African American Groundbreakers at the Smithsonian: Challenges and Achievements

Born in 1936 in Washington DC, John Robert Edward Kinard would become the first African American director of a Smithsonian museum at the age of 31. Kinard’s circuitous path into museum work took him from development work in Africa to community organizing on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to a dilapidated theater on Nichols Street in DC’s Anacostia neighborhood.  There, he would build the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in 1967. Over the next two decades, his work in Anacostia would radically challenge the relationship between museums and the communities they serve, and would pave the way for the establishment of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2004.¹

From Crossroads Africa to the War on Poverty

Kinard’s path to the directorship of the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum began in 1962. A year before his graduation from Hood Theological Seminary in Salisbury, NC, he volunteered for a summer working with Operation Crossroads Africa, a precursor to the Peace Corps.  While in Africa, Kinard helped build schools in Tanganyika, which was soon to become part of an independent Tanzania. There, he came to know Crossroads founder Rev. James Herman Robinson who was so impressed with Kinard that he convinced him to return to Africa and lead development projects in Cairo, Zimbabwe and Kenya. During his periodic returns to the United States to recruit new student volunteers, he worked hard to make it possible for black college students – who lacked the resources of their white counterparts – to be able to participate in the program. This desire to make these sorts of institutions accessible to as many different kinds of people as possible would serve him well in years to come.² 

Upon his return to the United States in 1964, Robinson recommended that Kinard take a position with the Office of Economic Opportunity that President Lyndon B. Johnson had just established to coordinate his War on Poverty. As an organizer with the Southeast Neighborhood Development Program in Washington DC, Kinard worked with Band of Angels, a forerunner to the National Welfare Rights Organization and organized a youth group called Rebels with a Cause. The nearly 300-strong Rebels organized to demand “better recreation, counseling and job training” in the Barry Farms housing project.  These efforts won him a promotion and by June of 1966 he became responsible for coordinating funding for anti-poverty groups throughout Maryland’s Eastern Shore.³

Kinard’s perspectives on how to build a neighborhood museum were forged during his years working on development projects in Africa and as a community organizer working with the OEO.  As Kinard described it in a 1987 interview, his philosophy was to

Arm people with facts and information and let those people, if it's a welfare problem, sit around the table with the authorities to say, 'Here's the history of welfare as we know it. Here's what legislation provided, and here are what the problems are as we live them each day. And here's what we recommend be done to solve these problems.'"⁴

At every stage of the process, Kinard wanted to bring people into the power structure. Rather than making them the objects of government largesse, he wanted to put the control of those resources in the hands of poor and working class African Americans. 

A Museum for the People

In November of 1966, the Washington Post reported on a meeting of museum directors at Colorado’s Aspen Institute. Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley urged those in attendance “to try taking their museums to the people,” suggesting they establish “store-front buildings in low-income areas.”⁵ Ripley’s comments sparked an immediate response from DC’s African American community as requests for a museum poured in to the Smithsonian from neighborhood organizations across the city. After a series of meetings, the Smithsonian entered into an agreement with the Greater Anacostia People’s Corporation. Together they would open a museum on Nichols Avenue in Anacostia, one the District’s historically black neighborhoods on the southern shore of the Anacostia River.⁶  

The initial negotiations between the Smithsonian and these neighborhood leaders were not easy. According to Caryl Marsh, a consultant who helped facilitate these negotiations, many Anacostians doubted that “the august Smithsonian Institution could actually come across the river and serve the local black people.” Many in the broader community opposed the idea of a neighborhood museum when there were so many other pressing needs facing Anacostia. At a mass meeting in the spring of 1967, these opponents confronted Assistant Secretary Charles Blitzer with a series of demands. Neighborhood leaders insisted that the proposed museum reflect African American history and provide space for “exhibits produced by neighborhood people.” Even more significantly, they demanded “community control” of the museum as well as an African American director, “one who knows the community .... someone who is worldly, yet feels comfortable talking to  all kinds of people.” It was important that the museum have paid black staff rather than middle class white volunteers who would do for free the jobs that black Anacostians “might be hired to do.”⁷They wanted the new museum to be as much theirs as it was the Smithsonian’s. 

These concerns led Marion Conover Hope of the Greater Anacostia People’s Corporation to seek out Kinard to become the museum’s director. Hope was the daughter-in-law of Lugenia Burns Hope, a legendary activist from Atlanta and a pioneer of the sorts of community organizing that Kinard engaged in his years with the OEO.⁸ It was only natural that Kinard would be her choice for director. 

