African American Groundbreakers at the Smithsonian: Challenges and Achievements

Louise Daniel Hutchinson set out on the path of her life’s work from a young age, growing up among DC’s African American intellectual elite in a family that imbued her with a passion for justice and a love of community. Those connections and commitments accompanied her throughout a long and influential career at the Smithsonian. She laid the foundation for the National Portrait Gallery’s innovative education program, and, as Research Director of the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, she helped transform that seemingly distant satellite of the museums on Washington DC's National Mall into a center of gravity in its own right. As a pioneer in both community and oral history, her work in preserving, recording and curating the history of Anacostia helped ensure that there would continue to be a place for African American history in the Smithsonian through the present day.

Youth and Childhood

Born in 1928 in the tiny rural hamlet of Ridge, Maryland, Hutchinson’s early childhood was spent at the Cardinal Gibbons Institute where her parents, Victor Hugo Daniel and Constance Eleanor Hazel Daniel served as principal and assistant principal. Modeled on Booker T. Washington’s famous Tuskegee Institute, this high school was the first to admit African American students in St. Mary’s County and for its first few years, Victor and Constance also comprised the entire teaching force.¹

As the children of lifelong educators, Hutchinson and her eight siblings were all born on the grounds of one of the African American schools where their parents taught. As a young man, Victor Daniel read Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, and was so profoundly drawn to the educator’s message of self-help and community development that he enrolled in Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. Upon graduating in 1911, he taught at a series of black Catholic schools before becoming principal of the Gibbons Institute. It was while both were enrolled at Tuskegee that Victor met and married Hutchinson’s mother, Constance, who hailed from a family that had long been active in the fight for civil rights.² 

Both Victor and Constance carried their family’s commitments to social justice into their work as educators. When they took charge of Gibbons, they felt it “imperative that students have the intellectual and practical foundations to do whatever they chose to do with their lives.” Equally important was their choice to use “African American literature, history, and music as the foundation for the Cardinal Gibbons Institute's liberal arts curriculum” in order “to encourage racial knowledge, understanding, pride, and respect.” They established a very effective health program for St. Mary’s County, which had one of the highest African American mortality rates in the nation. They also remained involved in civil rights causes, founding a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1928 through which they fought for the rights of the local black community.³

Young Louise Daniel lived at the Gibbons Institute until she was six years old. In 1934, the board of regents had grown increasingly alarmed by the Daniels’s political activism and decided to close the school. The Daniel family then moved to Washington DC into a house near Howard University that Constance had inherited from her father, the famed black architect William Augustus Hazel. As Hutchinson recalled in a 1987 interview, the neighborhood was “very, very stable” in spite of the Great Depression. With access to steady federal employment, the Daniels and their neighbors successfully weathered the economic crisis. Until the responsibility for caring for her family forced her departure from the workforce, Constance worked for the Farm Security Administration, where she advocated for the rights of black farmers. Victor took a position with the Office of Education, where he developed “adult, vocational and library programs” for African American schools.⁴ Once Constance left the FSA, she became “very involved in community activities” when Mary McLeod Bethune, who lived across the street, recruited her to the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW).⁵

Her mother’s involvement with the NCNW and her later work as a newspaper reporter for The Washington Afro-American allowed young Louise to grow up in a social milieu that contained people like William Henry Hastie, the nation’s first black federal judge, and Howard University’s Carter G. Woodson. Though compelled to live in a segregated neighborhood and attend segregated schools as a child, the sheer number of famous black intellectuals that made DC their home fired her young imagination with possibility.⁶

Her mother also put a fire in her belly for justice. During the 1940s, the Daniels moved into the Parkview neighborhood near the U.S. Soldiers’ and Airmens’ Home as part of the wartime migration of African American families into the community.  Despite the fact that this was rapidly becoming a largely African American neighborhood, black children were still barred from attending the neighborhood’s segregated high school or using its playground.  Constance took her children to picket the school and demand that it be made accessible to the local residents.  Even though her own children attended the prestigious Armstrong High School, this picket was a way to teach young Louise her “social responsibilities” to fight for justice wherever she happened to be.  This commitment later inspired her to participate in a sit-in campaign aimed at desegregating DC’s Hecht’s Department Store after World War II and would find her in the audience watching Thurgood Marshall argue Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court.⁷

With a desire to translate these social responsibilities into a career and become “a hotshot social worker,” she attended Howard to study sociology under E. Franklin Frazier.  She also chose to minor in history under John Hope Franklin, who confided to her that she showed some real promise as an historian. She did so because her father, who was “wild about history” and “a tremendous storyteller,” had filled her with a genuine love for the subject.  As she later recalled, “I learned more history from my father before I ever enrolled in a history course than I think I probably learned in most of my life.”⁸ 

