further as “those who labor for my happiness”). The script merely states,

“Jefferson’s way of life always depended on the labor of people he held in slavery.” In broad, quick strokes, the exhibition first supplies critical historical context: visitors learn about a century or so of the history of slavery in British North American through images, a bill of sale, and iron shackles, all belonging to NMAAHC. A map illustrates the extent of colonial slaveholding focusing on the Virginia gentry world that Jefferson was born into, where individuals measured their wealth and status in profitable tobacco crops and

African American human capital. Repeatedly the exhibition makes Jefferson’s distaste for slavery clear while at the same time, moves perilously close to justifying his slaveholding; reminding visitors in one instance, “Though Jefferson came to abhor slavery, his livelihood depended on it.” Even without condemning Jefferson in large measure (as Monticello understandably is uncomfortable doing), the exhibition could point out that although he chose not to sacrifice his comfortable living situation for his principles, other gentry contemporaries like Robert Carter of Nomini Hall, for example, influenced by a religious conversion, turned their backs on slavery and freed their slaves.

Instead, the exhibition presents a menu of schemes that Jefferson considered privately for ending slavery including colonizing newly freed slaves outside the United States. The exhibition allows that racism provides a probable explanation for Jefferson’s inaction; a brief discussion on his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) acknowledges, “Like many

180 other 18th-century thinkers, Jefferson believed blacks were inferior to whites.” Without offering a satisfactory defense, the text states tersely, “But after 1785, while still holding his belief in the injustice of slavery, he was publicly silent,” leaving it up to the visitor to draw his or her own further conclusions. 364 That Jefferson produced a “secret” biracial community at Monticello with Hemings while criticizing race mixing perhaps offers the best evidence for the inherent contradiction that existed between his public positions and his personal life.

Section 2 concludes with a large section called “Thomas Jefferson at Monticello” that organizers intend as a bridge to connect Jefferson with the enslaved community on his mountaintop. This part of the exhibition describes the plantation, its agricultural endeavors, and the main house and other buildings including the Mulberry Row slave quarter, reconstructed based on a Jefferson sketch via a computer-animated design program. It features a large tactile map that illustrates the entire estate’s topography.

While the text occasionally drops in phrases like “across the South,” the comparisons made to slavery anywhere other than Monticello seem superficial. This section establishes Jefferson’s wealth and taste for visitors by displaying some spectacular artifacts from Monticello’s collection including a striking carved ivory chess set with opposing pieces representing Caucasian Europeans and Africans that Jefferson purchased in Paris (sadly without analysis). Jefferson’s possessions sharply contrast to items excavated from Mulberry Row that illustrate what slaves purchased with monies they earned in their free time or from tips. These funds permitted them to make their own

364 Elizabeth Chew, “Exhibition script” (final). In an online conference presentation, Ellis mentions this as a deliberate strategy employed by the exhibition for visitors. See Ellis and Chew’s presentation, Thomas Jefferson: An Online Conference, Smithsonian Institution, April 27, 2012, accessed May 25, 2014, http://squirrel.adobeconnect.com/-a751959191/p9pwziqeph/?1.

181 modest improvements to their living standards. Even though the degree differed significantly, it is interesting to observe how material culture defined and enforced notions of self-identity for both Jefferson and his slaves.

The exhibition’s discussion turns to Jefferson’s qualities as a slaveholder and portrays him---with only a little ambivalence---as a “good” master. Because the white overseers whom Jefferson employed to run the plantation (particularly in his absence) bore responsibility for whipping or selling slaves who broke the rules, the text absolves him from blame, “He instructed his overseers not to whip slaves, but his wishes were often ignored during his frequent absences from home.” Particularly critical of this section, journalist Leah Caldwell disparaged the exhibition for portraying Jefferson as the

“Greatest Gentleman Slave Owner of the United States.” When in residence at

Monticello, Jefferson devoted time to closely supervising the artisans who worked on

Mulberry Road. He set their schedules, secured training opportunities or apprenticeships for them, and closely studied their production levels recording them in his ledgers.

Caldwell continues, “it doesn’t bode well that if you entered the Jefferson exhibit not knowing what slavery was, you might come out thinking it was an intensive training program for highly-skilled craftsmen…mentions of overseers and brutality are scarce.”

365 Jefferson’s micrometer, or telescope, a fascinating object included earlier in the exhibition as an example of a scientific instrument, implies his attitudes towards at least some of his slaves. According to former slave Isaac Jefferson, Jefferson employed the telescope to spy on his workers’ progress in distant fields, and later, to watch the

365 Leah Caldwell, “The New and Improved Thomas Jefferson, Enlightened Slave Owner,” The Awl, March 19, 2012, accessed December 30, 2013, www.theawl.com/2012/03/the-new-and-improved-thomas- jefferson-enlightened-slave-owner. 182 construction of the University of Virginia by laborers that included both his current and former slaves. If incorporated into the exhibition, this potent story suggests that Jefferson shared the same attitudes of suspicion and distrust exhibited by other slaveholding whites towards their slaves.

At the National Constitution Center venue in Philadelphia, the exhibition expands its biography of Jefferson in this section through the addition of a small theatre showing a visually stunning 15-minute movie made by the filmmaker Donna Lawrence (her work is in the Monticello Visitor’s Center). 366 A throwback to an earlier worshipful era, the film represents him as a Renaissance man and a citizen genius who created Monticello as his experimental “laboratory.” Portrayed by Bill Barker, Colonial Williamsburg’s resident

Jefferson impersonator, “Jefferson” is seen reading in his library or writing at his desk, settings selected to reinforce his intellect for the viewer. In one particularly egregious scene, the camera lingers on Barker lovingly silhouetted within Monticello’s garden pavilion at sunset (the slaves undoubtedly are laboring below in the plantation’s large kitchen garden). After lavishing praise on Jefferson for some minutes, the narration concedes that slavery was a millstone around Jefferson’s neck, “a glaring contradiction” of his noble ideals but after all, somewhat understandable because Jefferson “grew up in a culture of slavery.” Reflecting the movie’s apologist vein, Monticello’s enslaved receive little airtime. They materialize on screen working anonymously in the fields

“from dawn to dust…across the seasons” or sweeping a broom across the floor, possibly an oblique reference to Sally Hemings’ employment as a domestic. Because the film concentrates on Jefferson as a sort of early American rock star, the narrative

366 The film debuted at the exhibition’s Missouri History Center venue. 183 acknowledges Sally Hemings only fleetingly when it identifies him simply as the “father of the children of the slave Sally Hemings.” A confusing addition at best, the film suggests significant backtracking by Monticello away from the project’s original goals.

