This recording is from the Future of Museums Summit held November 1-2, 2023.
Engaging descendant communities in the interpretation of slavery involves addressing the historical underrepresentation and misrepresentation of their experiences within narratives. Current efforts focus on collaborative multi-disciplinary research, structural parity in governance, oral history projects, and inclusive interpretation, programming, and exhibitions that amplify these voices. Learn how museums and historic sites are fostering ongoing dialogue, incorporating diverse perspectives, and engaging descendants as co-creators in crafting a more accurate and empathetic understanding of the history and impact of slavery.
- Tonya Matthews, President and CEO, International African American Museum
- Ann Chinn, Program Director, Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project, Inc.
- Brent Leggs, Executive Director, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, National Trust for Historic Preservation
Transcript
Omar Eaton Martinez: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the AAM Future of Museums Summit. We’re on the session called engage Ing Descendant Communities in Inclusive Programming, Exhibitions, and Interpretation on Slavery. My name is Omar Eaton‑Martinez, I’m moderator, Senior Vice President, Historic Sites. I host a show called the “Museum Jedi Show,” as well as I’m serving as board president on the Association of African American Museums.
I wanted to just take a quick moment to read the blurb that describes this session because I thought it was on point and well written. Engaging descendant communities in the interpretation of slavery involves addressing the historical underrepresentation and misrepresentation of their experiences within narratives. Current efforts focus on collaborative multidisciplinary research, structural parity in governance, oral history projects, and inclusive interpretation, programming, and exhibitions that amplify voices. Learn how museums and historic sites are fostering ongoing dialogue, incorporating diverse perspectives and engaging descendants as cocreators in crafting a more accurate and empathetic understanding of the history and impact of slavery.
Earlier this year I was able to work with Brent Leggs and our colleagues over at the Smithsonian to put on the Descendant Community Social Integration Lab. It was a great gathering of a descendant‑led gathering, a descendant‑led event that brought folks together to talk about some of these issues.
And I wanted to share, at the end of that event that was held earlier this year in March at the museum, at the Smithsonian museum and the Museum of African American Culture we had Dr. Michael Blakeley as many of you know has done incredible work around these issues, historic work in the African burial ground in New York City, many projects since then and many people credit him for coining the word “descendant community,” and he left a bunch of jewels during his keynote called descendants rising. One of them, simply put, diversity’s important but it’s not the same as justice. And I think it’s very important for us to make that distinction and set the tone for our panel talk today.
So what I want to do is just quickly introduce our three panelists. We’ll keep the order and then we’ll allow them to do introductions about who they are, their work ‑‑ their organizations and how their organizations are connected to this work. So our first panelist that I’ll mention is Brent Leggs. He is the Executive Director and Senior Vice President for the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.
Then we have Ann Chinn who’s been ‑‑ I believe is the founder and one of the main agitators for the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project.
And we have Dr. Tonya Matthews who is the President and CEO for the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.
So I’m going to go back up to the top and I will ask Brent to introduce the African American cultural heritage fund, a little bit about his work and how it connects to the topic today. Brent Leggs.
Brent Leggs: Thank you, Omar. It’s nice to be with everyone today. So, a little background on the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. We were creating in the aftermath of Charlottesville in 2017 and it was an opportunity for the National Trust for Historic Preservation to showcase the influence of historic preservation on American society and that we can harness the power of place and strategy for equitable interpretation to begin the long journey of expanding the American story and centering blackness at the core of American democracy.
We have this bold idea, five‑year campaign, raise $25 million to help preserve 100 black heritage sites nationwide for the goal of helping to tell the full history. And I’m pleased to say that we are celebrating our sixth anniversary. We consider ourselves a revolution in the U.S. historic preservation profession and we are creating room for diverse perspectives and professionals to reimagine preservation practice and reimagine the way that we collaborate with Black communities, whether it’s family‑led projects, descendant‑led projects, or the organizations that are the daily caretakers that have worked for decades with limited resources and partnerships to advance our preservation projects.
So, I’m pleased that we are setting a new blueprint for preservation practice by having raised almost $100 million, establishing a 14 million‑dollar endowment, to continue our national leadership, but most importantly, we are protecting places in perpetuity to ensure that Black history is represented on the American landscape.
