[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on American History Since 1865
American history museums have a well-deserved reputation for presenting a sweetly consoling portrait of our past. Generally financed by conservative donors and oriented to affluent whites, museums have seldom attempted to shake entrenched values or encourage their patrons to reconsider comfortable perceptions of social reality. It might reasonably be assumed that there is little hope for thought provoking history from these venerable pillars of community complacency. Surprisingly, however, a small but influential group of thoughtful and politically challenging new museum offerings have recently appeared. Prominent among these is a current show at the Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia, dealing with racism and black-white relations in what had just ceased to be the capital of the Confederacy. Jim Crow: Racism and Reaction in the New South, Richmond, 1865-1940 (which runs until August 21), is the fourth in a series of Valentine shows dealing with black Richmonders.
The Valentine is a familiar species of institution, a museum dedicated to the history of its city, centered in the preserved nineteenth-century home of a rich local family, and recently best known for its generous collections of decorative smoking pipes, candlesticks and antique party dresses. But suggestions of a broader history have recently appeared in its galleries. Last year, a show dealt with African-American life before 1860, and it presented an industrial and urban side of slave and free -black labor that challenged stereotypes shared alike by historians and general museum-goers.
More than its predecessors, the present show has a gripping immediacy -in its treatment of national patterns through a sharp local focus. The specificity of a local story can carry some dangers. One local black radio announcer called for picketing because a Ku Klux Klan costume from the 1920s is shown without accompanying material that explicitly illustrates Klan violence. Interestingly, Valentine curator Gregg Kimball responds that physical terrorism has been less a part of the Klan's activities in Richmond than it has elsewhere......
