Grassroots Museums & the Changing - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Grassroots Museums & the Changing
Landscape of the Public Humanities

Fath Davis Ruffins

This essay is a brief history of the development of “grassroots” or community-
based museums since the 1960s. These museums pioneered new kinds of relation-
ships with their communities that were far different from older museums and, in the
processi, helped fundamentally enlarge and diversify public humanities. The essay
begins with a focus on three museums founded in 1967: El Museo del Barrio in New
York City, the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum (Smithsonian) a Washington,
D.C., and the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle. Over the last fifty years, these mu-
seums have grown and stabilized and newer, bigger museums with similar goals
have developed. These changes suggest that one future for humanities scholars is to
become involved in new publics outside of the academy who are seeking humanistic
analysis of their distinctive, previously marginalized, community stories.

W hen I joined the staff of the Museum of History and Technology in

1981, I was excited to be working in one of the largest museums ded-
icated to the preservation, analysis, and interpretation of American
history. I knew that I wanted to do historical analysis, but in a way that spoke to a
wider public than that of a university classroom. I did not know that I was enter-
ing a field that was just beginning to organize itself.

Around 1977 or so, the phrase “public history movement” emerged.1 As the
University of California, Santa Barbara, began shaping its public history program,
Professor G. Wesley Johnson organized a series of discussions with people work-
ing in museums and at historic sites and national historic parks as well as with
other federal government historians, archaeologists, and folklorists. Many dis-
cussed how their work was distinct from that of university-based scholars in the
same fields. Working with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Arizo-
na Humanities Council, Johnson organized a public history conference in Phoe-
nix. As a direct result, In 1980, the National Council on Public History (NCPH) era
incorporated in Washington, D.C.2

I also did not expect to discover and then become a part of a cultural move-
ment: scores of people working diligently across the nation to develop “grass-
roots museums.” Though understudied to this day, grassroots museums have had

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some large-scale influences on American cultural and social life over the last sixty
years. My scholarship has focused in part on the complex intersections between
“public history” or “public humanities” and the ethnic-specific histories of pres-
ervation, interpretation, and presentation by African Americans and other Amer-
ican minority groups. This essay investigates what can be posited about the future
of humanistic disciplines and practices by viewing public history and grassroots
museums in tandem.

S ince the NCPH was formed in 1980, there has been an ongoing debate over

what constitutes the fundamental elements of public history or public hu-
manities. In the beginning, some suggested that it was simply traditional
history, but presented outside the academy, in venues such as museums or histor-
ic houses. More recently, several principles have coalesced that define contempo-
rary public history, including:

•

“Shared authority” between public professionals and oral history inter-
viewees and/or other community members to “shape a narrative process”
or product (such as an exhibition or program).3
“Active collaboration” between public professionals and their stakeholders,
“constantly reframing questions and improving interpretations in conver-
sation so that there is a ‘shared inquiry.’”4
“Multidisciplinary” or “interdisciplinary” approaches of necessity. Author-
ity is shared among public professionals from a variety of disciplines to an-
alyze and form interpretations holistically.5

• Service to the public; a “scholarship of engagement” or mutual learning.6
Not only does the public humanist seek to educate the audience but also to
“learn something about the ways in which average people understand, use,
and value the past.”7

• A commitment to “reconnect with the public and demonstrate [IL] value

and relevance” of the humanities “in contemporary life.”8

For many practitioners, these five elements express the key values they hold
and share as the fundamental praxis of their work. Infatti, these statements re-
flect a multidecade process of conflict and dialogue among public humanists.
Even so, many public historians continue to debate how best to translate these
ideas into action.

Fortunately, public humanists can take inspiration from the grassroots or com-
munity museum movement because it pioneered these same ideas and created
many durable examples by successfully applying them in the real world. Beginning
in the 1950s, African American cultural activists created grassroots museums, Di-
ten using skills they had developed as civil rights community organizers. Soon,

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151 (3) Summer 2022Fath Davis Ruffins

activists in other urban minority communities began to invent their own muse-
ums. The new museums and cultural centers emerged from social relationships
in which like-minded people had bonded over local (and sometimes national)
struggles, mostly for civil rights. These institutions came into being by sharing
authority between the founders, staffs, and activated community members. Both
the content and process of their exhibits engaged with and served their communi-
ties and enlarged America’s interest in what museum professionals call the public
humanities.

Over the last sixty years, more than 450 grassroots or community museums
have been built (although not all survived). Though it is hard to get solid figures,
the Association of African American Museums estimates that there are over four
hundred African American museums.9 The online Guide to Hispanic and Latino
Museums lists twenty-four such institutions.10 Due to the overlay between Asian
art and Asian American museums, it is difficult to get firm figures on the number
of specifically Asian American museums as well as the number of Japanese intern-
ment and other historic sites that are part of the National Park Service. Tuttavia,
there are at least twenty listed in major cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los
Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle. This is an extraordinary number of new public hu-
manities institutions that were founded mostly outside of preexisting organiza-
zioni, such as universities or state historical societies. The continuous formation
of these new museums and cultural centers suggests a tremendous public desire
for humanities content.

