This is what happens in the Harold Washington exhibit, which is in the Harold Washington Wing of the DuSable Museum of African American History, which is at about the 50-yard line in Washington Park, which is in Hyde Park. What happens is you round a corner inside the museum, coming out of a permanent exhibit on African-American contributions to the military, past musket balls and war bond posters, past a tribute to the first African-American astronaut (Chicago-born Robert Lawrence Jr.), and you find yourself in Harold Washington’s office.
And there he is, Chicago’s first black mayor, sitting behind a desk, a little gray at his hairline, jocular, pensive, animatronic.
Press the button on the display.
Washington blinks and his eyes shift and his head nods and the white dress shirt under his navy blazer pulls with the hydraulic movements beneath his chest. Because this charming and sleepy old building will likely be stone quiet the afternoon you visit, you will jump the moment Washington moves.
Happens all the time.
Theresa Christopher, DuSable’s registrar — “the institutional memory of this place,” according to DuSable CEO Carol Adams — explained specifically what happens when visitors realize that Washington moves. “Oh, they run,” she said, laughing. “They go ‘Oh!’ and ‘No!’ They do!” Then she demonstrated, pressing the button and backing up in a crouch and giggling as Robot Harold’s booming voice welcomed visitors, loud enough to hear several exhibits away.
This, more or less, is the big Wow! moment at the DuSable, the showiest moment, the one time during your visit when you are reminded that DuSable actually competes for visitors, against museums that like it bigger, museums that offer perpetually cycling tornadoes and boast dinosaur bones craning two stories high. It’s also, unintentionally, a reminder that old-school, text-heavy, artifact-behind-glass museums live on, and that not every museum assumes you get bored quickly or works overtime to grab you by the lapels and thrill. Which, admittedly, sounds like faint and damning praise. But then step downstairs, where, through May, you will find a temporary exhibit, “For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights.”
It’s sprawling, 250-items large and a reminder of the impact of sheer volume and variety: video of Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River” alongside racist 1950s magazine ads for Hoover vacuums; a “Julia” lunchbox (from 1969) and the first black Barbie (from 1979); a short video of Gordon Parks loading his camera and TV footage from 1963 of writer James Baldwin arguing with three teenage boys that, yes, there will be a black president one day; and the horrific 1955 photos of the murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till (photos that his mother insisted be shown, her words lending the title of the exhibit).
It isn’t flashy (or particularly well organized), but it isn’t drab or overwhelming, either — a grab bag of cultural contexts, delivered without a heavy hand.
“I think there’s an intimacy about DuSable that the big marble halls in town are often missing,” said Caroline Goldthorpe, a professor of museum studies at Northwestern University. “I don’t think it’s high on people’s radar, and given how long it’s been there and how well it’s done with the story that it tells, that’s a pity. There is something to be said for interesting over merely entertaining. Because when you are mainly thinking of the latter, it’s a disservice, and a vicious circle — the exhibits have to be bigger, which means museums have to spend more, which mean they charge more, which excludes more people from going. So it’s a tricky thing, because hordes of people are not rushing to the DuSable — but does that mean it’s doing something wrong?”
A good question, and a good time to ask: 2011 is the 50th anniversary of the DuSable, one of the first African-American history museums in the United States.
It was co-founded by Chicago artist Margaret Burroughs. She died Nov. 21, just after her 95th birthday. She named the museum in honor of Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the black pioneer considered the first resident of what would become Chicago. Burroughs was museum president until 1986, when she was appointed Chicago Park District commissioner by Washington; afterward, though she wasn’t involved in everyday decisions, the museum was always associated with her. Indeed, despite expanding twice, it didn’t change much: Until September, admission (which is now $10) had been $3 since 1975.
Nevertheless, DuSable has the lowest attendance for a major museum in Chicago — 134,000 in 2010, a 15 percent drop from 2009, 30,000 fewer visitors than the National Museum of Mexican Art, which has the second lowest attendance. (Though to be fair, there was an overall 3 percent dip in Chicago museum attendance in 2010.) Gary Johnson, president of Museums in the Park, a coalition that counts attendance and represents museums on Chicago Park District property (including the DuSable), put it this way: “The DuSable has fascinating things. But it’s a place for reflection, not glitz.”
He’s right, yet the DuSable is also unusual and curious, for myriad reasons. Consider that Washington exhibit. It’s flatly titled “A Slow Walk to Greatness,” and at first seems predictable, unremarkable, with displays of Washington campaign buttons and gifts presented to Washington by visiting dignitaries, and even a Washington coloring book. But then Robot Harold speaks: “At this very desk,” he says, “I suffered a massive coronary from which I would never recover.”
Robot Harold sits surrounded by Washington’s actual belongings: his monogrammed briefcase and his coat rack, his Northwestern law diploma, his desk. His hand raises slightly, a loud electrical generator resembling a small refrigerator kicks in beside him, and Robot Harold turns to the back wall, where a video monitor shows the breaking news footage of his surprising death in 1987. Robot Harold watches quietly, nodding.
As I watched with Robot Harold, I noticed, just outside his office, an Ashanti stool, typically given to African kings. It was presented to Washington and, keeping with tradition, painted black after he died. It’s touching. But then Robot Harold mentions that his death was so unexpected that conspiracy theories ran amok. He also says he misses the birds in Chicago. Then Robot Harold, lifelike, if unnervingly waxy, lowers his head, powers down and goes silent.
It’s a bizarre moment, but also tender, frank and interesting — all at once. More important, it leaves a pair of unanswerable questions in your head:
Why is this place so quiet? Why does the DuSable feel so underused?