Omar Eaton Martinez: Thank you so much, Brent. Brent is my brother in the struggle at the national trust and I’m so glad in locked arm and harmony with him.
Next up I’d like to have our sister in the struggle, Ann Chinn, talk about her organization.
Ann Chinn: Good afternoon, everyone and thank you so much. I have connections professionally and personally with all three of the other people on this session. The Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project was created in 2011, it’s a non‑profit. And I like the idea that I’m bookended by both Brent and Tonya because we are distinctly not institutional, and we are not connected to a specific defined historical site in the sense of a structure. We are community‑based. Over the last 12 years we have identified principally with Voyages database and research, over 80 locations where captive African Americans first arrived after completing the middle passage, the ocean crossing. So, we’re not talking or addressing domestic trade or intra-American trade. Specifically, U.S. Which also includes Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
We have managed so far to have forty-two markers installed. One of the latest was at Professor Matthews’ location in Charleston. Started off years ago with Brent Leggs at Montpelier describing or developing the rubric for engaging descendants. And one of the things that we’ve learned over time in placing markers and holding remembrance ceremonies, as we worked with members of the community, is that increasingly we were talking about memory work and the interpretation. And then the collaboration and networking with the museums, with funding sources on behalf of community residents. And I think we’ll leave it at that. And to include the fact that we connect with UNESCO as an international place of history for each one of these locations. Thank you.
Omar Eaton Martinez: Thank you so much, Ann. I think the world of your work and we stand on your shoulders. And I look forward to the future and all we continue to do together.
Last we want to give weight to my other sister in the struggle Dr. Tonya Matthews to talk about the International African American Museum and the other work that connects her to this topic.
Dr. Tonya Matthews: So thank you, Omar, Brent, Sister Ann, as Ann has mentioned, we are all very, very much connected and occasionally we do call Brent for things other than money, not often, but every once in a while we appeal to him as the wise man that he is in our space so the International African American Museum opened on June 27th, 2023 so we are barely 100 days old in this space. We are a 23‑year journey and we can get into some of why that journey was so long. But part of one of the reasons that journey was so long was in creating processes and pathways for honoring the keepers of the story because sometimes those who fund a museum or build a museum or ‑‑ can make room to build in a space are not the keepers of the story. I refer to them as a steward. You may be a steward without being an owner so we had to work through some of that. And I think that history is not just told, it is, as has been said, interpreted. And the way Black people talk about Black stories in the context of Black culture is different, the language and energy is different. One of the things I’m excited to say is that, you know, I do think we’ve made some significant strides and have been very successful in framing our stories in our own voice.
Now, we are a very large museum as well. With our opening, we become essentially the second largest African American history museum in the country after the Smithsonian. But I say that to recognize the fact that we are now growing a pantheon of giant Black history museums just like you have giant art museums. And one of the things I’ve been a big champion of is you need to go on a pilgrimage and go to all of them, we have different ways we curate the stories, different energies, different ways we bring them, intuitive, no one thinks there’s one art museum to serve them all. I think we’re finally at a point that we can start to demonstrate the same as true of history, certainly of African American history as well.
The other major institution within our institution is our ancestry and genealogy center. We’ve devoted a significant amount of space. It’s actually just a little bit larger than even our largest gallery in the space and one might ask a museum gave up a gallery for people to be on computers? What ‑‑ what is that about? And I think part of it is we have a nice kitschy way the land has a story, we’re built at the site of Gadsden, slave training, tells the story and invite visitors to tell their own stories within this particular context. The way of phrasing that last part is important because we have developed a specialty if not a reverence for African American history and storytelling that you may not find in a particular genealogy center which is one we do believe that all people, African Americans as well, can go back generations upon generations upon generations, we are not going to get stuck at 1871 in that space which is what we thought at some point. So it’s about being able to take records with a different eye. It’s about to hear ‑‑ about being able to hear oral histories with a different ear to help guide the way we do our research.
But the way I phrased it to connect with your own story within this context, every American family who has been here for generations is going to come through the period of our country that made Gadsden’s war what it is. I do think there are particular places, techniques, energies that help all of us get through that space.
At the museum we are adamant when we say that the period of slavery and enslavement is not the beginning or the end of the African American journey, it’s in the middle. And that can be true for all contexts and all folks who come through.