When Hope first approached Kinard, he was dubious. He had had no experience in museum work, no “inclination to run a museum,” and was doubtful that the Smithsonian would want to support such a venture. Echoing community concerns about the project, he had difficulty seeing “how a museum could have any redeeming factor in the development of [Anacostia].” ⁹ Additionally, he was concerned that Ripley only wanted “to keep blacks out of the museum[s]” on the Mall, which was why he was working to develop a museum for African Americans out in Anacostia.¹⁰

After some persuasion, Hope convinced Kinard to meet with Charles Blitzer, Assistant Secretary for History and Art at the Smithsonian. Still doubtful about the entire endeavor, Kinard walked into Blitzer’s office two weeks later, whereupon the assistant secretary shook Kinard’s hand and said, “Thank you for taking the job, Mr. Kinard. I would like to introduce you to the Secretary.”  Though he would later recall the meeting as an “ambush” set for him by Hope, he convinced himself: “What the hell? A person ought to, if he has a chance, take one leap in the dark with his life, and this is it—a leap in the dark.” ¹¹

On 5 July 1967, Blitzer gave Kinard the keys to the Carver Theater on Nichols Street in Anacostia. It was a little down at the heels, but within three months, it would become the first location of the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum.¹²

A Museum for the Community

When the doors of the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum opened on September 15, 1967, visitors would see in the middle of the museum a reproduction of the Mercury Space Capsule, which neighborhood children could pretend to fly. Behind it, on the stage was a TV camera and studio where residents could film their own shows.  To the left, they would find an art workshop, a small zoo with snakes, gerbils, monkeys and a talking parrot, and a series of “shoebox” exhibits containing coins, stamps, minerals, insects and other specimens that young visitors could handle. To their right, they would find a mock-up of an 1890 general store, and a space for rotating exhibits.  Everything in the museum’s 4,200 square feet was chosen in consultation with a Neighborhood Advisory Committee comprising men and women representing the people of Anacostia.¹³

For the museum’s first year, the exhibits on display were not specifically focused on African American history.  However, that changed after the riots that followed in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination in April of 1968. According to Research Director Louise Daniel Hutchinson, the staff and the Neighborhood Advisory Committee were struggling “to understand the assassination ..., [and] the advent of the riots.” In order “to bring about some healing in the community,” they concluded that “Anacostia [should] become a full-fledged museum that would highlight and address issues germane to black people, and particularly their history.” ¹⁴

For the next half decade, this decision resulted in the installation of dozens of temporary exhibits focused on local black history and culture.  Though each was open for just a few weeks or months, these established Kinard as a pioneer in the museum world.  As he would write in 1971, urging museums to “rethink their positions” in their communities:

Museums can no longer serve only the intellectually elite, the art connoisseur, and the scholar .... People who have no decent place to live or lack [education] ... are forced to concentrate on the struggle to survive, to house and clothe and educate their families. So we must begin where the people are ... The urban industrial centres have their own history.  In Anacostia, it is one of crime, drugs, unemployment, inadequate housing, sanitation, rats, to mention but a few of its problems."¹⁵

In this spirit, early exhibits included Lorton Reformatory: Beyond Time (1970).  Developed in collaboration with the men incarcerated at Lorton, the exhibit explored the struggles of prison life.  In 1972, with the support of a $50,000 grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, The Evolution of a Community: Part II investigated major urban problems chosen by the residents of Anacostia.¹⁶ 

However, the exhibit that placed Kinard and the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum on the cutting edge of museology was The Rat: Man’s Invited Affliction (1969).  The idea for the exhibit originated with Kinard’s observation of the neighborhood children who came to see the zoo. To feed “Uncle Wiggly,” the museum’s indigo snake, Kinard’s staff kept a small population of white mice. However, it soon became obvious that the neighborhood children were killing them. One day, they even discovered that a can of paint had been poured over a cage of laboratory rats. For Kinard, these acts of cruelty “reflected the deep hatred that people who live with rats feel for all rodents.” Rather than disciplining them, he solicited the advice of the children, asking them what visitors to the museum should know about rats. They volunteered: “tell what rats like to eat, tell the different diseases they carry ... show how to poison them, show how to get rid of them.”¹⁷

