Time literally flies when you are having fun. It’s hard to believe that what felt like an endless 11 week summer … is nearly over! We have had our last week of camp, our last week of working on our teaching collection inventory, and our last week of curriculum re-writes for fall programs. The summer is over … and we got the first taste of that when our new school program brochures were delivered last week. It was hard to believe when I saw the 2009-2010 written on the front cover! So where did our summer go? In Summer Camp we went around the world, from Mariachis to Junkanoo bands. Unlike any other museum in our community, we ran camp for the full 11 week Miami-Dade Public School summer season. A small team of museum educators scoured over our teaching collection, took a critical inventory and started entering everything into a database. We overhauled our school programs through the lenses of “Understanding by Design,” a planning and teaching method which allows the educator to think big and narrow down in layers. So yes, we’ve been buzzing on the mezzanine level, a.k.a. Education … and tweeting on Twitter about it all summer long. -- Cecelia D. Slesnick, Vice President, Education
As a history museum, we’re charged with finding the visual images and objects that tell the story or piece of history presented in an exhibition. This can be a challenge since more history has been captured in text than in actual photographs, and objects are often junked before their historical importance is realized. This was not the case with burned cross above, one of the signature objects on display in the museum’s Black Crossroads: The African Diaspora in Miami exhibition. The cross is part of the collection of the Black Archives, History and Research Foundation of South Florida. Its charred frame sits at the entrance to the Struggles section of the exhibition – the area that explores blacks’ century-long struggle for equality in Miami. It was burned on the lawn of Hazel Howard in 1982. Howard was an African American woman who had just moved into a new home in North Miami. As telling as that story is about the prevalence of racial prejudice in Miami, how this piece of history got saved also deserves telling. The Community Relations Board (CRB), an inter-racial group created by county in 1963 “to solve hardcore social problems and economic distresses” collected the cross from Howard’s lawn after the incident and attempted to investigate the event. Members of the CRB at the time included community activist Bob Simms, who recalls that they then kept the cross in their offices as visual symbol of the past. Eventually the board donated the cross to the Black Archives, saving it from historical extinction and enabling future generations to also experience its significance. And experience it they do – visitors to the exhibition are compelled towards it and have reported back to us the powerful connection they make to it. The charred 10-foot cross speaks volumes, makes the past real in a way no text can. All thanks to the CRB who saw that an object of history, no matter how painful, has something to teach all of us. -- Joanne Hyppolite, Ph.D. Chief Curator.