The first of these grassroots or community museums was the Ebony Museum
in Chicago in 1961 (now known as the DuSable Museum of African American His-
tory).11 In the mid-1950s, Margaret Burroughs (1915–2010) and her second hus-
band Charles (1920–1994) were both longtime social activists. Margaret was an
artist, poet, and teacher in the Chicago public schools. In the late 1930s, she was
one of the founders of the Southside Community Art Center, a place for Black
artists to show their work, build community with other Black artists, and teach
skills to young people and emerging artists.12 However, Burroughs had remained
too leftist for the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s and was asked to leave the
board of the Center. During the 1950s, the Burroughs opened an art gallery in
their sizeable home and invited in schoolchildren for educational tours. They also
sponsored evening events and salons for their community and welcomed their
artistic, activist, intellectual, and interracial group of friends. By 1961, the effort
had outgrown their home, and the Burroughs and a small cohort of friends de-
cided to incorporate formally.13 Today, the DuSable remains the “oldest indepen-
dent African American museum”; it celebrated its sixtieth year of operation in
2021.14

Most of these museums emerged in large urban areas, often in neighborhoods
associated with a particular minority ethnic or racial group. The DuSable origi-

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesGrassroots Museums & the Changing Landscape of the Public Humanities

nated in the Southside of Chicago, long known as the “Black Metropolis.” Other
examples include the Museum of Afro-American History, first located in the Rox-
bury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts (1963); the Charles Wright Muse-
um on Grand Boulevard in Detroit (1965); El Museo del Barrio in Spanish Harlem
in New York City (1967); the Wing Luke Museum in a pan-Asian neighborhood in
Seattle (1967); the Anacostia Museum in Anacostia, east of the river in Washing-
ton, DC. (1967); and the Studio Museum in Harlem (1968). These are just some of
the earliest and most successful of these grassroots institutions.

What made these museums distinctive and essentially unlike most historical-
ly White museums was their relationships to audiences and communities. Tradi-
tional large-scale museums tend to be built in the most prestigious parts of town,
and most historic houses and estates showcase the wealth and stature of the no-
table worthies who founded them. The purpose of most of these institutions was
to bring ordinary people to important places where they could be uplifted, or to
provide a setting where scholars, connoisseurs, and collectors could congregate
and appreciate elite culture.

By contrast, the grassroots institutions were established in specific neighbor-
hoods and directed toward marginalized minority groups. In a sense, this was an
early form of restorative justice or “restorative history,” particularly for African
Americans. From the very beginning of the nation, scholars, newspaper writers,
politicians, and ministers in predominately White institutions maintained that
Black people and Native people had contributed nothing to the heroic building
of the country or to its predominant Anglo-American culture. This “history of no
history” was crucial to the maintenance of slavery and later segregation. People
without a history and a record of contributions can be more easily and thorough-
ly oppressed.15 These grassroots museums saw their mission as correcting these
mainstream historical inaccuracies. They sought to present a more authentic his-
tory of their people’s cultural contributions and historical sacrifices, such as serv-
ing in the military during America’s wars.

I n the beginning, none of these museums would have qualified as such accord-

ing to the standards of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM). At that
time, the AAM’s fundamental definition of a museum required having and
stewarding a collection of artifacts and/or maintaining a historic building. Ini-
tially, these new grassroots institutions were not so focused on acquiring collec-
zioni. Invece, they were committed to producing art and exhibitions that uplift-
ed and inspired people by focusing on their distinctive histories. Rather quickly,
as they become more significant in their local communities, they received objects
and had to confront the care of those collections. At first, what separated the mu-
seum staffs from their visitors was only their zeal and commitment to interpret-
ing the history and culture of their people.

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151 (3) Summer 2022Fath Davis Ruffins

None of these early founders or founding directors were “museum people”
who had attended either Winterthur or Cooperstown graduate programs in deco-
rative arts or museum studies. Piuttosto, they were teachers, social workers, and civil
rights activists who saw needs in their communities that they wanted to address.
A number were also working artists, such as many of the founders of El Museo
del Barrio. These artists often had a keen sense of how the mainstream museums
ignored minority artists. Compared to some of the other founders, they may have
had a better sense of how museums functioned.