The resulting exhibit featured “a large simulated rat environment”: a backyard stocked with live rats for visitors to observe. Educational exhibits featured the history of rats since the Middle Ages, rat-borne diseases, their uses in scientific research, and how rat infestations as serious as Anacostia’s were not inevitable, but rather the result of political decisions. Working with the head of rat control in DC, Kinard created a map of the entire area “to show where we are infested.” It soon became evident that several different organizations ranging from the Department of Defense to the National Park Service were responsible for removing trash from the areas where rats made their homes. With so many overlapping jurisdictions that did not coordinate their efforts, Anacostia was awash in garbage and the rat problem was impossible to control.¹⁸ Though the exhibit drew criticism from members of the Neighborhood Advisory Committee who felt that it put Anacostia in a bad light, the exhibit was wildly popular among the children who were the museum’s most solid base of supporters.¹⁹ It also drew widespread attention to Anacostia’s rat crisis and pressured both Congress and the DC city government to act.²⁰ 

Revolutionary Interventions

Moving beyond what he saw as the limits of traditional, “object-oriented” museums, Kinard insisted that museums must become “people-oriented.” ²¹ Or, as Louise Hutchinson remembered it the director “very plainly” told his staff that “we can either simply be in the community or we can become a part of the community.” ²² The Anacostia Neighborhood Museum became one of the centers of the community. As Kinard recalled in 1987, “in terms of program, we did some of everything imaginable ... we did everything in that museum except have a funeral. If you can name anything else, we have done it. Even had church in the place. Even the [Nation of Islam] use[d] the place.” ²³

Ella B. Howard Pearis, whose family had been in Anacostia since the Civil War, related in a 1986 interview how Kinard’s command to be “of the community” found expression through the museum’s exhibits. In 1977, The Anacostia Story, narrated the history of the neighborhood through artifacts and photographs contributed by members of the community. Pearis and her neighbors visited the museum to see the lives of their fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers on display, to see the picture of “Mrs. so-and-so” from down the block or one of the local Tuskegee Airmen when he was young man.  As Pearis recalled, “when you start getting artifacts together from families, homes that they were digging in, their attics, to put up – see, everybody became a part of it then.”²⁴    

This broadly ecumenical vision for the role of the museum in the community meant that the museum soon outgrew its original space in the former Carver Theater. Within three years of opening, the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum had expanded to include three leased houses in the surrounding neighborhood to accommodate a “Research Center and Library, [an] Exhibits Design Workshop, Photography Lab, and Crafts Center.”²⁵ 

These new outbuildings housed a crucial component of Kinard’s program for transforming the relationship between African Americans and museums. According to staffer James Mayo, at the time the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum opened, the Smithsonian employed no African American curators and had “never produced [a major exhibition] on African American history and culture.” ²⁶ For Kinard, these two facts were connected.  In a not-so-thinly veiled critique of the Smithsonian, he charged that

...in some instances the museum has accepted the culture of its minorities as museum curiosities but rejected the people who created these cultures ... 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?" ²⁷

In consultation with the Neighborhood Advisory Committee, Kinard raised $500,000 in 1971 to build an Exhibit and Design Laboratory as a place to train African American museum professionals. When it opened five years later, the new facility allowed Kinard “to produce professional exhibits” using local talent and nurturing the careers of the next generation of African American curators and museum specialists.²⁸  

Kinard’s revolutionary interventions in the development of the museum occurred at a moment in the history of the Smithsonian when the institution was uniquely open to change. As he later recalled, upon joining the staff in 1967, “there were many, many ideas floating around” about how to make museums more relevant to those living through the cultural upheavals of the 1960s.²⁹ This creative, new direction was nurtured by the arrival in 1964 of the Smithsonian’s eighth secretary, S. Dillon Ripley. As Secretary, Ripley was unafraid to challenge the Smithsonian to change, charging that it had a “moral responsibility” to move beyond presenting a history that panders to the “myth that all our ancestors were upper middle-class Protestant whites who lived like ladies and gentlemen.” Instead, museums needed to portray “the true historical picture, to describe the whole panorama of our cultures.” In the midst of the rights revolution of the late 1960s, “Negroes, Indians, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese,” and others who visited the Smithsonian were still “not given the evidence that they were part of the stream of history of the United States.” ³⁰