367

Portraits of six enslaved families who lived and worked at Monticello inhabit the exhibition’s third section. This information about enslaved life is new to most audience members, and visitors learn specifics (briefly described) about subjects such as material circumstances, daily work (featuring resistance to slavery), and family life. Here

Monticello researchers reveal the admirable level of evidence they have developed for the enslaved experiences of the men, women, and children who resided in this particular place. Each grouping displays surviving historical documentation and objects including archaeological materials recovered from areas where the highlighted family members lived and worked. With few images of Jefferson’s slaves known, the exhibition instead creates a detailed family tree for each---courtesy of Stanton’s extensive genealogical research---that records known descendants for several generations beyond Jefferson.

Stressing themes that resonate strongly in African American culture, the exhibition focuses here on the survival and memories of the former Monticello slaves and their descendants, illustrating in Chew’s words, how they “passed their histories and convictions to succeeding generations.”368

367 Created after Chew’s departure, Monticello produced the film for the exhibition’s travel. All the quotes are from the film except the last one (Chew, “Conceptual outline (draft), To emphasize a balanced approach that focuses on the lives of Others at Monticello/Understand the world that Jefferson and the slaves shared,” March 25/2010/April 8, 2010., Chew Archives). 368 Chew, “Institutional Evolution,” 40, Chew Archives. 184

In finalizing this section’s contents, NMAAHC urged Monticello to give greater voice to these stories. Ellis noted, “Together, they give insight into what they did on their own time, what they valued, what they believed and how they individually and collectively grappled with their condition. The drama, and the trauma of the enslaved…will be interesting to audiences seeking to know more about them than the work they did.”369 At Stanton’s recommendation, Chew also added the tale of the two

Hubbard brothers, one of whom repeatedly tried to escape Monticello and was flogged and sold, while the other chose to negotiate directly (and successfully) with Jefferson to remain with his family.370 For all its good intentions, this area has a few design and conceptual issues. Individual stories appear only in written form on small focus labels appended to the large text panels or attached on case rails that visitors mostly ignore.

Envisioned to give viewers a sense of manual labor, interactives (lifting up a heavy nail bucket or piecing together two wood joints) are so simplistic as to appear incongruous.

Rather than continue the exhibition’s largely traditional format, this section cries out for another treatment utilizing the voices of the enslaved to capture the “drama and the trauma”---as Ellis described. The amazingly varied two-hundred-plus mostly everyday objects on display attract visitors into the area, but Chew and Ellis miss an opportunity to summarize the important but little known research conducted over the last twenty years

369 Dorey Butter [NMAAHC Project Manager], “Family Stories suggested by Rex in email of Wednesday 4/27/11,” Chew Archives. 370 Cinder Stanton, “Comments on the April draft of text for NMAAHC exhibit,” May 11, 2011, Chew Archives. Stanton commented that the script overall was “ever so didactic.” 185 into enslaved material culture by Monticello’s archaeologists and others working at slave sites located throughout North America.371

During the planning process, Chew expressed concerns to Monticello co-workers about the exhibition’s veracity in telling the “complete story.” To conclude the exhibition, she recommended recounting stories of Monticello’s anonymous slaves who

“we know nothing about…to highlight the anonymity of slavery.” Despite her urgings, the content mainly portrays the small, enslaved group who shared a relationship with

Jefferson (which is why they appear in his records so frequently). Chew’s crucial point that Monticello actually knows little about most individuals held in slavery there never materializes in the exhibition’s final form.

In its discussion of the Monticello plantation, the exhibition reinforces the

Foundation’s firmly held position that slavery on Jefferson’s mountaintop was distinctive. Little in the presentation speaks to the cruelty, disruption, and substandard living conditions that commonly shaped enslaved life in the American South. Ellis himself describes slavery generally as “traumatic, oppressive and emasculating.” While he appears to agree with the Foundation that Monticello’s enslaved population enjoyed a

“markedly different” experience, Ellis recognizes that “the enslaved at Monticello did not escape these assassinations of their humanity.”372 Surviving meeting notes indicate that the project originally intended to show that the slave system “of which Monticello was a

371 Monticello is a leader in the subfield of slave archaeology. In 2004, it launched a research tool, Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) that allows comparisons of archaeological data related to slavery across a number of historical sites (accessed July 19, 2014, http://www.daacs.org). 372 [Rex Ellis], “NMAAHC Preliminary Exhibition Outline,” October 4, 2010, 15, Chew Archives. Ellis voiced these comments on several occasions. See for example, Ellis and Chew’s presentation, Thomas Jefferson: An Online Conference, April 27, 2012. Smithsonian Institution, accessed May 25, 2014, http://squirrel.adobeconnect.com/-a751959191/p9pwziqeph/?1. 186 part was founded on control enforced by violence,” but in actuality, the exhibition demonstrates a reticence about discussing power dynamics, miscegenation, and corporal punishment in relationship to Monticello’s slaves. 373 Multiple edits removed any mildly controversial statements from the script and conferred on it the careful, neutral tone of an

American history textbook. This may represent Smithsonian-house style but Adam

Gopnik identifies an analogous predicament at New York’s new 9-11 museum where curators are “struggling to keep the displays afloat while in constant peril from the enormous American readiness to be mortally offended by some small misstep of word or tone.”374 Worried about protests from conservative politicians if they perceived the exhibition tarnished Jefferson’s image, Castle staff (Smithsonian’s top management) kept a close eye on “Slavery at Monticello.” The Smithsonian’s Chief Spokesperson and the