So I will pause there but with one little nugget in case folks that Black folks couldn’t do it twice, dare I say three times, shout out to my Brother Stephenson down there in Montgomery but in our first two and a half, three months the museum has welcomed more than 55,000 visitors to the museum. So, we are very excited. And if y’all are not one of the 55, what you doing? What you doing? Come on down to Charleston, we still got some life down here. So, thank you, Omar.
Omar Eaton Martinez: Oh, man. We absolutely salute you, your staff, your stewards, your board, your community for all the wonderful work. I had the awesome privilege of being able to be in that space and it’s just so diasporic, intentionally diasporic, warms my heart just thinking about how beautiful that space is. Definitely encourage people to come. Shout out to the Black museums, Dr. Matthews, I think we have a strong role in this fight and lock arms with the efforts that Ann Chinn has made as well as Brent Leggs.
So Brent, if you could talk to us, you know, Ann mentioned it before, you know, some of us had the opportunity to participate five years ago in the teaching slavery summit that was held at James Madison’s Montpelier, that’s the place that changed the rubric that changed the perspective of the field on how we interpret sterling silver. If you could talk to us about the genesis of the rubric I think people would benefit from hearing from you.
Brent Leggs: I don’t know if the public understanding that the Montpelier foundation for the last two decades starting with archeology and wanting to rescue and uncover the hidden stories of the black experience at the site of enslavement to recovery the hidden history and the landscape and that has informed their kind of strategic engagement of descendants over time.
Past forward years later the Montpelier Foundation was in the process of developing a permanent exhibition called the mere distinction of color. And if you haven’t toured it, it’s in the basement of the main house and it is innovative in the way that it connects enslaved workers’ story and contribution to our presidential history.
But building on that work, the next step was to understand what are the best practices for engaging descendants beyond just interpretation but in governance, leadership, and as this ad session described, the cocreation of this work, but it also was learning from best practices from the broader field for teaching slavery interpretation.
And so, we collaborated with the Montpelier Foundation, we partially invested funding to cohost 50 practitioners, museum professionals, descendants, and others, and we had a multi‑day convening at Montpelier. And you all remember, it was a beautiful moment. You all remember when Joe McGill, we had that fireside chat after dinner, and we circled around the reconstructed slave cabins, and we were calling the ancestors and using that as a moment to honor their memory.
And what I think also was beautiful was from having folks like Dr. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham the chair of the history department of Harvard University, again, all the way from descendants directly connected to Montpelier so a diverse audience and we organized ourselves to cocreate and co‑write the rubric.
And so as an outcome of the convening this community volunteered to organize those ideas and to produce what is now an award‑winning document and a best practice for the field. And I think the best example of the implementation of the rubric is the use of it at Montpelier itself. And you all know that, as an outcome, we were able to achieve structural parity with 50% representation on the board of trustees which is transformational for a presidential site but transformational for Montpelier where they have now had two chairs of the board representing African American history.
Omar Eaton Martinez: Yes, that was an amazing feat to see. Thank you for sharing that genesis, Brent. It’s so important that people understand how this started, where it is now and we’re going to talk a little bit more about the future and how you’ve seen it used.
I wanted to give way to Ann. And Ann, you know, if you could talk about, a little bit about what the communities mean ‑‑ descendant communities mean to you and your work but maybe couple it also with what you’ve seen, what you started with and you mentioned having markers outside of the mainland of the United States including Puerto Rico and other spaces like that, how important is that in interpreting your slave name with the diasporic lens and the work that you’ve done?
Ann Chinn: well, I don’t think it could be interpreted without looking at the broad scope but before I even respond to that I want to piggyback on what Dr. Matthews has said about personal history and I guess what I call the memory work which is related to how descendants define and control the decision‑making, whether it is at the board level, at the design level, graphically, or actually interpretation in, say, audio tours.
I come to this history as a descendant connected to Mount Vernon. I come to this session as a member of the participants with developing the rubric. And currently, we are working with several newly identified arrival locations, including Puerto Rico, and Macau. There will be four arrival locations on that island. They are now clamoring to say, “Well, Ann, why don’t you do this throughout the Caribbean?”