These museum founders and the early cadres of students, activists, and volun-
teers worked with their families, neighbors, and friends to learn what kinds of ex-
hibitions they would like to see and what kind of programs they would like to at-
tend. A fundamental practice involved showing their communities that they had a
history, that their ancestors had contributed to building the nation, that their an-
cestors had struggled to resist and protest their unfair treatment by the larger soci-
ety, and that their artists had contributed to the cultural efflorescence of America.
Three examples demonstrate the trajectory of these grassroots museums: El
Museo del Barrio (New York City), the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific
American Experience (Seattle), and the Anacostia Community Museum (Wash-
ington, D.C.). All of these museums first opened their doors in 1967. In the fifty-
five years since, they have expanded more than once. Today, they are located in
newly constructed or renovated buildings, designed specifically to look and feel in
many ways like professionally run museums. Briefly, here are their stories.

In the mid-1960s, a number of teachers, artists, and social activists in New
York’s Puerto Rican community began to call for some kind of cultural center. In
1967, artist and art teacher Raphael Montañez Ortiz became the founding director
of El Museo del Barrio, supported by a much larger group of local artists, educa-
tori, activists, and volunteers. In describing its mission, Ortiz said the museum “is
bravely girding itself to meet . . . ‘the needs of Puerto Ricans for a cultural identity.
As a people, Puerto Ricans have been disenfranchised, economically, politically
and culturally.’” He added, “as a group like the Young Lords was born to deal with
the political and economic disenfranchisement, so Museo is an attempt to begin
to come to terms with our cultural disenfranchisement.”16

At first, the museum had no specific home and consisted of boxes of materi-
als in an available classroom in a New York City public school. Over the next few
years, the museum bounced from a few rented rooms to various storefronts. Yet
even when the museum had no permanent home, Ortiz and the artists, teachers,
and volunteers organized exhibitions in libraries, schools, and occasionally small
galleries. Their goal was to encourage the collection of personal records docu-
menting the lives of families in East Harlem; to provide an outlet for Puerto Ri-
can (and other Latino/a) local artists; to represent the importance of Puerto Ri-
can culture in New York City; and to inform their community about the history

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesGrassroots Museums & the Changing Landscape of the Public Humanities

of Puerto Ricans, both locally and on their Caribbean island homeland. By 1977,
the museum had gained enough public support from the city to move into the un-
used Heckscher building, located on Fifth Avenue. Today, the building has been
renovated to include a working theater, lobby, and more collections and gallery
spazio.

Of these three museums, El Museo has suffered the greatest internal turmoil.
On some occasions, the staff and director worked for free. Several times in the
1970s and 1980s El Museo almost closed due to its financial problems. At oth-
er times, the directors, staff, board members, local supporters, and critics have
fiercely disagreed over whether the museum was dedicated solely to Puerto Ri-
cans, to all Latin Americans, or to Latin artists throughout the hemisphere. By
the early 2000s, El Museo had garnered criticism from some of the former activ-
ists who had been involved in its earliest phases. It was also attacked by schol-
ars who critiqued the whole concept of “Latin American art” in part because that
positioning tended to uplift artists from other nations and to devalue U.S.-based
Latino/a artists.17

Today, El Museo has clarified its purpose, acknowledging a complex institu-

tional history. Its website states:

OUR PURPOSE

• El Museo del Barrio’s purpose is to collect, preserve, exhibit and interpret the art

and artifacts of Caribbean and Latin American cultures for posterity.

• To enhance the sense of identity, self-esteem and self-knowledge of the Caribbean
and Latin American peoples by educating them in their artistic heritage and bring-
ing art and artists into their communities.

• To provide an educational forum that promotes an appreciation and understand-
ing of Caribbean and Latin American art and culture and its rich contribution to
North America.

• To offer Caribbean and Latin American artists greater access to institutional sup-

port in the national and international art world.

• To convert young people of Caribbean and Latin American descent into the next
generation of museum-goers, stakeholders in the institution created for them.

• To fulfill our special responsibility as a center of learning and training ground for
the growing numbers of artists, educators, art historians, and museum profession-
als interested in Caribbean and Latin American art.

• This mission reaffirms the vision of Raphael Montañez Ortiz, who founded El Mu-
seo del Barrio in 1969, and of the Puerto Rican educators, artists, and community
activists who worked in support of this goal.18

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151 (3) Summer 2022Fath Davis Ruffins

This contemporary restating of their purpose reiterates their original and on-
going commitment to the arts of Caribbean peoples, such as Puerto Ricans, Fare-
minicans, and Cubans. But it also makes it clear that other Latinos are explicitly
included in the museum’s purview.