Director of the Office of Communication and External Affairs, among others, vetted the script and requested wording changes including some that minimized Jefferson’s personal accountability with respect to slavery. Several months before the opening, apparently due to growing apprehension about the press revisiting the Sally Hemings story, the Castle requested from Chew---and presumably reviewed---copies of Monticello’s Hemings evidence. 375

373 The PRD Group Ltd., NMAAHC and TJ Foundation, “Monticello Exhibit, Startup Meeting Notes,” December 6, 2010, Chew Archives. 374 Adam Gopnik, “Stones and Bones: Visiting the 9/11 memorial and museum,” The New Yorker, July 7 & 14, 2014, 40, accessed July 18, 2014, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/07/stones-and-bones. 375 Interview with Chew, December 17, 2013. For example, in the “Seeing Slavery at Monticello” section at the conclusion, the original text read, “We cannot have a clear view of Jefferson, his failure to live up to the ideals of freedom, or the founding of our nation if we leave slavery out of the story.” After the review, “We cannot have a clear view of Jefferson or the founding of our nation if we leave slavery out of the story.” [Chew, “Final Draft of the script with Smithsonian comments,” no date and “Final Draft of the script as produced,” no date, Chew Archives]. 187

In its conclusion, “Slavery at Monticello” leaps a little incongruously through time to the “Getting Word” project, which the exhibition uses to articulate a modern

African American story of survival and achievement envisioned to inspire the audience as it exits. Little context appears about the long effect of slavery’s legacy of racial inequality. Here, the exhibition takes on a self-congratulatory tone that some may find excessive. On display are interpretive text, photographs, and a large map illustrating where interviewees live. Several computer kiosks provide access to the “Getting Word” website and museumgoers can watch an 8-minute film describing the project written and narrated by Stanton. Visitors learn about various family histories including those that imply a complex racial history such as the eight men related to Betty Hemings (Sally’s mother) who served in the Civil War: four in black regiments and four in white. The section’s interpretation strongly reflects Stanton’s recent conviction that we should read the enslaved descendants’ lives and accomplishments as embodying the democratic principles that Jefferson embedded in the Declaration of Independence (which hypothetically links their progeny back to Monticello).376 Drawing primarily on what is only a small sample of ex-Monticello slaves’ descendants, this connection seems far- fetched. Conceivably some might have deliberately distanced themselves from an association with Jefferson.

Perhaps “Getting Word” is more persuasive as a symbol to reconcile the African

American past to those democratic ideals. When interviewed during “Slavery at

376 Stanton, “Fulfilling the Declaration: Descendants of Monticello’s African American Families,” undated. Perhaps concerned about over-reach, Smithsonian editors removed this statement (influenced by Stanton) from “Slavery at Monticello’s” brochure (although it remains in the script): “The people of Monticello and their descendants strove to make Jefferson’s ideals a reality. They believed in the truth of the Declaration, cherished the hope that it would one day be more than an ideal; and joined with---and often led---countless other African Americans in the cause of liberty” (Brochure copy (draft), undated, Chew Archive). 188

Monticello,” several descendants confirmed their desire for greater reconciliation not only with their enslaved past but with the [white] nation who perpetuated slavery.

Shannon Lanier, descended from Sally Hemings and Jefferson through their son

Madison, observed “Getting Word’s” recognition helps us “to get to the healing side.”377

Another participant, Karen Hughes White commented, “as long as we deny slavery as it was, as it truly was, it will forever be a sore.”378 Rather than attempting some abstract connection to America’s founding documents, “Getting Word” resonates powerfully as

“the act of reconciliation” itself that, in the words of Levy and Sznaider writing about the

Holocaust, “diffuses the distinction between memories of victims and perpetrators. What remains is the memory of a shared past.”379 At Monticello, that shared past comes together over Sally Hemings who functions as a catalyst for rethinking the American story.

Where is Sally Hemings in “Slavery at Monticello?” Although NMAAHC originally wanted the exhibition to recap current scholarship about Heming and her relationship to Jefferson, the exhibition instead strands arguably the most important woman in Jefferson’s life somewhere on its margins. 380 Hemings appears at different points in the script but principally as identification in relationship to her descendants. She receives the greatest attention on two small focus panels attached to the family’s larger

377 “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Descendants reflect on the landmark exhibition,” accessed July 16, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33011JYnTGE. 378 Giles Morris, “Scholars recreate landscape of slavery at Monticello,” C-VILLE Weekly, January 31, 2012, accessed June 14, 2014, http://www.c-ville.com/Scholars-recreate-landscape-of-slavery-at- Monticello/. 379 D.Levy and N. Sznaider, “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory” (2002), quoted in Christine N. Buzinde and Carla Almeida Santos, “Representations of Slavery,” Annals of Tourism Research 35 (April 2008): 484, accessed December 30, 2013, doi:10.1016/j.annals.2008.01.003. 380 [Elaine Nichols], “Monticello Brief,” 5/31/10 and 6/3/2010, Chew Archives. 189 genealogy panel, one discusses the DNA test and the other relates bare facts of her life.

Earlier the exhibition team informed the designers: “Sally Hemings and her relationship with Jefferson illustrate many key points [but] this story should not overshadow those of the others we know and don’t know.” After Lonnie Bunch’s initial script review, he requested the exhibition deal more “directly w/Sally Hemings” and the above-mentioned panels were added but the co-curators ignored adviser Nell Painter’s suggestion to make

Hemings’s relationship with Jefferson explicit by referring to her as his “slave wife.”381

Even with the additions, “Slavery at Monticello” reduces Hemings to a kind of footnote, a one-line reference, according to a reviewer, that “you might easily miss [it] if you weren’t looking.” 382 This closely resembles how Monticello represents Hemings today in their tours and in the visitor center exhibitions. Visitors to the exhibition expressed a definite interest in her. When I visited the exhibition in the National Constitution Center,