And I’m going, “because right now we have our hands full with the U.S., however, I’m hoping that in many cases those who do museum work will see this as part of their charge.” And to look at this entire history and presence today of descendants in the context of the diaspora. You know, we are not limited to a place, we share a history. And each one of us has a family that is distinct and figuring out that a lot of the identification and preservation and interpretation has always got to include descendants. I mean, I think that a lot of times we don’t see ourselves in that role as much as we should. I look, in terms of our project, as advisors to community, as technical people to a community, not setting the agenda. And I think that’s at least for me in terms of how we operate, really crucial. So that in every location, it is what do you know that you can tell us as opposed to dictating this is what we think, it’s not ‑‑ it can’t be extractive, I guess, is what I’m basically saying.
And so each place is unique, each family is unique, even though they are shared points of history. And that’s our approach.
Omar Eaton Martinez: Thank you so much for sharing that approach. That approach is exactly what we want to share with our attendees today that when we do this work, it’s supposed to be community‑centered, it’s supposed to be lift people up, be inclusive, center voices, this is exactly what you’ve been sharing with them. And, you know, a quick acknowledgement and shoutout from (saying name) who has been working with you adding markers in Puerto Rico and, of course, I can certainly understand a demand for people wanting to add markers throughout the West Indies, there’s a lot of work to be done over there.
I wanted to go ahead to Dr. Matthews (?) in particular talk about (?) family history and how it’s continued to align itself with descendant community work.
Dr. Tonya Matthews: Yeah, so thank you. A couple of things. And it’s very interesting. I think that one of the things, the center for family history is doing sort of in practice and action is for folks who have been railing against the machine and talking about the descendancy and their ownership of their story for quite some time, home, where the voice is not just recognized and heard but amplified.
But I think the other thing that I’m also seeing is that for those who are ‑‑ who had not previously been as comfortable referencing themselves as descendants, right, because when we use the word “descendant,” it is euphemism for the full phrase descendants of enslaved people. Not everyone was ready to go there, my own sister said, “I’m not going to your museum if it’s just about slavery.” I said, Come on down.” It’s very interesting because of the approach we use, it’s the full story, we also believe in sort of getting beyond the story and knowing more than just a name, a number, and a price tag. And it’s also really about connection. And to be here in the low country, this is a very particular part of the south. It’s very interesting when we talk about things that are hidden or history that folks didn’t know. Who didn’t know what? Because folks out here, they really, really do know. And it’s absolutely fascinating to what sort of Ann has talked about, the memory work. The memory here, folks know names for generations. Number one question when you meet folk, and you got the right shaped nose is who are your people and if you don’t know they can probably start pointing you in those places even to the place where the land was worked in expose spaces. So one of the things I’m learning is the relationship to those who are still in this space and still in this land to their descendancy is different than the relationship that some of us who were part of greater migrations or were taken to other places.
And one of the other things I found fascinating, you know, as Omar has alluded to is the museum has begun its partnerships with Barbados specifically because of the center for family history. Long story short Barbados, Charleston, super special history, that was the first place where the ship stopped before going to Charleston, the British evacuated to and got a little too successful. They came here to Charleston. We have a very, very close relationship, not just the descendant community but also the descendants of those who owned community here. And that connection is really, really interesting. And so, one of the things that I resonate with is the diversity with which we hold our own stories. The Barbados, the way of holding the story of ownership, I know my last name and I’m coming for mine. It’s very much wanting the full legacy. They also claim all of the African Americans who also bear those names. Whenever you go there, they want you to come and see the wall in the square, the square was the site of a failed uprising. And there’s a commemorative wall in that space and it’s listing all of these names and they will tell you Ghana wall, find your name, we will introduce you to your cousins, they are adamant they’re, like, if you are from the states your name is on the wall, find your name don’t let the spelling fool you.
It’s been very interesting kind of being in this work. And it’s not just a sense of history. It starts to be a sense of belonging in the present which I have found to be I think really interesting in that space. And for some folks it’s exciting. For some folks it’s halting, some it’s saddening, some it’s rejoicing, for some it’s bits and pieces of all of that. So that has been what I think has been very interesting around that.
The last thing I would say is the approach we’re taking for the Center of Family History is trying to increase the capacity of every family to do their own history. So we’re a genealogy and ancestry research library, I like to remind folks, when you go to the library, the librarian does not read the book for you, she points you in the direction of the book you have asked to read. And so that is part of what we’re trying to do because it’s really possible and we would not have the capacity to support every single individual and the way they needed to be supported but we do have the capacity to teach every single individual how to follow along these paths and that’s also what’s guiding how we pick kind of what seminars and deep dives that we do even as we will eventually grow into doing some individual work as well.
