Happy summer!
We just reached the halfway point of our summer TLAM field course — where oh where has the time gone? Looking out over the boats on Lake Mendota from the Bunge Room at SLIS, the six of us have embarked on the journey of wrapping our minds around how we can help prepare for the process of developing a Great Lakes Culture Keepers traveling exhibition. We know we have three years and a bunch of awesome individuals on board. But how to start?
Michael Edmonds, deputy director of the Library-Archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society visited our class last week to share his stories from getting “Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer Exhibit for Students” off the ground. (You can experience the exhibit virtually here.
Michael said the initial idea came from wanting to honor the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, the coordinated efforts of southern civil-rights groups and northern volunteers to educate and register black voters in Mississippi in 1964. Through some interesting twists of history, WHS here in Madison holds some of the most extensive documentation of civil rights activism to be found anywhere. (Check out Michael’s article about the fearless UW graduate students responsible for collecting the bulk of the records here: http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/wmh/id/51901)
So WHS decided to digitize its huge collection (now available here: http://wisconsinhistory.org/freedomsummer). Soon into the process, Michael came across a quote, made by a teacher in one of the 1964 Freedom Schools — established ad hoc, often in church basements, to hold classes for undereducated black Mississippians in civics, African-American history, etc. — that such lessons were letting these students know for the first time that people like them could be heroes. Given recent national recognition of our country’s unsolved problems with racial discrimination and segregation, in Wisconsin especially, Michael said his response was to ask: what if we could inspire kids in, say, inner-city Milwaukee the same way?
Thus began the adventure of the traveling exhibit. Michael got the go-ahead from WHS, hired Lotus Norton-Wisla — our own TLAM graduate! — as an assistant, and dug in. He encouraged the digitization project helpers to bring to his attention anything that grabbed their attention — documents or images that illustrated key turning points or personalities in this history.
Meanwhile — while still involved in his other full-time duties — Michael did research (reading “every book on Freedom Summer”), wrote the text for the panels, and communicated with the design firm. He contacted Milwaukee public schoolteachers, held a focus group over their winter break, and based on their input created a curriculum guide to accompany the exhibit. He also gathered together the original collectors of the material to give talks to donors, and he found civil rights experts (both academics and “political people”) as well as high-schoolers (his daughter and friends) to proof his drafts for content and appropriateness for the target audience.
We learned from his story that in some cases, per Michael’s own words, “It’s like desire makes it happen — not planning.”He shared with us that his initial idea for an evaluation procedure, a survey to be delivered by teachers to their middle- and high-school students, proved totally unrealistic. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t focused the entire time on the outcomes, how people who would experience this exhibit could change for the better as a result. The evidence was just more anecdotal, as in the quote from one student viewer: “I didn’t know my grandmother had to be so brave.”
And in the end, Michael said, it’s statements like that one that really make the exhibit planners, funders, and teachers feel it was well worth doing, as well as the fact that new institutions are still asking for the exhibit to travel to their communities over a year later.
We now have a lot of food for thought as we start to draft proposed timelines and project plans for the Growing Great Lakes Culture Keepers exhibit process. Our development process will be different — we are, after all, a team of students and a whole conference of tribal cultural workers, rather than one energetic archivist. But I think Michael’s talk did inspire us to be brave, and to keep the people for whom we’re doing it and the ways it could possibly change their lives as our foremost priorities.