I overheard a conversation by several African American visitors looking specifically for her and I noticed that when they found Hemings family stories and artifacts, they gave them particularly close attention. As Alexander Boulton observed in 2001, “The story of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship is part of an ongoing national conversation on issues of race, sexuality, and American culture. One of the questions it forces historians today to address is: have we consistently ignored these issues in an effort to ‘whitewash’ our national history?”383

381 Handwritten note from Lonnie Bunch, “Exhibition Script” (Draft 2), May 18, 2011, Chew Archives; Interview with Chew, December 17, 2013. Unfortunately, Chew’s files do not include records of the advisory panel’s comments. 382 Leah Caldwell, “The New and Improved Thomas Jefferson, Enlightened Slave Owner.” I was told recently that some of Monticello’s reticence about claiming Hemings is due to ongoing struggles with the Monticello Association over the family burial ground. 383 Alexander O. Boulton, “The Monticello Mystery. Case Continued,” William and Mary Quarterly 58 (October 2001):1046, accessed June 10, 2014, doi: 10.2307/2674523. 190

While “Slavery at Monticello” contributes to this national conversation up to a point, it does not recap arguments made by historians authorizing the significance of

Jefferson-Hemings for both black and white Americans. Without overly romanticizing it, the discovery of an intimate relationship between an America “hero” (an individual with an enduring global influence) that persevered for decades and helped to produce a biracial community is powerful. In Mongrel Nation: the America Begotten by Thomas

Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Clarence Walker bluntly states---with knowledge of the

Hemings and Jefferson liaison---“the myth of a white United States has to be abandoned.” 384 According to Herman Belz, the fact of Jefferson’s paternity of Hemings’ children elevated African Americans “into the family of America.” 385 Shortly after the release of the DNA evidence, Gordon-Reed made a comparable connection, “I don’t know… how passionately a number of blacks are about working their way back to

Monticello. But it is a way of establishing the truth of American life. And when you can participate in the shaping and the acceptance of the truth of American life, that is a way of claiming birthright, literally.”386 Individuals related by blood to Jefferson and Hemings understood better than most the compelling symbolism of their now famous family story.

Speaking on a Smithsonian panel, descendant Karen Hughes White characterized the relationship as the “story of America,” explaining “this particular one has a name…where others are unnamed.” Shannon Lanier commented, “You may find you are like us if you

384 Quoted in Martha Hodes, review of Clarence Walker, Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (UVA Press, 2009) in Reviews in American History 38 (September 2010): 441, accessed June 10, 2014, doi:10.1353/rah.2010.0022. 385 Belz, 225. 386 Interview with Annette Gordon-Reed as part of the website created for the Frontline documentary, Jefferson’s Blood, accessed June 10, 2014, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/Jefferson/interviews/Reed.html. 191 go digging in your family history.”387 Arguably, many other Americans today share a similar but sometimes unacknowledged multiracial history.

In relaying a largely traditional narrative told from Jefferson’s perspective (with

Monticello as his surrogate), the exhibition tells visitors rather definitively about why slaveholders like Jefferson (and their white heirs) struggled so mightily to maintain the cultural assumptions and racial norms implicit in slavery. It submerges what is undoubtedly a complex but compelling story of a plantation owned by a nationally prominent white slaveholding family who shared it with a much larger population of enslaved African Americans that they depended on, many of whom were relatives. The exhibition says nothing about the many Hemings deniers among current white Jefferson descendants (most of whom are wealthy and powerful). Hollywood screenwriters, novelists, and historians have mostly failed to illuminate the rich, messy story that in its details implies so much about the colliding dynamics of race, class, and gender in our shared history. Without reconciliation to the truth of our past in all its dimensions, our national narrative cannot be satisfactorily re-written---in museums or elsewhere.

“Slavery at Monticello” highlights the challenges in content, tactics, and interpretation that NMAAHC faces in its future approach to slavery. In congressional testimony, Bunch has criticized museums for their failure to examine the larger

“complexities, interactions and difficulties of race in America.”388 Listing other

387 Comments by Karen Hughes White and Shannon Lanier, “Getting Word: A Conversation with Descendants of the Enslaved at Monticello,” Thomas Jefferson: An Online Conference, Smithsonian Institution, April 27, 2012, accessed May 25, 2014, http://squirrel.adobeconnect.com/- a751959191/p9pwziqeph/?1. 388 Lonnie C. Bunch, “Testimony,” Hearing on “The Construction of the United States Capitol: Recognizing the Contributions of Slave Labor,” Committee on House Administration, House of 192 exhibitions about slavery (including some discussed in previous chapters) Bunch noted,

“Even the best of these exhibitions struggle to simply acknowledge and introduce the public to slavery. I would suggest that the time for simple acknowledgement is past.”

Ultimately, for NMAAHC to succeed, the museum must (finally) position African

American history, beginning with slavery, firmly within our official national story and memory. As Bunch recognizes, NMAAHC exhibitions must do more than simply bear witness to the country’s flawed founding and the terrible reality that American slavery inflicted on millions and the lingering racism that followed its demise. The museum’s exhibitions need to offer explanations and creative imaginings that unravel for the public our troubled racial history—starting with Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings who together represent the paradox that created it and the meaning of its legacy.

Representatives, November 7, 2007 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 2008), accessed July 17, 2014, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-110hhrg41186/html/CHRG-110hhrg41186.htm. 193

Chapter 6. Conclusion: Presenting Slavery in the Museum

“People are ready to hear it,” Oprah Winfrey commented in a 2013 interview with the BBC when a journalist asked her to explain the popularity of the Oscar- winning Hollywood movie, Twelve Years a Slave, in comparison to her own unsuccessful 1998 film on American slavery based on Toni Morrison’s novel,

Beloved. 389 If recent film/video treatments, scholarly and popular books, novels,

Civil War reenactments, memorials, art works, archaeological discoveries, Internet resources, and television series are representative, slavery has moved out from the shadows to manifest itself in national memory through many highly public forms, as

Winfrey recognized. Even so, the “conversation” remains largely superficial and unfinished. Greater familiarity with slavery as an historical event does not translate into truly significant change in our national discourse with respect to race.