Omar Eaton Martinez: Thank you, thank you, Dr. Matthews, that was great to learn about the center and then the connection to Barbados is always a good one to make for us to make the world a little bit smaller for us and to also really ‑‑ to help people understand that blackness is not a monolith, we are a very complicated and wonderfully nuanced people and I think your museum does a great job in telling those stories.
Brent, I wanted to come back ‑‑ I know there’s been a lot of chat in the chatroom and just buzz around the sector around the rubric. And, you know, you at the action fund have done such a great job in funding all these different projects and so you’ve accumulated this massive list of grantees which I believe some of them may have been used a rubric in their work and I was wondering if you have some examples you would like to share with the group.
Brent Leggs: Yeah, so we’ve got 242 grantee projects nationwide where we’ve directed about $20 million of investment. And one of the key audiences for us includes families and descendants. And families or descendants are often working on an informal basis and so we’re wanting to direct resources to advance our projects.
One example is helping to partially fund the first paid Executive Director for Africatown Heritage Foundation, you know. We all know that they are working to help tell that story, mitigate issues of environmental injustice, and really connect descendants of the last slave ship to arrive to the U.S. to be able to help tell that story and to protect that cultural legacy.
We also have provided funding to saint Simon’s Island, one. The sea islands of Georgia working with Gullah descendants and this funding had two goals. It was to advance aired property trainings and working with the Southern Poverty Law Center that led those trainings and we had 10 families that participated in the trainings and then we were able to direct resources to help pay delinquent property taxes for three families and keep them in their houses.
And the other component was docent training, where we would pay ‑‑ the organization paid members of the community, they went through a docent training and they are leading the heritage tours and saint Simon’s.
Lastly, I would give the example of the Montpelier Descendant Committee. So this organization was formed as an outcome of the rubric, the convening for the rubric and it’s a all‑descendant‑led organization, Dr. Michael Blakeley is a member with Dr. Iris and some other leaders in this space, James French and others. We have invested $226,000, 151,000 is for them to hire their first paid Executive Director so that they can develop their operational infrastructure to be a capable partner to the Montpelier Foundation and to be an advocate, both at the local, state‑wide, and national level.
And then we also directed 75,000 so that they can collaborate with other descendant‑led organizations in the state to create this coalition around sites of enslavement. And we’re motivated to support this kind of work because it’s innovative and it’s looking for opportunities to consolidate resources at impact.
Last thing that I would say is thanks to our partnership with the Mellon Foundation is the largest investor in the fund, they recently invested 5.25 million to pilot a new descendant and family stewardship initiative. And I won’t describe all the components of the program, but one component is we will collaborate with seven descendant and family‑led preservation projects across the country, direct 200,000 each and we will help to cocreate holistic stewardship plans that help envelope management, interpretation, public programming and beyond. We also will collaborate with four presidential sites in Virginia and continue to test the model ideas for descendant, leadership, governance, management, interpretation.
And then, lastly, we will collaborate with two national trust historic sites under Omar’s leadership. And that’s Woodlawn in Virginia and shadows in Louisiana and really help them to advance this work in a meaningful way.
So it’s exciting to build on the previous work and the lessons and to continue to look for ways to innovate practice.
Omar Eaton Martinez: Thank you, Brent, for sharing about all that great work. It’s so heartening, you can see how excited the attendees are, they’re lighting up the chat, they’re sending emojis, everyone is feeling this. I’m so glad to be in partnership with you on this. I’m heartened to also share that one of the sites that Brent just mentioned, a stewardship site, which means it doesn’t have its own board with the Montpelier Foundation but in their case we call it an advisory council, it does adjacent work as the board does, with that advisory council under the new leadership of John Warner Smith we have structure parity, first time ever, with an advisory council. And so this just happened. We celebrated that at the top of September. And we’re going to meet again with that council in January.