The Anacostia Neighborhood Museum opened in Washington, D.C., In 1967
as an outpost of the Smithsonian Institution and the first federally funded grass-
roots museum. The museum is often described as being established by Smithso-
nian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley (1913–2001). In reality, an organization of older
activists in the Anacostia neighborhood had spent years trying to get a museum or
cultural center in their part of the city. When Secretary Ripley began to look for a
likely community spot, the Anacostia Neighborhood Alliance seized the opportu-
nity. Marion Hope and her group successfully insisted that the Smithsonian hire
their candidate as the founding director: Reverend John Kinard, a local activist,
minister, and native son.19

Zora Martin Felton, the first director of education at the Anacostia Museum,
remembered that the staff often had to stay until 10 p.m. or later. Since its first lo-
cation was in the former Carver Theater on Nichols Avenue in the heart of down-
town Anacostia, the museum had an auditorium with a stage. Community choirs
would practice there. School bands might rehearse there. Local activist groups
could schedule meetings there.20

In this way, the museum was revolutionary in being fully participatory with its
neighbors and community. It took forty years for the concept of the “participatory
museum” to become an important and urgent new idea in the wider public hu-
manities/museum world. The staffs of these early grassroots museums often had
the urgency and the fierce commitment of a cadre of civil rights workers. Infatti,
many were veterans of those struggles. They saw their work on social and cultur-
al issues as being critical tools in empowering their communities for political and
electoral battles.

Because Nichols Avenue (later renamed Martin Luther King Boulevard) be-
came drug-ridden and dangerous, the Anacostia Museum moved to a new loca-
tion in 1987. Though it has a commanding view of the city, the Museum is in a
somewhat isolated spot, further from the “thick of the neighborhood” than when
it was in the Carver Theater. Tuttavia, the attractive building was specifically
built to be a museum and has been renovated several times over the years, provid-
ing more space for the library, collections, and storage.

In recent years, the Anacostia Community Museum has articulated a new mis-
sion to document the various communities of the city of Washington. The muse-
um’s recent exhibition, “A Right to the City,” details the changing nature of six
neighborhoods, including the once Latino-dominated Adams-Morgan; a shrink-
ing Chinatown; and the Brookland neighborhood, which was integrated long be-
fore the current wave of gentrification.21

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesGrassroots Museums & the Changing Landscape of the Public Humanities

In Seattle, the Wing Luke Memorial Museum was also organized in 1967, by
a group of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese American activists. The museum was
named after Wing Luke (1925–1965), a Chinese American lawyer who served as
the Assistant Attorney General of Washington State in the Civil Rights Division
and a member of the Seattle City Council from 1962 until his death in a plane crash
In 1965.22 A group of pan-Asian shopkeepers, teachers, and activists came together
to establish a memorial in his memory and to give voice to a community that had
lost their chief spokesman.

The Wing Luke Museum was unusual in that it was dedicated to the wide spec-
trum of Asian and Pacific Islander American people, while most Asian American
museums today are nation/ethnic specific: Japanese American, Chinese Ameri-
can, or Korean American, in part due to the different geography of where these
groups settled.23 The Wing Luke Memorial Museum began in a storefront, Ma
moved in 1987 to a larger building. In 2008, the museum became associated with
the National Park Service as part of the Asian Pacific American Heritage Corridor
and relocated into an even more spacious building associated with a number of re-
lated historic structures nearby. In 2010, the museum’s current name was adopt-
ed: the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience. Today, it is
still the only pan-Asian museum in the United States.

What remains distinctive about these grassroots museums is their shared mis-
sion to give voice to their communities. The Wing Luke Museum, in a previous
values statement, highlighted the importance of community-based work: “Peo-
ple give us meaning and purpose. Relationships are our foundation. We desire
community empowerment and ownership.” They went on to outline the ten prin-
ciples of community-based work:

1. Community-based work must be rooted in relationships of trust and respect.

2. Community-based work requires a safe, comfortable environment to ex-

press ideas and share experiences.

3. Community-based work requires listening, flexibility, agility and patience.

4. It is democratic in nature–not top-down, and not a funnel for input.

5. Community ownership of their stories enables communities to hold and use

them towards their own self-determined purposes.

6. Opportunities to learn abound in community-based work.

7. Community empowerment results from bringing together diverse people
within communities who might not otherwise connect and collaborate to-
gether, increased community pride through increased visibility, develop-
ment of professional skills and resources within the community from grant
writing to educating to publishing and more.

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151 (3) Summer 2022Fath Davis Ruffins

8. Community-based work draws together communities and creates deep en-

gagement and connections within as well as to the broader public.

9. Community-based work creates a safe place to speak your story and your

truth.

10. People get involved in heart-felt work, doing something that they believe

in.24

As with El Museo and the Anacostia Museum, the Wing Luke’s values state-
ment resonates and reaffirms the original concerns of their founders. Strikingly,
what has emerged as “best practices” in the public humanities echoes many of the
sentiments that these museums first articulated sixty-five years ago.