Slavery continues to be a contested subject, despite the case studies illustrated here. Recently, the National Park Service, the City of Philadelphia, and members of the local African American community strongly disagreed over a new visitor’s center’s location for the Liberty Bell. It was originally planned for the President’s

House slave quarters site, occupied in the late 18th century by George Washington’s nine slaves. Under pressure, the National Park Service ultimately turned the land into an outdoor exhibition area (opened in 2010) that principally explores Washington’s enslaved household through didactic text panels and video-screen portraits by actors.

389 BBC Interview with Oprah Winfrey, November 13, 2013, accessed August 11, 2014, http//www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-24924888. 194

The multi-year confrontation over the President’s House site, which devolved into ugly name-calling, suggests that slavery remains a critical element in an ongoing debate -over the larger question, “who owns the past;” together with all the attendant privileges that such authority conveys to the winners.390 Jim Horton and Johanna

Kardux theorize that these conflicts persist particularly in slave-related sites (usually also museums) because in these places “history confronts heritage.” They define heritage as “intensely personal, connecting individuals to the past through their particular community or their ancestors in ways that help to define their own lives in contemporary society.” They observe when slavery is believed by someone to form a considerable component of their identity, an individual (whether white or black) is likely to react differently (usually with some sensitivity) to presentations of this past.391 Until slavery ceases to be such a fractious blot on our contemporary view of history, one that makes some individuals defensive and others angry, it will continue to matter to how we understand ourselves as Americans.

This dissertation has explored how modern American museum exhibitions have become critical sites for ongoing efforts to interrogate slavery. Slavery first received sustained attention in mainstream museums only some forty years ago with a series of pioneering presentations positioned against a portrait of the American past as divisive and troubling. Initiated immediately following the Civil Rights era, during a time when museums struggled for inclusivity on different fronts, these projects illustrate the multiple approaches advocated by the rise of social history, which

390 See for example, Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, “The ‘Black’ Eye on George Washington’s ‘White’ House,” September 11, 2005, updated October 21, 2010, accessed September 10, 2014, avengingtheancestors.com/releases/black-eye.htm. 391 James Oliver Horton and Johanna C. Kardux, “Slavery and the Contest for National heritage in the United States and The Netherlands,” American Studies International 62 (June/October 2004): 53. 195 legitimated slavery as a subject for serious consideration in American history museums. In embracing challenging topics like slavery, the museum projects discussed here sought to promote a national discussion by challenging and even destabilizing the comfortable and the familiar. Diverging from interpreting the broader institution of slavery itself (its economics or its political context, for example), these exhibitions mostly privileged the lives of slaves, grounding their content in objects and events that suggested autonomous lives lived apart from whites.

The 1990s initiated a period where different museums embodied conflicting memories of the American past as slavery became increasing politicized as a museum topic. Descendant stakeholder communities regularly contested what they understood as the efforts of majority museums to appropriate and/or control their history.

Corresponding to what Rebecca Kook identifies as African Americans’ growing prominence within the modern “American collective identity,” African-American- centered museums multiplied in number and influence.392 They initially constructed their exhibitions differently, around narratives connoting “triumph” over nearly impossible obstacles as reflected in themes of resistance, determination, and cultural contributions. 393 These interpretations sometimes were out of the historical mainstream. For instance, at Baltimore’s Great Blacks in Wax, a community-based

392 Rebecca Kook, “The Shifting Status of African Americans in the American Collective Identity,” Journal of Black Studies 29 (November 1998): 154-178, accessed January 28, 2014, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2668087. 393 Derrick R. Brooms, “Lest We Forget: Exhibiting (and Remembering) Slavery in African-American Museums,” Journal of African American Studies 15 (2011): 521, accessed July 14, 2014, doi: 10.1007/s12111-011-9165-2. See also Robyn Autry, “The political economy of memory: the challenges of representing national conflict ‘identity-driven’ museums,” Theoretical Sociology 42 (2010): 64, accessed July 14, 2013, doi: 10.1007/s11186-012-9185-5. 196 museum with little or no professional staff, large-scale dramatic tableaus use wax figures to illustrate the violent domination of blacks by whites throughout American history. A larger institution, Cincinnati, Ohio’s National Underground Railroad

Freedom Center (now managed by the city’s museum system) concentrates less on past injustices and instead focuses more broadly on today’s “ongoing struggles for freedom.”394 During roughly the same decade, other ethnic groups launched museums

(sometimes lumped together as “identity museums”) that embarked on programs or exhibitions that, like African American museums, centered on the racial discrimination, which shaped their own American experiences. For example, at the

Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles (opened 1992), a notable exhibition on wartime internment, “America’s Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese American,” commemorated the 50th anniversary of World War II in

1994. Some critics argue that “identity museums” expose a problem intrinsic to multiculturalism: by focusing exclusively on one ethnic identity, they run the risk of privileging the “other” to the extent that they may perpetuate the same old dangerous

“authenticities” and stereotypes.

Although in the future their form undoubtedly will change, exhibitions persist in museums as the chief method of framing and communicating a series of related ideas. In recent exhibitions about slavery, artifacts recovered from archaeological investigations at sites with slave histories help to compensate for meagre museum collections. They also permit curators to develop more nuanced explanations of enslaved life, while increasingly sophisticated technical elements incorporate media

394 www.freedomcenter.org/what-were-doing, accessed December 11, 2014. 197

(video imagery and sound) for better communication of more abstract ideas or experiences.

At national conferences and in professional journals, museum professionals continue to call for institutions to embrace and interpret this “difficult history.”