So, listen, things are happening here. (?) this movement. And so I’m glad that we’re in a position right now to share these types of things with you. Just one more thing with Ann is that the rubric is such a powerful document, that we’ve had other people outside of what we’re called the (?) in this context, we’ve had people who were descendants of American Indian boarding schools. We’ve had folks who are descendants of Japanese incarceration camps. This one group in particular actually took the rubric and recreated the rubric for their purposes and presented it to us. Like, this is the magic behind a document like that that really centers justice and inequity and inclusion. So, there’s hope for us, right, we have something we’re working on, we’re going to build on this work together and hopefully we’ll bring more allies to this group.
I want to turn it back over to Ann who, again, has been a leader in this work for so long and I wanted to ask you, Ann, when we met earlier in preparation for this session, you said something about us having to learn how to respect and honor local voices and I wanted you to kind of, you know, dig into your bag of experiences and share some examples about what that looks like in your work and how important that is for the success of this work.
Ann Chinn: Thank you, Omar. I mean, we can start with almost the very first marker. And I will say that we think it’s important that we do this marker work. It is simply a marker (chuckle) that tells the story of a place and its people. It is not a structure. But tied in with that marker is an ancestral remembrance ceremony which we encourage each location to observe on whatever is that location’s most prominent African American history point.
So one of the things that we found from the beginning is you have to build trust and you have to main container it so that when we started, say, with historic Jamestown and the national park service, initially, you know, the question of whether or not Africans first came to Hampton or Point Comfort or Jamestown was unbelievable in terms of the resistance. Everybody wants to stakehold and they do want to own but you have to allow the history to tell itself as well. So that ultimately through, I guess probably almost nine months of negotiation, Point Comfort is the place where people arrived, but they ended up in Hampton and Jamestown and other places. I mean, I think that you have to ‑‑ you have to stretch out the story. I mean, in the same way that Dr. Matthews talked about the Gullah Geechee, where those descendants are everywhere across this nation, you know, and you have to say that. You can say these are ‑‑ this is sort of the origins, but every one of these places connects to someplace else.
And so involving people who, again, may say this ‑‑ I’m not ‑‑ I’m not connected, you know, you know, I moved here, but if you look at your place as a place that is diverse, that reflects many, many people, how you interpret, how you apply the relevance of whether it is the middle passage slavery or dominant culture. You move to New Orleans, eventually you’re going to be in a Mardi Gras parade, you know, who started that parade, you know, who has influenced that parade? If you’re going to eat oysters in New York, who was the main person for, you know, who did street oyster work, you know, I think that we have to figure out how to tell the story of networking and connection so that no matter where the place is, there’s ‑‑ you know, there’s a trail. And I think that that’s one of the challenges. You know, we’re asked why do we include native Americans in the remembrance ceremony., well, who was here first, you know. I mean, and just as we ‑‑ as descendants of primarily enslaved Africans have been omitted, why would we turn around and say that this history is just exclusively this (indicating). It isn’t. It is a wide, wide range. And I think that that becomes a challenge because you approach different localities in different ways in order to have them understand that you want them to tell their story. I mean, that’s probably the only thing that we come with, and how you tell it, and for us, the marker is public access to a story that often is either unknown, devalued, or omitted.
So, when we say what we do, we only do markers and ceremonies, you know. We’re not building, you know, but ‑‑ but whatever you want, whatever the community wants to apply to telling that story in ceremonies, in art exhibits, whatever ‑‑ it mushrooms. We’re just saying that for us the marker is the anchor, this is the place where we can say, for here, this is where it began and when.
Omar Eaton Martinez: That’s wonderful because I think it reminds us that we all have a capacity to do certain things, we all have roles, we are part of ‑‑ pieces and part of a larger puzzle and so we have to honor that and work together and understand what one person’s work ends another person can pick it up and keep it going.
So, it looks like we have time for one more question. I had a question about kind of harkening back to the comment that I made about my experience visiting the International African American Museum. A question from the audience I’m going to rephrase because it’s touching on something similar so I wanted Dr. Matthews to focus on this one, if she could.
It says ‑‑ this is from Meagan Bill, it says do any of you have experience engaging descendant communities and U.S. descendant communities on the African continent especially regarding stewardship of African heritage and/or African art if so she’d love to hear your perspectives, lessons learned, et cetera.