Despite Ripley’s backing, not everyone at the Smithsonian welcomed Kinard. Around 1970, at a monthly luncheon for bureau directors, Director Daniel J. Boorstin of the National Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History) got into a disagreement with Kinard about hiring African American staff. As the argument grew heated, one witness recalled how Boorstin lost his temper and “dressed down” Kinard, yelling “at the top of his lungs” that he was unqualified to be director of the Anacostia Museum.  Boorstin elaborated, explaining his belief that “Afro-Americans, it’s known that their mental capacities are less than Caucasians .... I’m a historian, I’ve done a lot of research in this area, and there is no way that any person who is black could possibly have the mental capacity to do the kind of job that I want to have him do.” Kinard responded calmly, informing his overheated colleague that “the Civil War was fought a long time ago, and we abolished slavery. So I’m not a slave here to you, Mr. Boorstin. I’m going to enjoy my luncheon. If you wish to leave, fine.” Several in the room applauded. Boorstin stormed out.³¹

Given the reaction of the old guard to Kinard’s arrival, it’s difficult to overstate the importance of Ripley’s support in creating the institutional space for the sorts of radical experimentation that Kinard would bring to the museum world. As Louise Hutchinson put it in a 1987 interview, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley is the reason that [the Anacostia Museum] is alive and well today.” ³² In 1968, Ripley convinced First Lady Johnson to host a fundraiser for the Anacostia Museum.³³ And when Regent John J. Rooney expressed concern over the museum’s celebration of Kwanzaa in 1974, Ripley wrote a letter to defend Kinard.³⁴ He also directed his staff to support the new museum in every way they could. At an advisory committee meeting held just after the opening of the rat exhibit, the Smithsonian’s Charles Blitzer told the neighborhood representatives “that if the Museum wanted to turn to urban problems and problems that really hit the people of Anacostia, he would stand by them in every way.” Jack Anglim, the Smithsonian’s Director of Exhibits and Programs, added that if the Anacostia Museum chose to change “its direction to exhibits like the rat exhibit ... he would knock himself out to help.” ³⁵

More than a Storefront

By the mid-1970s, this level of institutional commitment proved difficult to sustain. Though Ripley’s support for Kinard remained unwavering, the museum’s Design and Exhibit Lab was forced to close in 1978 after only two years for both a lack of funding and the Smithsonian’s reluctance to continue the project.³⁶ Additionally, it became ever more difficult to maintain the community involvement that accompanied the opening of the museum in 1967, and by 1972 the Neighborhood Advisory Committee was replaced by a more conventional board of directors.³⁷ 

Even more difficult for the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum to face was the urban crisis of the 1970s, which put severe stresses on the neighborhood and demonstrated the limits of what a museum could do to address urban problems. Towards the end of his career, Kinard reflected that this early focus on the issues of urban blight and underdevelopment was hard to maintain, since such a tight focus on the community’s problems made it difficult for the neighborhood to have pride in itself.³⁸ By the end of the 1970s, the conditions in Anacostia had deteriorated so much that Kinard was compelled to abandon his famously democratic policies of access to the museum. By the early 1980s, a burgeoning drug trade had made the corner near which the museum sat “one of the most crime riddled intersections in the city” compelling Kinard to seek a new location for the museum.³⁹ 

As Kinard sought to build a new and more permanent home for the museum, he expanded its scope to cover African American history “in the context of American civilization.” To reflect this new vision, the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum became the Anacostia Museum when it opened at its new location in Fort Stanton Park in 1987. When Kinard broke ground at the site of the new building, he assumed this would be a temporary stop on the way to moving the museum to the National Mall.  However, the Smithsonian had decided that Anacostia would remain a neighborhood museum. With Ripley’s retirement in 1984, Kinard’s temporary move would become permanent. Today named the Anacostia Community Museum, Kinard’s museum continues to break new ground in museum/community relations, with its Community Documentation Initiative and urban ecology programs such as Reclaiming the Edge: Urban Waterways and Civic Engagement.⁴⁰

In an interview given just six days before he died in August of 1989, Kinard looked ahead to the day when there would be such a museum on the Mall:

“From the very beginning and I recognize even now that this museum should be, based on twenty years of experience, much larger than it is, much more vital to the Institution, the Smithsonian, than it is, but I recognize why it isn't. It isn't because the black man's role in America is not respected. His view is not respected. His history is not respected. Until that comes about, you will have small operations which represent smallness. Why isn't that kind of thing done down on the Mall? Why don't we tell American history?” ⁴¹

Nevertheless, it was in that “smallness,” an Anacostia storefront on Nichols Ave, where Kinard laid the first cornerstone of what would become the National Museum of African American History and Culture a half century later. Just as he had envisioned, African Americans seeking their own story reflected in the official story of the nation’s past would be able find it along the swath of green connecting the Lincoln Memorial with the Capitol.