Because no agreed approach has yet emerged, slavery in museum exhibitions continues to be unsettled, located in an unstable area where “subjectivities and objectivities collide” in Susan Crane’s words. We need to develop a hybrid model that both enable museums to realize difference and co-narrate with voices that to this point have been irreconcilable.395 If museums are to function as civic laboratories

(rather than storage houses for dusty objects), places for the interaction of ideas and the negotiation of conflicting viewpoints, as Tony Bennett recommends, we must better engage institutional capacities to function as a distinctive “civic and reformatory apparatus.”396 Following Bennett’s definition, this “apparatus” might result in new interpretive directions, further promote advantageous co-productions, or attempt experimental approaches, that singly or together could initiate constructive public dialogue. Events in late 2014 offered a painful reminder that we still live in a nation profoundly troubled by race and class disparities that are traceable---in significant part---to centuries of slavery and the Jim Crow-era consequences that followed it. When exhibition projects such as “At Freedom’s Door” focused on regional history (rather than national) and involved multiple collaborations across groups, audiences and critics generally approved.

395 Susan Crane, Museums and Memories, 7. 396 Tony Bennett, “Civic Laboratories: Museums, Cultural Objecthood and the Governance of the Social,” Cultural Studies 19 (2005), 539, accessed March 17, 2009, doi:10.1080/09502380500365416. 198

More than ever before, contemporary museums seek to “matter” in their communities. Increasingly museums are expressing a willingness to step outside their traditional roles to embrace more activist agendas, whether it involves raising public awareness for issues like global warming or advocating better treatment of

LGBT individuals. Museum leaders strongly urge colleagues to exploit museums’ reputation for trustworthiness among the public to garner support for many different social justice causes.397 Some scholars identify this worldwide movement as a defining characteristic in 21st-century museology.398 With respect to slavery, museums are progressively interpreting it as a worldwide phenomenon, which manifested itself across time and within many cultures, yet that still needs acknowledgement within many national histories. Over the last two decades,

Holland, France, and the United Kingdom have struggled to reconcile publicly their colonial histories as slave trading nations. They embarked on countrywide celebrations such as Britain’s 2007 commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade, which featured museum projects, issued political referendums and formal apologies, and even created new memorials such as that built (by the municipal authority) in the former French slave trading port of Nantes, on the Atlantic coast harbor.399 During the 2007 anniversary, Liverpool opened an International Slavery

Museum, and a similar American venture is scheduled to open in 2016 in

397 David Fleming, “Human Rights Museums: An Overview,” Curator 55 (July 2012): 251-255, accessed August 28, 2014, doi: 10.1111/j.2151-6952.2012.00148.x. Fleming is the Director of the Liverpool Museums system, which includes the International Slavery Museum. He gave a keynote address at the 2014 AAM conference in Seattle on this topic. 398 Fiona Cameron, “Introduction,” in Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums, ed. by Fiona Cameron and Lynda Kelly (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010): 1. 399 With respect to the Dutch, see Horton and Kardux, 66-71. In a lawsuit, to be resolved by the U.N. High Court of Justice in the near future, fourteen Caribbean former colonies sued Britain, Holland and France in 2013 for reparations related to slavery. 199

Charleston, South Carolina as the International Museum of the Slave Trade. Both seek to bridge history and heritage by focusing on slavery’s historic and contemporary context. Some American museums linked historically or thematically to slavery, come together to raise awareness of the estimated 30 million people enslaved in the 21st-century world. Increasingly museums with direct associations to slavery participate in global coalitions such as the International Coalition of Sites of

Conscience (founded 1999), the Federation of International Human Rights Museums

(2010), and the Social Justice Alliance for Museums (2013) to demonstrate their commitment to human rights and allied issues. In one example, in 2012, the Civil

War-era historic site, President Lincoln’s Cottage in Washington, D.C., organized an exhibition, “Can You Walk Away?” that examined present day human trafficking.400

Opportunities for shared authority with the public through programs or

exhibitions (sometimes described as “dialogic”) offer a promising model to adjust

the natural power imbalance inherent between museums and their audiences.

Working with community members, history museums in post-apartheid South

Africa, for example, are opting to create exhibitions centered on understanding and

accepting a difficult past as a means to foster racial reconciliation going forward.

Their experimental exhibition programs endeavor to remake the South African

national narrative by openly recognizing the sharp racial divides that mark the

country’s past dehumanizing treatment of people of color, while promoting a more

inclusive future for all South Africans. According to one observer, “They [the

museums] bear witness to peoples’ inhumanity to others so it will never be

400 “Can You Walk Away? Website (www.lincolncottage.org/canyouwalkaway.html), accessed September 3, 2014. 200

forgotten and never repeated, and they demonstrate how an oppressive past can be

overcome in a constructive way.” 401 Similar to the work undertaken by the same

country’s celebrated Truth and Reconciliation Commission in openly confronting

apartheid’s true nature, South Africans from different racial backgrounds and

experiences face each other in their museums and try to come to terms with---and

hopefully move on from---their troubled racial history.

Closer to home, the Science Museum of Minnesota and the American

Anthropological Association collaborated on a traveling exhibition, “RACE: Are

We So Different?” that traced ideas about race through three thematic prisms:

science (biology), culture, and history. Slavery was not the sole emphasis but the

exhibition’s historical sections highlighted it (and its legacy) prominently. Utilizing

diverse interpretive techniques, the exhibition design featured a series of

freestanding modules (called “history stations”) that related subjects like “The

Invention of Whiteness,” which incorporated visuals and interactives rather than

traditional museum objects. In each exhibition section, several examples subtly

communicated to visitors the exhibition’s main message that ideas about race and

racial distinctions are socially constructed. Lead developer, Robert Garfinkle,

commented, “In large measure, we want people to decide for themselves what

[race] means for them. We chose not to advocate for a position; we chose to

advocate for [an] uncovering…”402 Although some scholars questioned particular

emphases or criticized content choices, most agreed that “RACE” particularly

401 Serena Nanda, “South African Museums and the Creation of a New National Identity,” American Anthropologist 106 (January 2004): 379, accessed July 14, 2014, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3566975. 402 Robert Garfinkle, comments posted on the blog Incluseum, December 6, 2012, accessed August 27, 2014, http://incluseum.com/2012/12/06/allyship-and-the-race-exhibit-reflections-part-i/. 201

challenged white audiences to confront race in ways that they likely had not

considered previously.403 In addition to volunteer “explainers” stationed throughout

the exhibition, moderated public discussions (described by the museum as “talking

circles”) allowed participants to engage in frank and sometimes personal

conversations about race. Additionally, at each traveling exhibition site, educators

promoted anti-racism initiatives already underway in the community or created

partnerships with local organizations, extending the exhibition’s ideas outside the

museum. At the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, visitors can participate in

educator-led activities that draw parallels between contemporary experience and the

violence, repression, and bigotry that shaped Frank’s world. All site tours conclude

in a soaring modern annex that offers an immediate contrast to the intense physical

world created within the Frank house itself. Together with computer interactive

stations, a small theatre features moderated programs that advocate for individuals

to confront racism and discrimination in Holland and elsewhere. These examples

suggest that in-person programs or an electronic forum for public conversations

incorporated within exhibitions could offer visitors a contemporary context with

which to understand slavery’s enduring legacy.