D uring the 1980s, the number and variety of grassroots museums in-

creased. In 1980, community organizer John Kuo Wei Tchen and an in-
terracial group of activists launched the New York Chinatown History
Project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Art enthusiast and Urban League
activist Aurelia Brooks (1931–2021) became the founding director of the Cali-
fornia African American Museum in Los Angeles in 1981. Carlos Tortolero and a
group of fellow public school teachers opened the Mexican Fine Arts Museum in
Chicago in 1982, now known as the National Museum of Mexican Art.

A growing number of the founding directors of these museums were academ-
ically trained in related disciplines such as history, while in the 1960s, none of
the founders of these institutions were academics, though most had been to col-
lege and were professionals. By the mid-1980s, more of these leaders had PhDs,
though none were trained as public humanities scholars.25 In 1988, the National
Afro American Museum and Cultural Center opened in Wilberforce, Ohio. John
Fleming, a Peace Corp volunteer, civil rights scholar, and activist, was its founding
director. Also in 1988, former member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee and former D.C. city councilmember Frank Smith formed the African
American Civil War Museum and Memorial in Washington, DC. Other found-
ing leaders in this period were professional administrators. For instance, In 1985, UN
group of Nisei (questo è, second-generation Japanese Americans) organized the Jap-
anese American National Museum, which opened with Irene Hirano (1948–2020)
as the founding director.

These directors showed an increasing interest in consulting university-based
scholars. And unlike earlier grassroots museums, which had started in storefronts
but grown into larger buildings, these 1980s museums often started as new build-
ings or in major renovations of historic buildings. To generate funds beyond their
local communities, these institutions needed the support of major foundations
such as the Ford Foundation or the Mellon Foundation. They also began to apply
to government programs such as the National Endowments for the Humanities

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and the Arts and the Institute for Museums and Library Services. These founda-
tions and programs required academic consultants as par for the course in their
grant applications. To get these larger grants, museums across the board needed
to forge relationships with university-based scholars.

These newer directors were instrumental in this process. Many had previous
contacts with university-based scholars and could initially rely on personal con-
tacts to seek scholars interested in this public arena. Directors sought scholars’
advice as consultants, asked them to serve on museum panels and boards, E
sometimes contracted them to work as guest curators, often paired with a more
experienced museum exhibition developer or designer.

The grassroots museum movement of the 1950s and 1960s largely preceded the
formal founding of African American and other ethnic studies programs and de-
partments at universities.26 However, by the 1980s, they could draw on the books
and expertise of social historians and others interested in history “from the bot-
tom up,” as a growing number of scholars began publishing in ethnic studies,
women’s studies, and cultural studies. As these areas of humanities scholarship
grew, there were more sympathetic academics than there had been in the 1950s
and 1960s. By the 1980s and 1990s, grassroots museums could consult and call
upon them to inform their exhibitions and programs.

Some of these grassroots museum directors and staff began to publish journal
articles and essays in books that detailed and analyzed their values, metodi, E
practices. Per esempio, John Kuo Wei Tchen, cofounder of the Chinatown Histo-
ry Project, published an extremely influential essay, “Creating the Dialogic Mu-
seum.”27 Tchen described the Chinatown History Project as having a “dialogue
driven approach” that was essential to determine what the “public needs” that
history can serve. Rather than having exhibitions and programming organized
exclusively by professional historians and specialists, this dialogic approach re-
quired working with and sharing interpretive authority with those who brought
the wisdom of “lived experience.” In this process of dialogue, new historical
knowledge might well surface. Since much of the work produced by professional
historians over decades tended to stereotype and marginalize Chinese people and
Chinatowns, this new knowledge often served as a corrective to the previous pro-
fessional scholarship.28

By the early 1990s, several public or community-facing museums opened, come
as the National Civil Rights Museum (NCRM) in Memphis, Tennessee, In 1991 E
the Birmingham [Alabama] Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) In 1992. Both museums
originally focused on the specific and distinctive local aspects of the modern civil
rights movement. In Memphis, the NCRM acquired the Lorraine Motel, the Black-
owned hotel that Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was staying in when he was as-
sassinated in 1968.29 Consequently, this museum is set in a historic location and
stewards a historic building. The BCRI is likewise situated in a historic district in

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151 (3) Summer 2022Fath Davis Ruffins

downtown Birmingham and stands across from Kelly Ingram Park, where many
demonstrations took place, including those met with the infamous use of dogs
and hoses. Down the street is the 16th Street Baptist Church where four girls died
when the Ku Klux Klan bombed the church in 1963. Both the NCRM and the BCRI
were organized by Black-led interracial groups of cultural activists who felt that
what was most historic and meaningful about their African American community
was its history of direct resistance to segregation.

The Memphis and Birmingham civil rights museums demonstrated the pro-
found new effect grassroots museums could have on local heritage tourism and
even traditional tourism. Although some White businessmen and chamber of
commerce folks (and some ordinary White people too) feared that the presence
of these museums would only interest African Americans, the museums proved
to be popular with “mainstream” or White visitors as well. Infatti, the Alabama
Tourism board revealed that BCRI was one of the most visited and popular sites in
the state, bringing significant new dollars to hotels, restaurants, tour guides, E
businesses.30 This unexpected prominence in tourism was a boon to those two in-
stitutions, in part because they proved their monetary value to mainstream inter-
ests, some of whom had initially opposed the museums.

Grassroots museums and centers continue to emerge, though during the last
twenty years, the trend has been toward larger and more imposing museums and
centers, often with million-dollar buildings and professional staff (though not
necessarily trained in museum work). After twenty years of work by activists, In
2000, the National Hispanic Cultural Center (NHCC) opened in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, with a twenty-acre campus. Over the years, the center has encom-
passed a plaza, three theaters, an art museum, a historic building, an education
center, a library, a genealogy center, and a restaurant. The NHCC also houses a
Spanish Resource Center, a branch of the Spanish embassy, and the Instituto Cer-
vantes. The NHCC is a division of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Af-
fairs. The museum’s website carefully states that they produce exhibitions and
programming “that are meaningful to the local community. [The NHCC] offers
the Hispanic, Chicano, and Latinx artist a place to present their work and bring it
to the national stage.”31

W hat might we conclude from this history that is instructive for think-

ing about the possible future of the humanities? There are two signif-
icant conclusions and/or signposts that emerge from these compli-

cated histories of the development and growth of the grassroots museum.

Primo, outside universities, there is a tremendous interest in humanities that are
“relevant” to particular publics. “Relevance” was a watchword of the 1960s that
has since fallen into disuse. Nonetheless, the concept of relevance is helpful here.
The landscape of public history has been changing for sixty years: there are new

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publics, sometimes nontraditional publics, that are hungry for information perti-
nent to their own identities, however constructed. Though this essay has focused
on ethnic-specific museums, there are other types of grassroots museums, ad esempio
for LGBTQ+ histories, for readers of comic books, and for many kinds of music.
Museums retain widespread public trust whereas many other institutions, come
as governments, newspapers, or even universities, have lost a great deal of public
trust.

Secondo, many of the people who know and were shaped by those kinds of
institutions are now rising to leadership positions in public humanities institu-
zioni. The preeminent example is Lonnie Bunch, who was named Secretary of the
Smithsonian in 2019 after serving as founding director of the National Museum of
African American History and Culture. Bunch selected Korean American Meroe
Park, a former CIA official, and Native American Kevin Gover, former director
of the National Museum of the American Indian, as two of his administrators.
As mainstream museums attempt to appeal to diverse national and international
publics and as predominantly White museums explore shared authority and dig-
ital co-curation, they will need the expertise of more people who were shaped by
these grassroots institutions, professionally or personally.

In the months since the global protests over the police killings of George Floyd
and Breonna Taylor, various predominantly White museums and cultural centers
have named an African American or Latino/a American to a prominent position,
often for the first time. During this current, highly polarized racial climate in the
United States and the world, public humanists from these minority communities
have moved from the margins to some of the most important mainstream muse-
ums in the land. Often formally trained in public humanities, a younger genera-
tion of directors and curators, many honed in these grassroots institutions, are
now posed to lead and influence mainstream institutions. This new generation
may be able to make fundamental changes in American museums and cultural
centers and provide new directions for humanistic institutions, speaking both lo-
cally and globally to new publics.

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151 (3) Summer 2022Fath Davis Ruffins

about the author

Fath Davis Ruffins is Curator of African American History and Culture in the Di-
vision of Cultural and Community Life at the National Museum of American His-
tory (NMAH) at the Smithsonian Institution. She has been a historian and curator
at NMAH since 1981. Between 1988 E 2005, she was the head of the Collection of
Advertising History at the NMAH Archives Center. She has curated or consulted on
several major African American exhibitions and on many community history proj-
ects around the country. Her early publications were among the first to explore the
history of African American preservation efforts. In 2018, her most recent publica-
zione, “Building Homes for Black History: Museum Founders, Founding Directors,
and Pioneers, 1915–1995,” won the G. Wesley Johnson Award from the National
Council on Public History for the best article in the journal The Public Historian.

endnotes

1 Barbara J. Howe, “Reflections on an Idea: NCPH’s First Decade Chair’s Annual Address,"
The Public Historian 11 (3) (1989): 70. See also Denise D. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments,
and National Parks: Towards a New Genealogy of Public History (Amherst: University of Mas-
sachusetts Press, 2012), xiv–xvii; and Robyn Schroeder, “The Rise of the Public Hu-
manists,” in Doing Public Humanities, ed. Susan Smulyan (New York: Routledge, 2021),
6–7.