The DuSable keeps 150,000 items in its archives, for instance — pieces that are as varied as a Halle Berry dress from “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge” and Richard Wright’s christening gown. Yet fewer than 300 major items from its collection (and none of the pieces just mentioned) are found on display.
The building, I’m told, is simply too small.
Which is why, in 2003, then-Illinois Senate President Emil Jones helped land the DuSable a $10 million grant to help it expand across 57th Street into a limestone, 61,000-square-foot horse stable built by Daniel Burnham, creating what the DuSable refers to as the “first African-American museum campus.” Cheryl Blackwell Bryson, chairwoman of DuSable’s board of trustees, said the grant paid for the first stage of the project, with fundraising recently kick-started for the next stage; Adams said the campus could be completed by 2015. Which, coincidentally, is when the $500 million National Museum of African American History and Culture is expected to open on the National Mall in Washington, as part of the Smithsonian museums.
The director of that museum is Lonnie Bunch, former president of the Chicago Historical Society, and already that connection is bearing fruit: “Let Your Motto Be Resistance,” at DuSable through March 6, is the first exhibit organized by Bunch’s museum, and it’s worth $10 alone — 74 silvery black and white portraits, culled from the National Portrait Gallery, quirkier than expected: politician Adam Clayton Powell and activist Stokely Carmichael in a congressional corridor, one in black, one in white, their bodies arched in laughter; Jackie Robinson, retired, on the phone; Duke Ellington in a mirror, backstage; Richard Pryor in a bathrobe, his hands raised in surrender; artist Elizabeth Catlett, her face obscured by shadows.
It’s so smartly chosen that (particularly at DuSable) the most glaring omission is hard to avoid — Burroughs herself, whom President Barack Obama praised, just after her death, for her “commitment to underserved communities,” and who Mayor Richard Daley said was a “cultural institution” herself.
I called Robert Stark, an associate professor of political science and inner-city studies at Northeastern Illinois University. He knew Burroughs for decades. “Once the DuSable expands, you’ll see the panache you’re lamenting,” he said. He said he remembers when Burroughs had the museum in her home.
“It was small and quaint and important, and because people understood she was a pioneer, and she was doing something no one had done, people believed in her and the museum.” And now that she’s gone? I asked. “Now that she’s gone,” he said, “I think people expect the museum to grow more prolific and become a better representative of the African-American community and what it stands for. They have to live up to her. I think they will.”
Burroughs was an artist, an author, a poet and a high school teacher (for more than 20 years at DuSable High School). She co-founded the South Side Community Art Center and the National Conference of African-American Artists, though her tallest legacy remains the museum. At the moment, there are two walls dedicated to her, samples of her poems and several of her linocut pieces, depictions of African queens and Malcolm X and ordinary people sitting on a bus.
Adams, the museum CEO, remembers Burroughs as “determined, incredibly self-sufficient, right up to the end.” She said she would often see Burroughs waiting for a bus, only months before she died. “And she wouldn’t think anything of it. Know what I mean? The world would have given her a ride, but she never expected it. Within two seconds of being out there someone would recognize her and pull up and ask, ‘Where do you want to go, Dr. Burroughs?’ And she would just get in the car. She felt that comfortable, and because she had big ideas, but not a big ego, folks did not let her down.
“It will take a lot of feet to fill her shoes. More than two.”
Adams, who came to the DuSable after a stint as chief of the Illinois Department of Human Services, has been at the DuSable for about a year. As we spoke, she sat at the desk in her office, a Jim Crow-era “Colored Only” sign hanging from a bookcase behind her, a late ’60s poster of Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton on the wall and, on a shelf, a photograph of Adams with her arm around Burroughs, who wore a cranberry-colored hat and coat.
Burroughs started DuSable in her home, I said.
“In her mansion,” Adams said.
“The museum was her home.”
“Which was a mansion.”
Indeed, the DuSable began as the Ebony Museum of Negro History and Art. In a mansion. Burroughs and her husband, Charles (who died in 1994), bought the three-story Victorian on South Michigan Avenue in Bronzeville from a white contractor. William Billingsley, executive director of the Association of African American Museums, said what Burroughs created became a typical model for black museums. “They were more of a community thing, usually started by people concerned that a lot of artifacts were being destroyed.” Today, many of them are still in homes and libraries, but a fair number are now on historic sites and in prototypical museums; the association counts 250 members.
In the early ’70s, DuSable moved to Washington Park, into a former park police precinct designed by Burnham; an extension was finished in 1993. That said, despite big plans, decades later, the DuSable is the largest museum in Chicago (and only member of the Museums in the Park coalition) without accreditation from the American Association of Museums, a status Gary Johnson said is “important in the profession because it sets a certain standard,” though accreditation is certainly not required. Indeed, according to the association, of the 17,000 museums in this country, only about 800 have accreditation.
“But it’s certainly a status we want,” Bryson said. “We want it because we were the first of our type and we have been here awhile, and I don’t know if it will bring in more people — and it’s not a death knell if we didn’t get it. You just want to say that you have accomplished this. That matters to us.”
Accreditation wasn’t a priority for Burroughs. Not as much as maintaining solid footing for the DuSable, which, at the moment, is still being considered for accreditation. This feels surprising when you step in the lobby; it’s hard to think of anything else in this spot but a museum. The roof is peaked, with a skylight. At the center is a bust of DuSable; on the walls, and in the corners, are the warm, elaborate mosaics of artist Thomas Miller, portraits of the Chicago skyline, of Washington, of DuSable in his trapping clothes shouldering a rifle, and, in the upper left, Burroughs, looking proud.