“Something that Makes a Difference”

After graduating with her B.A. from Howard in 1951, Hutchinson began graduate coursework.  However, she soon married Ellsworth W. Hutchinson, Jr and when “the children began to come,” it “didn’t leave much time for going back to school or for much involvement in the community.”  Like many ambitious women in her situation, she did what she could to stay active, but until her children were grown, she was forced to withdraw from most of her earlier commitments. After her third child was born, she and her husband left their apartment, and purchased a home in Southeast DC, and she settled into the full-time work of being a homemaker.⁹ For a full decade and a half after graduating college, Hutchinson remained occupied with caring for her expanding family, while working part time as a substitute teacher when she could. 

Then, in April of 1968, Washington DC exploded in four days of rioting in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.  For Hutchinson, the assassination and the unrest that followed changed her life.  It was a “turning point” for her as far as her “total commitment to [her] children.”  Rather than retreating from her “social responsibilities,” she would, like her mother before her, listen to that voice in her head telling her, “Now is the time when you've got to be accountable, when you've got to hopefully do something that makes a difference.”¹⁰

Hutchinson took a position at Southeast Neighborhood House, a former settlement house that had become part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty program in the 1960s.  Likely drawn to this work by her early desire to become a social worker, she helped to run its summer youth programs.¹¹ However, she did not find the work “intellectually challenging” and was soon looking for broader horizons.  Fortunately, during her time at Southeast House she became “very good friends” with Zora Martin Felton, who left in order to direct the Education Department at the recently established Anacostia Neighborhood Museum (ANM).¹²

This experimental museum was the result of a partnership between the Smithsonian Institution and the Greater Anacostia People’s Corporation, a grassroots advocacy organization that had mobilized to pressure the District’s civic institutions into investing in the Anacostia neighborhood on Washington, DC’s southeast side.  It was the hope of Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley that supporting a museum in Anacostia would encourage African Americans to visit the Smithsonian’s museums on the Mall.  It had long disturbed Ripley that so few among DC’s African American population visited the city’s premier cultural institution.  For the residents of Anacostia, their hope was that the Smithsonian would bring cultural and educational resources – as well as jobs – to a long neglected area of the city.¹³

To direct this new museum, Ripley had hired John Kinard, a talented community organizer who imbued the project with a radically inclusive vision for the relationship between the museum and the community.  As Hutchinson would recall later, Kinard insisted that the ANM should not simply be “in the community”; it had to be “of the community” as well.¹⁴ To fulfill this vision, Kinard worked with a neighborhood advisory committee to ensure that the museum’s exhibits and programming truly reflected the neighborhood’s interests.  Further, Kinard also understood the importance of hiring African American museum professionals, observing in 1971 that “in those rare instances where there is an exhibit that has to do with minorities it is designed in a fashion that represents the white man’s interpretation ...  How can it be otherwise since museums have refused to hire minority people in any significant capacity?”¹⁵

When Ripley hired Kinard to run the ANM, he was determined to hire as many talented and ambitious black museum professionals as he could.  He immediately hired Zora Martin Felton to run the museum’s education program.  Though Kinard lacked the resources to hire Hutchinson right away, he recommended her for a position at the Smithsonian’s newly opened National Portrait Gallery to help develop programming that emphasized greater involvement with “minority affairs in the city.”  Hired on a temporary contract in 1971, Hutchinson finally found the intellectually stimulating work, she had been seeking.  Her initial task was to research the William E. Harmon Collection, a large group of portraits depicting famous African Americans that had arrived at the gallery two years previously.  With the field of African American Studies yet to be firmly established, Hutchinson drew on both her historical training and her own lived experience to inform her work in the collection.  As Hutchinson recalled in a 1987 interview, she had “lived a great deal of” this history, and either personally knew or knew about “many of the people whose portraits were in the collection.”¹⁶

Her responsibilities eventually expanded to research other African American pieces that the gallery acquired such as the Winold Reiss Collection.  Then, starting in 1971, Hutchinson worked on several important exhibits that placed African American history at their center starting with A Glimmer of Their Own Beauty: Black Sounds of the Twenties, which explored the history of the Harlem Renaissance.  Two years later, she assisted in producing The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution (1770-1800). Based on the groundbreaking work of historian Sidney Kaplan, this exhibit was the one of the first comprehensive examinations of African American representations in the visual arts.¹⁷

