Reflections on Visiting the Greenwood Rising Museum and Racial Diversity in Museum Education Staffing
One memorable experience from the summer of 2024 was the opportunity to do some contract work for the National Council for History Education. I was hired to work as a historical consultant and joined NCHE staff and fifty teachers from the St. Louis area on a one-week bus tour of historic sites throughout Missouri and Oklahoma. I got to see a lot of Missouri that I hadn’t been familiar with and it was my first time traveling to Oklahoma, so that experience alone made it worthwhile. More importantly, it was very fulfilling to work alongside teachers to contemplate how historic sites and museums can help inform students as they study history. At each site we did a debriefing where we analyzed everything from historical content to questions of narrative, exhibit design, and organizational structure. I would like to think the teachers left the experience with a renewed excitement about the educational power of museums.
Most of us pointed to Greenwood Rising in Tulsa as the most thought-provoking museum of the entire experience. Opened to the public only three years ago, the sprawling museum interprets the story of a racially segregated Black community in Tulsa that was, economically speaking, one of the wealthiest of its kind in the entire nation. Despite segregation laws in Tulsa that had been passed in 1916, the Greenwood community benefitted from an oil boom in the area and established itself as a place of Black economic prosperity. That is until May 31, 1921, when a White 21-year-old woman accused a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner of assaulting her in an elevator. As these false rumors spread through the White community in Tulsa, a mob of 400 White men armed themselves, barricaded Greenwood to prevent Black residents from escaping, and proceeded to destroy more than 35 square blocks of the area within 24 hours of the rumors first spreading. The White mob set houses and businesses on fire and murdered at least 150 Black residents if not more (accounts differ). Nobody was ever held accountable for what is now known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. In my opinion, the quick reaction by the White mob to the so-called “elevator incident” demonstrates that White Tulsans were jealous of Greenwood’s success and were waiting for a pretext to destroy the community.
An interesting element of the Greenwood Rising museum is how much attention the Tulsa Race Massacre has received in recent years. I had never heard of the episode at any level of my education and I suspect that many longtime residents in Tulsa didn’t even know about the event until the past three years. None other than actor and self-described “lay historian” Tom Hanks wrote an op-ed for the New York Times lamenting his own ignorance of the event even though he has studied history extensively for much of his life. But the present shapes the past as much as the past shapes the present. There have been many racial massacres of Black Americans throughout this country’s history that deserve more study and popular attention. However, recent debates over race and racism in today’s society combined with the centennial anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 2021 seemingly thrust this particular event into the mainstream. I suspect that every academic historian of 20th century U.S. history now understands terms like “Greenwood” and “Black Wall Street” if they did not understand what they meant before 2020. And it is interesting to see the Greenwood Rising Museum’s transparency on its website about various corporate sponsorships contributing funds to their institution, including Boeing and Bank of America.
During the debriefing after the visit, some of the teachers brought up that our group’s tour of the museum was facilitated by a white docent. While all agreed that she did a fine job, we understood that Greenwood Rising was unique in that the museum’s leadership is largely composed of Black Tulsans and that the museum’s interpretive thrust was no doubt shaped by the descendants of the victims of this horrible event. Why, these teachers asked, wasn’t a Black docent around to lead the tour? I tried to give an answer to this complicated question.
Historic sites and museums are organized very similarly to schools when it comes to compensation models. The premise is simple. In education, the farther away you are from the student, the more money you make. The superintendent always makes more than the principal, who makes more than the teacher. In public history, the farther away you are from the visitor, the more money you make. Generally speaking, docents, guides, museum educators, and interpreters are the lowest paid employees save for possibly maintenance/janitorial staff. The issue is compounded further when considering that a lot public facing staff in these educational roles are interns, part-time, seasonal, temporary, or something else besides full-time, permanent. And those who are full-time permanent often struggle to make ends meet. For example, a spreadsheet posted by the American Association of Museums in 2019 showed that a Director of Education at a museum in upstate New York made $40,000 that year, while others in the Midwest made between $30,000 and $50,000. Part time workers are often lucky to make between $15-18 dollars an hour.
When working a frontline job at a place of traumatic history like the Greenwood Rising Museum, educators are reliving the trauma of that event on a daily basis alongside visitors—strangers—who are working through their own emotions as they experience the history on display. The museum educator is simultaneously interpreting history, facilitating dialogue, and an emotional caretaker trying to help visitors navigate a highly charged historical landscape. This work is delicate and challenging. When we ask museum educators to undertake this very difficult work on a daily basis while working in an unstable, contingent employment structure, we should not be surprised when BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) workers choose to take their talents elsewhere.
I do not mean to argue here that White workers don’t also struggle with unstable work conditions in this field, that they aren’t also emotionally affected by traumatic history, that BIPOC workers aren’t interested in or unable to interpret traumatic history, or that White workers can’t interpret Black history (such an argument would make much of my work in the field null and void). What I am arguing is that the socio-economic structure of many museums and public history sites does not incentivize BIPOC representation in frontline staff positions. More broadly, contingent jobs make it hard for workers to climb onto a career ladder. Expanding racial diversity in public history requires leadership at these sites to invest in opportunities for employees to advance their careers and to prepare them for expanded leadership opportunities in the future. Contingent employment doesn’t accomplish that. The solution is easier said than done, yes, but we ultimately cannot lament talented people leaving the field if we don’t give them the opportunity to put food on the table, a roof over their head, and some hope about their future career prospects.
Cheers
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