Increasingly scholars recognize that powerful exhibitions contain distinct

affective powers within which lie the elements of “rupture, trauma and change” that

Sharon MacDonald identified as desirable to sustain museum “hybridity.” Scholars

identify complimentary approaches in Holocaust museums for exhibiting slavery,

403 Mischa Penn, Gregory Laden and Gilbert Toestevin, “Review Essay: RACE: Are We So Different?” Museum Anthropology 31 (Fall 2008): 146-156, accessed August 28, 2014, doi:10.1111/j.1548- 1379.2008.00015.x. 202

particularly the evocative permanent exhibition at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial

Museum visited by millions of people (most non-Jewish) since it first opened

twenty years ago. As the former director of the Anacostia Museum, Steven

Newsome remarked some years ago, “People want that same sense of

monumentality [as exhibited by the USHMM] given to their story, particularly

since the institution of slavery is central to the definition of the American

character.” 404 The museum contains a multi-level experiential exhibition

combining still photography, film clips, documents, statements from witnesses and

an array of authentic artifacts including a partial concentration camp barracks and a

rail car originally used for transportation to the camps. Museologist Andrea

Witcomb observes, exhibitions that “avoid linear, rational and didactic means of

communication” are more effective in “generating more complex understandings of

the past and in particular for crossing the boundaries produced by cultural memories

and identities.”405 Witcomb regards exhibitions as successful when they merge a

sense of place with “authentic” objects and first person voices (“testimonies”) and

through that combination, create an authentic encounter for the audience.

Witcomb’s current scholarship centers around what she describes as a “pedagogy of

feeling,” which she encounters mainly in cross-cultural exhibitions about “difficult

histories,” When done sensitively, such exhibitions offer visitors a transformative

experience that moves them to stop thinking about “them” (or the “other”) and

404 Fath Davis Ruffins, “Revisiting the Old Plantation,” pp. 399-401. The Newsome quote is on p. 401. 405 Andrea Witcomb, “The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Exhibition Making,” in Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums, 246. 203

instead to recognize the “us.”406 If “Slavery at Monticello” had utilized its

potentially powerful storyline about the enslaved community American icon

Thomas Jefferson created with Sally Hemings, as one still carried on into the

present day by its biracial descendants, it could have rendered a profound impact on

audiences.

For Witcomb, “rupture” in exhibitions involves admitting emotion into the

form. Sometimes a relatively simple but powerful mechanism provides the trigger. I

recall the remarkable effect made by the “well” that stood in the middle of The

New-York Historical Society’s “Slavery in New York” (2007) exhibition. Visitors

peered down into a recreated well’s watery surface, which actually was a video

screen that projected the reflection of four enslaved women in 18th-century dress

engaged in ordinary conversation. It was easy enough for the audience to imagine

that each woman probably walked to the well several times a day to haul the

quantities of water needed by their owner’s household. Visitors listened intently as

the quartet laughed, gossiped, and reflected about their lives together, just as their

real counterparts did some two centuries before. By utilizing technology creatively,

the “well” delivered up an empathetic human moment that engrossed its’ audiences

while (briefly) transporting them somewhere outside themselves.407 This is what the

best exhibitions strive to do.

406 Andrea Witcomb, “Towards a pedagogy of feeling-understanding how museums create a space for cross-cultural encounters,” unpublished (as of September 24, 2014), copy supplied by the author. 407 A drawing of the well is included in American History Workshop, “Slavery in New York” exhibit materials, Public History Commons Library, accessed May 7, 2014, http://publichistorycommons.org/library/items/show/13. The curator, Richard Rabinowitz, characterizes the well as the exhibition’s most engaging and successful feature. 204

Ultimately, exhibitions within the Smithsonian Institution’s new National

Museum of African American History and Culture may determine how future museums

will represent American slavery to the public. By its own declaration, the NMAAHC

seeks to reconceptualize the racial hegemony of national memory. For audiences, its

privileged location and presence near the Washington Monument and the White House

symbolically connect the museum to the federal government and the entrenched civic

myths that surround American democracy. The new museum stands kitty-corner from

the National Museum of American History who recently celebrated its 50th anniversary

yet whose exhibitions render a fragmentary and somewhat incoherent picture of the

past. NMAAHC benefits too from the deleterious experiences of its Smithsonian

neighbor, the National Museum of the American Indian (hereafter, NMAI). Ceding

curatorial authority to native communities, NMAI’s inaugural exhibitions celebrated

the present and future lives of indigenous people without any analysis or reference to

the devastation colonialism visited on them---or even a cohesive narrative suitable for

broad audiences. In the wake of an unenthusiastic reception by critics and visitors alike,

NMAI is now rethinking its entire interpretation and just opened its first new long-term

exhibition on treaties. In contrast, NMAAHC plans to integrate an interpretative

approach within its exhibitions and programs based on extensive visitor research that is

intended to speak to both history and heritage. According to founding Director Lonnie

Bunch, the museum will combine a two-pronged narrative pathway that incorporates

elements fashioned specifically for African Americans visitors alongside another track

crafted for “outsiders” that positions the African American story centrally “as a lens of

what it means to be an American.”408

408 Noralee Frankel and Cliff Jacobs, “Re-collecting the African American Experience: A Conversation 205

Ultimately, if it succeeds, NMAAHC’s multi-layered strategy may persuade

mainstream audiences visiting the Smithsonian that slavery as well as other parts of