The National Portrait Gallery

During her three and a half years at the National Portrait Gallery, Hutchinson’s most enduring legacy was the development of the museum’s education program. After convincing Director Marvin Sadik that schoolchildren should not only be tolerated, but welcomed, into the building, she built what would become a decades-long relationship between the Gallery and DC’s public schools. One of the big achievements of the education program was its success in getting students from a broad variety of racial and class backgrounds to overcome the imposing grandeur of the historic Old Patent Office Building in which the museum had opened in 1968.¹⁸

Working alongside pioneering African American historians Letitia Woods Brown at George Washington University and Howard University’s Elsie Lewis, Hutchinson crafted a series of educational programs that highlighted local history as well as African American history.¹⁹ Using the pieces on display in the National Portrait Gallery, she showed how it was possible to highlight African American history. For example, the famous portrait of John Brown provided an opportunity to offer an interpretation of the abolitionist’s raid Harper’s Ferry in a way that put the black experience at the center of this oft-told tale. Hutchinson drew on her own life experience as well. The portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt allowed Hutchison to elaborate on the president’s relationship with Hutchinson’s childhood neighbor, Mary McLeod Bethune. Vindicating Kinard’s insistence that bringing African American history to the Smithsonian would require hiring African American museum professionals, Hutchinson recalled that, “you could have marvelous conversations about these people, and it was easy for me to do because I had lived a lot of that. I had lived that history.”²⁰

National Park Service

In 1973, Hutchinson left the National Portrait Gallery to develop the education program at the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Anacostia.²¹ In 1916, the Douglass house had been saved from destruction by the National Association of Colored Women, which had cared for the home until the mounting costs of maintaining the property became too great.²² In 1962, the National Park Service took over the property to begin the work of restoring and preserving it. When the home finally opened to the public in 1972, the Douglass site proved wildly popular and attracted more than 75,000 visitors in its first year.²³ Hutchinson was hired to apply the practical knowledge she had gained at the National Portrait Gallery and develop a more thorough education and outreach program. She trained the staff about how to use the Douglass home to educate the public about the history abolition, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.²⁴

Hutchinson’s stint with the National Park Service was brief. In 1974, John Kinard finally raised the funds needed to bring her on the Anacostia Museum’s staff. Very quickly promoted to Director of Research, she would use her position to publish several important works of African American history, each based on research conducted for the museum’s exhibits. These included The Anacostia Story: 1609-1930 and Anna J. Cooper, A Voice from the South, which still stands as the major biography of this important and influential black educator. Drawing on her experiences at the Douglass home and the National Portrait Gallery, she would also play a major role in professionalizing the museum’s exhibits and programming. 

April 1968

Prior to joining the staff of the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, Hutchinson had been a member of the museum’s neighborhood advisory committee for several years.  Invited by her old friend Zora Martin Felton, she and other community residents had helped the staff in guiding the development of the museum’s programming and exhibits.²⁵

For the first year it was open, the exhibits reflected Secretary Ripley’s original plan for the ANM that envisioned it as a vehicle for encouraging the African American residents of Anacostia to visit the museums on the Mall. Along with a series of interactive educational displays about science, the museum was populated with objects on loan from the Smithsonian such as “Uncle Beazley,” a life-size fiberglass reproduction of a Triceratops and a reproduction of the Mercury Space Capsule that visiting children could pretend to fly.²⁶ None of these exhibits, all chosen with the input of the neighborhood committee, reflected the history of Anacostia itself. All were effectively appetizers for the full meal that could be had across the river and in the proper museums on the Mall. 

Then, as Hutchinson recalled, “something happened.” Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the riots that followed in April of 1968, “the community began to articulate new concerns for the museum.” African Americans living in Anacostia began to look at themselves and say,

‘Where do we fit into a museum experience? Where do we see ourselves in a museum? If we go downtown, are there any exhibits about us, about people who look like us? Anything about our past, our heritage?’ The answer was a resounding no.