2 With funds from the NEH, a second conference was held in Santa Barbara in 1979. Another
outcome of these discussions was the formation of the Society for History in the Fed-
eral Government. Howe, “Reflections on an Idea," 71.

3 Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks, xxiv. See also Schroeder, “The Rise of
the Public Humanists," 11; and “How Is Public History Different from ‘Regular’ Histo-
ry?” National Council on Public History, https://ncph.org/what-is-public-history/about
-the-field/ (accessed August 2, 2021).

4 Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks, xxiii–xxiv.

5 Ibid., xxv.

6 Schroeder, “The Rise of the Public Humanists," 13. See also Meringolo, Museums, Monu-

menti, and National Parks, xxv.

7 Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks, xxv.
8 Schroeder, “The Rise of the Public Humanists,” 13–14.
9 “History,” Association of African American Museums, https://blackmuseums.org/history

-2/ (accesso a gennaio 8, 2022).

10 “Guide to Latino & Hispanic Museums in the U.S.,” Mi LegaSi, https://www.milegasi
.com/blogs/hispanic-heritage/latino-museums-guide (accesso a gennaio 8, 2022).
11 “About Us,” DuSable Museum, https://www.dusablemuseum.org/about-us/ (avuto accesso
Luglio 31, 2021). In 1968, the name was changed to honor Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (before
1750–1818), who many celebrate as the first non-Indigenous permanent settler of what
is now Chicago. He is sometimes called the “Founder of Chicago.” He was a frontier
trader, married a Potawatomi Nation woman, Kithawa (Catherine), and became a

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wealthy merchant. He later moved near to what is now St. Louis, Missouri (then Span-
ish Louisiana), and died there.

12 “About Us,” Southside Community Art Center, https://www.sscartcenter.org/about-
us/ (accessed August 2, 2021); and “History and Archives,” Southside Community Art
Center, https://www.sscartcenter.org/about-us/building-legacy/ (accessed August 2,
2021). In some respects, the Southside Community Art Center (SSAC) grew out of artists’
involvement with the Federal Art Project that was part of the WPA. Artists began orga-
nizing to buy a building in 1938 and succeeded by 1940. Dedicated by First Lady Eleanor
Roosevelt in May 1940, Burroughs was one of seven original artist members that in-
cluded Archibald Motley, Eldzier Cortor, and Charles White; she was the only woman.
Over many ups and downs, the Southside Center has persisted as a vital institution.
The building earned Chicago Landmark status in 1994. In 2017, the SSAC was named a
national treasure and, In 2018, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
13 Fath Davis Ruffins, “Building Homes for Black History: Museum Founders, Founding
Directors, and Pioneers, 1915–1995,” The Public Historian 40 (3) (2018): 13–43, https://doi
.org/10.1525/tph.2018.40.3.13. See also “Margaret Burroughs: Biography,” interview,
The History Makers, Giugno 12, 2010, https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/
margaret-burroughs-40 (accesso a gennaio 5, 2022); and “South Side Stories: The Art
and Influence of Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs, 1960–1980,” DuSable Museum, https://
www.dusablemuseum.org/exhibition/south-side-stories/ (accesso a gennaio 5, 2022).
14 By which they mean the first African American museum not attached to a university. Af-
rican Americans have a longer history of independent “public history” organizations
than is generally known to many scholars of public humanities. While many ethnic and
racial groups founded fraternal and sororal societies, religious sodalities, and other af-
finity organizations, African Americans are among the first to have museums. The first
African American museum opened in 1868 at what is now Hampton University in Vir-
ginia. Although originally more of a naturalist’s collection, by the 1890s, the Hampton
Museum began to acquire collections of African art and artifacts. Howard University
opened its museum on paper in 1867, but did not designate a formal museum and ar-
chives space until the 1870s. By the 1930s, renowned HBCUs Fisk University (Nashville,
Tennessee), Howard University (Washington, D.C.), and Atlanta University (Atlanta,
Georgia) had all developed art galleries and/or museums on their campuses.

15 Many early African American historians articulated these sentiments. For this essay, per-
haps the most important was Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950). In 1915, Woodson and
several associates formed the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in
Chicago (later renamed the Association for the Study of African American Life and
History, ASALH). Woodson was the second African American to receive a PhD in his-
tory from Harvard University, In 1912. (W. E. B. DuBois, 1868–1963, was the first in
1895.) This was the first and is still today the largest organization devoted to African
American history and culture. Therefore, Woodson intentionally created a financially
independent historical society, an early organization of truly public history. For many
decades, African Americans with PhDs could not teach in predominantly White insti-
tutions and had great difficulty getting published in mainstream journals, such as the
Journal of American History or the American Historical Review. In 1916, Woodson founded the
Journal of Negro History and later the Journal of Negro Education to fill this gap. In 1926, he
founded “Negro History Week” to have public celebrations of the histories that Negro
scholars were writing. By the 1940s, Negro History Week was observed in segregated
Negro schools, churches, and by a full array of Negro organizations, newspapers and

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other publications, and businesses. Infatti, a key service that the ASALH performed was
to produce and distribute kits to teachers, ministers, and other thought leaders for each
year, focusing on particular themes and providing background information, feature ar-
ticles, and art to help plan celebrations with the appropriate content.

