During my year as a graduate fellow at the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater-Kent, the most frequently requested lesson by visiting elementary and middle school groups was invariably the Quest for Freedom program. This ninety minute experience begins with a (white cotton gloved) hands-on exploration of material culture artifacts that tell the story of early anti-slavery efforts in the Philadelphia area, such as a child’s dress made from the antebellum equivalent of fair trade cloth, before offering students a chance to make history by signing an anti-slavery petition using quill pens. The program concludes with a black history focused tour of the museum’s extensive object collection, which makes no attempt to hide the problematic parts of Philadelphia’s past but instead places shackles as the initial artifact in the City Stories Gallery on the first floor and, upstairs, juxtaposes a harness next to an original marker from the Mason-and-Dixon line to problematize the traditional geography of slavery. While at the PHM I also sat in on several meetings about the launch of joint programing with the AAMP, in part to take advantage of the former’s massive artifact vault and latter’s much larger meeting spaces.
The African American Museum in Philadelphia tells the story of the city’s prominent free black community in the years before the Civil War and the struggles to achieve equality in the decades after. The building itself reflects a very distinctive angular architectural style from the mid-1970s, complete with steel sculptures outside and ramps linking interior exhibits. The main attraction at the AAMP is the Audacious Freedom exhibit, a multi-media experience which highlights specific aspects of the African-American community in Philadelphia such as religion, education, employment, and politics. This exhibit also serves as an introduction to some of the dozen major figures who are depicted in the full-size video projections that comprise the next section of the museum, including one of Octavius Catto who fought for educational equality but was murdered trying to register black voters. Catto is also portrayed as a youth in an interactive exhibit for kids that is one of the many ways that the AAMP strives to create an educational experience for all ages. The upper floors contain gallery space for rotating artistic exhibits which sometimes stand out even over the permanent displays, as in the case of last year’s ‘Cash Crop’, a powerful sculpture exhibition on the trans-Atlantic slave trade that received widespread critical acclaim.
Several more sites around the city focus on other elements of local black history. The NPS run President’s House on Independence Mall, for example, tells tales of enslaved people in the household of George and Martha Washington alongside archeological analyses and displays on the Executive Branch. Located just a few blocks away near Penn’s Landing, the Independence Seaport Museum is home to a landmark exhibit entitled Tides of Freedom: African Presence on the Delaware River, which is curated by Penn professor and PBS personality Tukufu Zuberi (who also wrote a piece for the Huffington Post about the exhibit). Across the city, the ACES Museum in Germantown, housed within an historic structure that served as a stop on the Underground Railroad and as an unofficial African-American USO during WWII, highlights the role of minority members of the military in that war and includes innumerable artifacts from the 1940s not often found in many other museums. Meanwhile, a considerable amount of space at the Penn Museum of Archeology and Anthropology is devoted to Africa, from permanent flagship displays about Ancient Egypt and covering sub-Saharan civilizations to temporary contemporary exhibits such as Imagine Africa, while they also host a celebration of African Cultures scheduled for this Saturday February 28th.
Beyond highlighting the theme of freedom, many of these exhibits seem to share an emphasis on more fully integrating black history into a broader narrative. The Philadelphia History Museum and the African-American Museum in Philadelphia each exemplify the significant roles played locally by both enslaved and free black communities during the long antebellum period in urban areas of the Northeast. Similarly, the President’s House and the Seaport Museum both seek to reassert the presence of African-Americans in two of the most important areas of the local geography, along the waterfront and nearby Independence Hall, while simultaneously emphasizing the role of blacks in early American economic and political history. Finally, the ACES Museum and the Penn Museum each expand the chronological period and geographical focus, forward to highlight the presence of minority soldiers in WWII throughout the United States and into the ancient past to emphasize the African origins of global civilization. Moreover, by portraying some of the vital roles that Africans and African-Americans have played throughout all of human history all year round, these sites all encourage visitors to reimagine a more inclusive narrative, an increasingly important function in a 21st century global city, but one which is made more difficult by the fact that diverse student groups are often unable to explore such local sites due to budget cutbacks.