The Wisconsin Historical Society will celebrate its 3rd annual Black History Month Open House on Tuesday, Feb. 19. This event will be a special open house where community members can see African-American archival and museum collections on display and participate in a listening session about the creation of a new Wisconsin history museum on Madison’s Capitol Square.
“The importance of black history is to remind us who we are and who we can be potentially,” Tanika Apaloo, Community Engagement and Diversity Liaison for the Wisconsin Historical Society, tells Madison365. “It certainly should be something that is more than one month. It’s something that in my position and in my role that I recognize and celebrate every day.
“Black History Month is very important to me. I think that a lot of the challenges that are occurring in our black community would be mediated in a lot of ways if youths and adults alike new more about their history and their culture,” Apaloo adds. “I think the relationship between culture and history is an intangible one and its difficult for us to move forward and be confident in who we are without both knowing where we come from and knowing our purpose.”
Archival documents that will be on display for the Black History Month Open House event in an exhibit called “African American Activism in Wisconsin.” It will feature documents that tell the story of the fight for African-American suffrage in the 19th century. This includes the proposed 1846 state constitution that allowed granted voting rights to African American men and the 1866 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision in favor of Ezekiel Gillespie that finally enacted this right. Moving forward a century, the exhibit will highlight documents from the 1960s actions in Milwaukee to desegregate schools and enact fair housing legislation and also feature items commemorating the 50th anniversary of the UW-Madison Black Student Strike.
There will be a full slate of events at the Black History Month Open House Celebration, but one of the big highlights of the evening will be the “Share Your Voice Session” which will be a chance to hear about the new Wisconsin history museum project where people can share their stories on what they feel makes Wisconsin Wisconsin. Apaloo says that are specifically targetting the African-American community.
“That’s when we will be having the designers coming from the East Coast – Gallagher and Associates – who will be asking specifically from the community what they would like to see in a new State History Museum,” she says. “We’re hoping to see a lot of people there from many different types of backgrounds and to get some great participation. The designers will be facilitating an hour-long engagement session.
“After the listening session, we want to make sure that we have an opportunity to view what it is that we’re talking about that we have in our collection as well as what we don’t have,” she continues. “We hope that people will be inquisitive enough to ask: ‘What is it that we can bring as a community?’ or ‘What do you have that represents us and what do you still need?’”
On the same day, a little bit earlier in the day a 1 p.m., the Wisconsin Historical Society will be hosting an American Indian Engagement Session as part of their statewide engagement campaign for the new History Museum. Rebecca Comfort, American Indian Nation Liaison for the Wisconsin Historical Society, has been engaging the American Indian Nation of Wisconsin as well as some of the urban Indian communities.
“The ultimate goal of what we will be doing on Tuesday with the tribal population that will be attending is creating a space to start a dialog related to American Indian representation throughout the scope of the museum project,” Comfort tells Madison365. “This is much like the rest of the statewide engagement event. It’s not a start and an end to this engagement process but it’s more about everybody coming to the table and making room for identifying conversations that we have to have that we may not have answers for or solutions for in the immediate future, but that we can use to think about how we navigate this process in the most inclusive way possible so that we all end up with the result that I think everybody wants – which is a good museum that really serves to represent the full scope of Wisconsin history.”
“People have been living in what we now refer to as Madison for a minimum of 12,000 years. The same goes for most other parts of the state. There is speculation in the scientific community that people have been living there even longer than that. We can’t tell the story of Wisconsin without engaging in this deeper context of the people who call this place home.”
Walking Together in a Good Way: American Indian Engagement For The New Museum” will take place on Tuesday, Feb. 19, 1-3 p.m. at the Wisconsin Historical Museum, 30 N. Carroll St. The program includes a short presentation, followed by a discussion with Cybelle Jones, principal and executive director for Gallagher & Associates, an internationally recognized Washington D.C.-based museum design firm.
The Black History Month Open House Celebration will be held at the Wisconsin Historical Society, 816 State St., from 5-9 p.m. Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes will be speaking at the event and Melly Mel’s will be providing a delicious soul food dinner.
Eddie Boyse will open the event with a call to action. Rob Dz will perform a spoken-word poetry piece. Mt. Zion Baptist Choir will also be performing led my musical director Leotha Stanley. There will be a step exhibitions.
One of the highlights that the museum archives will be featuring is a display talking about the Negro Baseball League as it came through Wisconsin,” Apaloo says. “A good portion of the museum artifacts on display will focus on that.”
The WHS will be displaying a prototype, interactive story map which will begin to explore the reach of African American baseball in Wisconsin. Although Wisconsin did not host a long-lived Negro League team like the Kansas City Monarchs or the Chicago American Giants, black ballplayers were a regular presence in communities throughout Wisconsin for decades, even in small northern towns with few African American residents.
“It’s going to be a great time. I’m most excited about the opportunity that the community will have to get their input. It’s not often that history museums are built and it’s even less often that communities are asked to participate in that process,” Apaloo says. “I’m extremely excited for our society and the community to work side-by-side with our designers to ensure that our stories are told the way that we would like them to be told as a community.
“An event like this is important for sharing stories. And it’s everyday stories,” she continues. “Some people think that something has to be very significant to be historic. That’s not the case. In oral history interviews, there are so many everyday people who have done very significant things. They are unsung heroes, so to speak that had that oral history not been discussed or discovered, we would never had known about it. And, they, too, would have never realized what they are doing is historic.”