16 Grace Glueck, “Barrio Museum: Hope Si, Home No," Il New York Times, Luglio 30, 1970,
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/30/archives/barrio-museum-hope-si-home-no
.html. See also Will Lissner, “Puerto Rican Art Museum Finally Gets Its Own Home,” The
New York Times, Luglio 10, 1971, https://www.nytimes.com/1971/07/10/archives/puerto
-rican-art-museum-finally-gets-its-own-home.html; and George Gent, “Puerto Rican Art
Is Shown Uptown," Il New York Times, May 1, 1973, https://www.nytimes.com/1973/
05/01/archives/puerto-rican-art-is-shown-uptown.html.

17 See Arlene Davila, “Latinizing Culture: Arte, Museums, and the Politics of U.S. Multi-
cultural Encompassment,” Cultural Anthropology 14 (2) (1999): 180–202, accessed at
https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1999.14.2.180.

18 “Our Purpose,” El Museo del Barrio, https://www.elmuseo.org/history-mission/ (ac-
cessed January 9, 2022). This website also features a thirty-eight-page history of the
museum that candidly lists financial and other problems. It also documents an aston-
ishingly long list of exhibitions and artists’ works on display despite the difficulties.
19 John Kinard, founding director of the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, Smithsonian

Institution, Washington, D.C., interview with author, April 1, 1985.

20 Zora Martin Felton, interview with Jeffrey C. Stewart and Fath Davis Ruffins, 1986; E
Zora Martin Felton, interview with author, novembre 2019. See also Anacostia Neigh-
borhood Museum 1967/1977, Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution, 1977.

21 “Right to the City,” exhibition, Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, https://
www.si.edu/exhibitions/right-city%3Aevent-exhib-6222 (accessed January 8, 2022).
See also the online exhibition, “‘A Right to the City’ Digital Exhibit,” Smithsonian
Anacostia Community Museum, https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections/34d99cccb
2c5454da7b4f08e482c1987 (accesso a gennaio 8, 2022).

22 “Our Namesake–Wing Luke,” Wing Luke Museum (accessed July 31, 2021).
23 David Takami, “Luke, Wing (1925–1965),” History Link.org, https://www.historylink
.org/file/2047 (accessed July 30, 2021). See also Sherry Stripling, “Wing Luke: The Man
Behind the Museum,” The Seattle Times, Febbraio 25, 2005, https://www.seattletimes
.com/entertainment/wing-luke-the-man-behind-the-museum/ (accessed July 30, 2021).

24 About Us,” Wing Luke Museum (accesso a gennaio 8, 2022).
25 When they went to graduate school, public history did not exist as a field within history

or American studies.

26 In 1968, a five-month-long student rebellion at San Francisco State University ended in a
bloody attack by the police sent into the campus by California Governor Ronald Rea-
gan. Although some of the students were beaten senseless and some were arrested and
served time in prison, by 1969, there was an Afro-American studies department with
other similar ethnic studies programs on the way.

27 John Kuo Wei Tchen, “Creating A Dialogic Museum: The Chinatown History Museum
Experiment,” in Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, ed. Ivan Karp,
Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian In-
stitution Press, 1992), 285–326. This book includes chapters by a number of the found-

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ers or founding directors mentioned in this essay. Today, it is the Museum of the Chi-
nese in America; see “History,” Museum of the Chinese in America, https://www
.mocanyc.org/about/history/ (accessed July 31, 2021).

28 Tchen is an example of an activist who cofounded a museum, earned a PhD, and became
a professor. He has written extensively on the theory and practice of the public human-
ities and helped to train a new generation of students who became museum profes-
sionals as well as scholars. Tchen is currently the chair of the Public History and Hu-
manities Department at Rutgers University, Newark, and serves as the director of the
Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience.

29 Years later, the NCRM also acquired the rooming house from which James Earl Ray,
King’s convicted assassin, fired his shots, which is across a courtyard and an alley from
the Lorraine Motel.

30 Fath Davis Ruffins, “Revisiting the Old Plantation: Reparations, Reconciliation, and Mu-
seumizing American Slavery,” in Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations,
ed. Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).

31 “About Creating a Cultural Home,” National Hispanic Cultural Center, https://www

.nhccnm.org/about/ (accessed August 4, 2021).

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