Questions of Community: Black Resistance and Heritage

^{“Northern National Bank/Ile Ife Museum, Germantown, Dauphin, and Marshall, Philadelphia” by Scavenger49 is licensed under CC BY 2.0}

The 2020 AASLH Annual Meeting looked very different this year, spread over thousands of individual computers and offices across the country, but the conversation was over fifty years old. Issues of community, racism, and equitable historical interrogation were consistent themes of the panels – spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic and increasing readiness to acknowledge the funding and organizational models public history has favored are unsustainable. In many ways, the 2020 AASLH Annual Meeting echoed similar concerns from the 1960’s professional discourse that opens up Andrea Burns’ evocative From Storefront to Monument: Tracing the Public History of the Black Museum Movement (2013). Burns locates the emergence of the modern Black museum to the now-familiar tumultuous mid-20th century, where faced with and shaped by the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Black institutions subverted and challenged tradition structures to foster Black pride and community¹. In un-peeling the complex and dynamic evolution of Black museums as community responses to nationally recognized symbols of diversity, Burns reveals the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the “museum”.

In positioning the onus on community at the creation of Black institutions like the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, Burns reveals how The Museum was, at its core, not interested in community wellness. Fundamentally this was seen in the White visitor demographics to the Smithsonian Institution, located in a predominately Black city, where Black residents could not see their culture or history represented on equal footing to White history in the nation’s attic². The Museum, not isolated to the Smithsonian, was in a sense a way of citizen-making of fostering select inclusion along race that manifested itself in identifying value and importance that neglected Black voices and history.

Black leaders capitalized on White apathy in the creation and fostering of neighborhood museums in Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History, Washington D.C.’s Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, and Philadelphia’s Ile-Ife Museum. Where Black families and residents could not see themselves in the nation’s hallowed galleries, museum leaders like John Kinard understood the importance of visibility and value and therefore curated engagement along neighborhood lines – incorporating personal “artifacts” and oral histories. They thus fostered Black activism and belonging, challenging “sterile” academic definitions of museum and heritage that were exercised in exclusionary ways that privileged White experience and feeling. As such, Black institutions manipulated and transformed institutional standards to center community at their core and inspire pride and collaboration between community members.

White appropriation of Black imagination and resistance came in the increasing social visibility of racism and the need of the community to hear and locate diverse stories. Yet where Black institutions had primarily opened doors to community involvement, White institutions and cities sought ownership and sole authority as seen in the fraught formation of the African American Museum of Philadelphia (AAMP) – where funding and reality was restricted by questions of true community participation, political tennis, and racist resistance to Black visibility³. While local community museums were valuable resources for institutional dialogue and incorporation of history, structural racism imbued in funding restricted Black museums from equal footing as much as White institutions sought to appropriate Black resistance and labor. Burns details financial struggles acutely in her breakdown of tensions between the Whitney Museum and the Studio Museum of Harlem, funding discrepancies echoed in Lindsey Tucker Ho’s op-ed “As the Nation Reckons With Racism, Philly’s African American Museum is Wildly Underfunded”, where she breaks down AAMP’s financial and physical challenges. Where the Philadelphia Museum of Art receives 10% of funding from the City of Philadelphia, AAMP wavers between 8% – 14% throughout its history⁴, while working with significantly fewer endowments.

The discourse continues, as referenced in the proceedings of the AASLH Annual Meeting.  Faced with the reality some cultural institutions won’t financially survive this year and a professional field grappling with racism internally and externally the reality was ultimately posed by the courageous Paula Santos of Museum Workers Speak: maybe some institutions don’t deserve to survive. Yet in a field that is favoring Whiteness and white institutions, the racial inequities seen in Covid-19 mortality is predicted to apply to institutions and businesses, with minority-run and based institutions’ mortality threatened. From small institutions like the Paul Robeson House in Philadelphia to the AAMP, legacy is out of community control – restricted by White authority and a manifested right-to-comfort.

Point-blank, the museum and public heritage sector has been flavored and limited by Whiteness, perpetuating White supremacy culture and racism as much as they appropriate Black resistance and culture. The longevity of these conversations shows that the current, mainstream model of heritage is not just unsustainable but harmful. With heritage autonomy and engagement restricted by Whiteness at its core – what right do such museums have to survive? How prepared are White museum professionals to sacrifice control and comfort? A moment of reckoning spread over 50 years, the conversations have never felt more immediate and pressing, giving hope to the idea we finally have the tools necessary to act and radically restructure away from White supremacy and toward holistic, community focused institutions that Black museums have historically demonstrated and fostered, collaborating to produce landscapes of history and heritage that not only reflect their communities but also encourage well-being.

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¹ Andrea A. Burns, From Storefront to Monument: Tracing the Public History of the Black Museum Movement (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press,2013) p 7.

² Ibid. p 38.

³ Ibid. p 67.

⁴ Lindsey Tucker Ho, “As the Nation Reckons with Racism, Philly’s African American Museum is Wildly Underfunded”, Philadelphia Inquirer, September 10, 2020. https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/african-american-museum-in-philadelphia-funding-cuts-penns-landing-20200910.html.