African American history deserves the same prominence within our national memory

as that accorded Euro-Americans to this point. In decentering the traditional single

museum narrative (seen in all types of affinity museums), NMAAHC seeks to reach

across difference and in doing so, direct audiences towards a more thoughtful, messier,

and deeper trajectory than they might typically experience in exhibitions that merely

acknowledge failures and successes. In writing about the Jewish Museum in Berlin,

Amy Sodaro describes this trend as generally appearing within museums marked by

what she identifies as the “politics of regret,” moving in the best cases “toward a post-

national memory that---freed from the hegemony of the nation-state---emphasizes self-

reflexive efforts to critically address past injustices, learn from past mistakes, and right

past wrongs.”409

Yet if we look to NMAAHC’s collaboration with Monticello to preview the

new museum’s representational strategies, this approach materializes as mere

rhetoric. Sceptics rightly question whether any national museum can truly pull off

such a difficult balancing act while at the same time communicating a radically

different, hybrid approach to our complicated past. Potential land mines abound.

Once open and throughout its future endeavors, NMAAHC will need to engender a

“radical trust” (deep confidence that requires taking a risk) on the part of its

with Lonnie Bunch,” Perspectives on History, November 2005, accessed September 26, 2014, http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/November-2005/re- collecting-the-African-American-experience-a-conversation-with-lonnie-bunch.

409 Amy Sodaro, “Memory, History, and Nostalgia in Berlin’s Jewish Museum,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 26 (2013):81, accessed May 7, 2014, doi: 10.1007/s10767-013-9139-6. 206

public.410 How will the museum maintain its relevance over time, as the country’s

population evolves beyond a black-white continuum? More critically, our nice, neat

narratives of American history resist disruption. In its eagerness to homogenize

difference and make resounding connections to African American history for all

Americans, the museum could remove what is truly unique and special about the

African American experience. Tillet takes this a step further: as recognition of

slavery’s critical role in forming American society emerges more broadly, we run

the risk of an overfamiliarity that allows us to push slavery aside, minimize its

impact, and even perhaps forget it. 411

It will take years to gauge NMAAHC’s influence and perhaps even longer to

develop truly meaningful ways of exhibiting traumatic parts of our history in

museums but it is good news that in 2016, American slavery finally takes its place

in a museum on the National Mall.

410 The term is used in Bernadette T. Lynch and Samuel J.M.M. Alberti, “Legacies of prejudice: racism, co- production and radical trust in the museum,” Museum Management and Curatorship 25 (2010):13-35, accessed February 11, 2014, doi:10.1080/09647770903529061. 411 Tillet, 129. 207

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Stanton, Lucia, Annette Gordon-Reed and Roger Wilkins. “Did Thomas Jefferson Have an Affair with One of his Slaves?” Remarks at the Virginia Festival of the Book, Charlottesville, April 14, 1997. C-Span 2. Accessed June 10, 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=davI_EZInAE.

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White, Karen Hughes and Shannon Lanier. “Getting Word: A Conversation with Descendants of the Enslaved at Monticello.” Thomas Jefferson: An Online Conference, Smithsonian Institution, April 27, 2012. Accessed May 25, 2014. http://squirrel.adobeconnect.com/-a751959191/p9pwziqeph/?1.

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229 space for cross-cultural encounters.” Paper presented at Museum Studies Program, The George Washington University, September 24, 2014.

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Appendices

After the Revolution

1. Object theatre. (Courtesy, The Smithsonian Institution)

Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South

2.Entry sign, Before Freedom Came

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3.Entrance, Before Freedom Came

4.Clenched fist charm, collection of The Hermitage, Nashville, Before Freedom Came

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5. Archaeological objects related to spiritual practice, Before Freedom Came

6. Plantation life section, Before Freedom Came

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7.Urban life section, Before Freedom Came

8.Ex-slave narrative audio stations, Before Freedom Came

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9.Ivory bust of Nora August, c. 1865, collection of Sea Island Company, Jekyll Island, Georgia, Before Freedom Came

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Mining the Museum (images courtesy George Ciscle)

10. Exhibition panel with audio, Mining the Museum

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11. Kirk silver set with shackles, Mining the Museum

12. Runaway slave broadsides and hunting rifle, Mining the Museum

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13. Klan robe in baby carriage, Mining the Museum

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At Freedom’s Door (images courtesy George Ciscle)

14. Class brainstorming session, At Freedom’s Door

15. Selecting the big idea, At Freedom’s Door

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16. Exhibition Development students in class

17. Opening festivities at the Maryland Historical Society

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18. Exhibition opening sign and first several galleries, MHS, At Freedom’s Door

19. Slavery in Maryland section, MHS, At Freedom’s Door

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20. Joan Gaither, “Maryland, My Maryland” quilt (partial), MHS, At Freedom’s Door

21. Maren Hassinger, “Legacy” installation, MHS, At Freedom’s Door

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22. Civil War case, MHS, At Freedom’s Door

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23. Entry area with Holmes gate, Lewis Museum, At Freedom’s Door

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24. “Beyond the Door” section, Lewis Museum, At Freedom’s Door

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25. David Claypool Johnston, “Early Development of Southern Chivalry (detail), c.1861-65, collection of the Maryland Historical Society, Lewis Museum, At Freedom’s Door

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26. David Levinthal, “Blackface Series,” collection of the artist, Lewis Museum, At Freedom’s Door

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Slavery at Monticello: Paradox of Liberty (images courtesy of Kym Rice)

27. Opening area, Philadelphia installation, Slavery at Monticello

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28. Opening area, Philadelphia installation, Slavery at Monticello

29. “Remembering Those Enslaved at Monticello,” Philadelphia Installation, Slavery at Monticello

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30. “The Hemings Family,” Philadelphia installation, Slavery at Monticello

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31. “Getting Word,” Philadelphia Installation, Slavery at Monticello

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