Dr. Tonya Matthews: That’s a really good question. Topic of the day, sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken. Two shared experiences which get into that. Which is one when we hosted the current and former mayor of a city in Ghana, it was wonderful and exciting, they actually happened to be here when we were putting up a historic marker for Robert Smalls, Google him, look him up if you don’t know him. She was here, they were both here. She was also the first female mayor of the city. I’m touring her around the museum and I’m walking this delegation and she’s getting very quiet. I’m asking, I’m thinking, oh, gracious what part of the story did we get wrong, I’ve got my pen out, let’s fix whatever part of the narrative right now. I asked if she was OK. And her response was, she said, “You know, of course, we know about the events but they don’t tell us about the story of what happened to you when you got here.”
And it was very, very interesting because I think in a lot of ways we think of the continent of Africa as holding the stories. We feel like we were taken from the story and that if we can just get back there, that the story is still there. And what that conversation showed me is that the stories had been taken, hidden, mashed up, not spoken on both sides.
And so, one of the interesting challenges that we’re facing is we’re each holding a part of the story and that we have to actually come ‑‑ come together. It never occurred to me that our cousins, aunts, uncles back on the continent did not know what slavery was on this side and what happened to us since. That was sort of one in terms of understanding that we are in a space of co-curation, co-stewardship of the story. Not just the past, but as we’re going forward.
The second I think is a more practical conversation to your point about using cultural heritage, artifacts, who has what. That’s closer to our conversation with Barbados and the museum itself has a partner, majority institution partner and they wanted to be connected to the space, they’re particularly interested in some of the things we’re doing particularly around genealogy and that kind of thing and I said sure, you know, we can make that introduction, but are you sure you don’t want the museum to go in there with you? No, no, we got it, we have skills and da da we know what we’re bringing to the table. All right, go on in there (chuckle).
And so, as you can imagine, it didn’t quite work as well. Because what I had noticed is that for those that are in the work, there is a bit of belief in or dependence on or expectation of kinship and respect for the story for the handling of this heritage, be it art, be ‑‑ be it a birth certificate. And that what that community, the Bajans, the Barbados community was requiring, they were able to require is we be at that table. Yeah, yeah, we get that you said you were friends of so and so but so and so is not in the room so we’re not prepared to have a full conversation with you unless the other half of this conversation is there. And it was very interesting to be in that space and to be part of that where it could be commanded that we were actually in the room when we were talking about what was going to happen with this cultural heritage that we were talking about.
So, I think what I would say is that particularly in this space, African Americans, African diasporic communities are far more important than we know. It took conversations from the other side to remind us of that. We have our struggles here but America is still America and when you come to the table it does actually mean something and so I think for me, it’s given me a different perspective on how African American museums, African American cultural heritage professionals and historians can show up in these spaces in a way that we perhaps have not spoken up before.
And the last thing I wanted to say was to hearken back to something that Brent, I think Brent and Omar have alluded to was whole lot more humble. If I can tell you how many times that (?) wielded in the face of injustice, have you followed the link, we have a wonderful site down here, Middleton Place which has based their work on this rubric. But what I would say the real power of implementing the rubric as it is supposed to be implemented is is it requires so much community participation that the community remembers what was promised, when it was promised. So, if, at a later time, folks decide to get off the trail just a little bit people remember what was supposed to have been agreed to because they were in the room. They didn’t just read about it after the fact, they’re not now catching up and realizing injustice was done, they can actually see it in real time. And, you know, and I think that this is hard work. Folks are much more likely to sort of lean back into old ways as soon as things get tough or tired or the new car smell has worn off. But the real power of the way the rubric demands you do the work puts so many people in the room when the work is being done that the memory stays, and that is part of how the community becomes a partner in keeping said institution accountable to what happens, not just at that moment but also down the road.
Omar Eaton Martinez: Thank you so much for sharing that. As we ‑‑ we tried to get it within the 45 minutes, we failed a little bit on that but I’m glad you guys stuck with us. Thank you, Brent. Thank you, Tonya. Thank you, Ann. I’m turning it back over to AAM.
Tiffany Gilbert: Thank you for joining us for this excellent presentation. Now we direct you to a moderated track‑based breakout to continue this discussion or you may want to explore one of the networking groups to connect with colleagues who have similar roles or interests. You may move between these two formats as you’d like. Enjoy these one‑hour breakouts which will conclude our program today and we look forward to seeing everyone back here tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Thank you all.
Ann Chinn: Thank you.
Omar Eaton Martinez: Thanks. Thanks again, everybody. That was great.
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