The riots of 1968 dramatically shifted the direction of the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum. Kinard, his staff, and the neighborhood advisory committee desired the museum to become much more than a community satellite that orbited the “real” museums on the Mall.²⁷ Hutchinson later recalled that “King's assassination was the catalyst,” which moved the Anacostia Museum from “being [a] ‘storefront museum’-- with hands-on activities and touch-and-feel kinds of exhibitions” to something “that would address ... the whole role of the contributions of black people to the development of this country.”²⁸

The Anacostia Story

The biggest hurdle in shifting the direction of the museum was that the museum had never been given the resources or authority to build and maintain its own collections. When established in 1967 “by S. Dillon Ripley with the concurrence of the Board of Regents,” the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum had been viewed by many in the administration as an “experimental,” even temporary museum.²⁹  

Despite Ripley’s unequivocal support, this attitude persisted throughout his administration. For its first two decades the ANM could not secure the funding to hire a curator and the responsibility for developing exhibits fell to the rest of the staff. Even though the new museum often had to fight for institutional support, this nonetheless gave Hutchinson and her colleagues the power and relative freedom to innovate, establishing the ANM as an institution with exhibits and programming of a quality comparable to that of any other Smithsonian museum.³⁰ 

Adopting a “two-pronged approach” to her curated exhibits, Hutchinson successfully wedded the local story of Anacostia and the District of Columbia to both national and even international histories of African and African American experiences. This included exhibits such as Out of Africa: From West African Kingdoms to Colonization, which traced the movement of the African diaspora from West Africa to the Caribbean and then to North America. However, the most powerful exhibits took advantage of Washington DC’s unique position as a city which is both the nation’s capital and the home of an African American community who had been in the city since its founding.³¹

The most significant of Hutchinson’s locally-focused exhibits opened in 1977. Entitled The Anacostia Story, it explored the history of one of DC’s oldest and most storied African American neighborhoods from its inception in 1608 through 1930 with an emphasis on famous residents like Frederick Douglass and Solomon Brown.

This exhibit became the vehicle for the first collections that ANM was able to acquire. During the public meetings that Hutchinson held to solicit the neighborhood’s input about what the exhibit should look like, community members would show up with objects to place in the museum. Soon, Hutchinson and her staff started doing “show-and-tell” sessions:

They would produce photographs, and they would produce scrapbooks. They would produce Grandma’s dishes, and somebody would have an aunt's favorite pair of kid gloves with the little buttons and the button hook. All kinds of things came out that we never could have gotten if we had not developed this mechanism for communicating with the community."³²

Hundreds of objects came to the ANM in this fashion including “[family] bibles, kerosene lamps, old school books, ledgers from various early organizations, flatirons, things that were now becoming quite obsolete in the community and were being lost.” Among the early donations was “a beautiful little china pin box” that had been gift from First Lady Edith Wilson to her seamstress. 

Even though the museum had no formal authority to collect, Kinard and Hutchinson did so anyway. These objects were far too valuable to the history of the community to let get away.³³ It became a precursor to the Save Our African American Treasures program, a very successful initiative run by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture decades later.³⁵

In her preparations for The Anacostia Story, Hutchinson also dramatically expanded the museum’s oral history program. Unlike earlier oral history projects – like the famous one founded at Columbia University in 1948 – that focused on the lives of “Great Men,” Hutchinson brought her questions and recording equipment into the streets of Anacostia, where she captured the stories of everyday people, joining the generation of curators that not only brought social history into the museum world, but also introduced the methodologies of oral history more broadly throughout the Smithsonian itself.³⁶ 

Given the intensive community involvement in preparing, researching and mounting The Anacostia Story, Hutchinson and her colleague John Tetrault sought a way “to keep this momentum that had been generated in the community ... and find a way to make this an ongoing proposition after the exhibit came down.” Out of their discussions came the idea for the formation of the Anacostia Historical Society. Numbering 400 members at its founding, the society was “rather atypical.” The only requirement for membership was to be a resident of Anacostia. As Hutchinson put it, “one ... need not be scholarly; hopefully, they would be. One need not have published.” Rather than imposing a bar for membership so high that few could meet it, the Anacostia Historical Society was simply a society that came together “to protect and preserve a way of life and the history of a community called Anacostia.” While the society did host scholarly lectures and other programs, meetings of the society often became conversations “about how they used to have taffy pulls; how they used to make cookies, [have] bake sales; how they used to have quilting bees; how they canned in the springtime.” With Hutchinson’s guidance, it became a vehicle for preserving the popular history of everyday life in “a place called Anacostia.”³⁷

Hutchinson’s commitment to her community informed her pioneering innovations in both community and oral history. Together, these successfully challenged an older notion that “that museums and cultural institutions somehow were only for the culturally elite, those who speak the King’s English and those who dress a certain way and act a certain way and see life in a certain way.”³⁸ With the strong support of Secretary Dillon Ripley, John Kinard and Louise Daniel Hutchinson transformed the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum from an “experimental” outpost to a museum in its own right.  Their dedicated work made It one of the most important vehicles for bringing African American history to the Smithsonian.