What's Going On: Reflections on the Opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture

• In Event: Other Voices, Other Rooms: Oral History, Interpretation and Transformation in Museum Spaces

Abstract

On September 24, 2017, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture opened to the public in Washington, DC. From September 23-25, we held a Grand Opening Festival on the National Mall surrounding the museum which sits on the corner of 14th and Constitution Avenue NW, in the shadow of the Washington Monument. As Museum Specialist in Oral History and the coordinator of our burgeoning oral history program, I was charged with capturing the reflections of visitors to the weekend event. Our goal was to get visitors to share their feelings about the historic opening of this museum and why they came to participate in the celebration on the Mall. Ultimately, we constructed an Oral History Tent on the Mall and invited the public to voluntarily answer one of four questions while being filmed. Each day we attracted long lines of enthusiastic participants.
In this paper, I propose to examine the conceptual planning that led to the Oral History Booth on the Mall where we set up a camera crew and filmed brief interviews of 2-4 minutes with 160 people over the course of three days in September. I also plan to discuss the obstacles we overcame, the unexpected outcomes and the successes. This paper will place these mini-interviews into the context of the broader vision of the oral history program we are developing at NMAAHC, the first National Museum devoted to African American History and Culture to explore such questions as, how do we plan to make this content accessible to the very public that created it? And how does this activity speak to and define the role of oral history in a museum such as ours?

Author

• Kelly Elaine Navies, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture