New National Museum of African American History and Culture has SPLC connections

The SPLC also worked with the museum to develop its education and anti-bias programs.

The Bond items include a campaign button from when the civil rights activist ran for the Georgia Senate in the 1980s and a letter to James Baldwin from Bond’s time with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which he helped found in the early 1960s.

Bond also served on the Civil Rights History Project advisory committee for the museum, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution complex and is located on the National Mall.

“I am so sorry Julian didn’t get to experience the finished museum in all its splendor but very grateful that I did,” said Pam Horowitz, a former SPLC staff attorney who was married to Bond for 25 years until his death in August 2015.

The Bond artifacts are just the most visible of the SPLC’s connections to the museum.

Lecia Brooks, director of the SPLC’s Civil Rights Memorial Center, created an anti-racism training video for the museum to use as a staff development tool.

In addition, Adrienne van der Valk, deputy director of the SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance program, participated in a convening of social justice educators, academics and nonprofit sector representatives to help the museum create programs for teachers. Participants also helped the museum establish what van der Valk called a “common language for talking about issues like race, racism, bias and white supremacy.”

“We also spent a lot of time discussing how to meet the needs of the public, including people who will be at many different places in terms of their understanding of identity,” van der Valk said. “We looked for ways to make the museum an emancipatory space for all visitors and education program participants.”

The museum is prepared for just how challenging that can be. At a subsequent event in Washington, van der Valk and her training partner used role-playing to prepare museum staffers to handle challenging remarks or behavior from guests. That could be a museum visitor breaking down in tears or a tour group member insisting that “all lives matter,” she said.

If and when that happens, the museum’s guides won’t try to change a person’s mind but will listen and re-orient them to the “big picture,” or the mission of the museum, which is to educate visitors about African-American history through a lens that is often not acknowledged.

“Bring them back to the focus of the museum, and it takes away the power that they had to disrupt the moment,” van der Valk said.

The Fall issue of Teaching Tolerance magazine tells the story of the museum and its education programs in “One Hundred Years in the Making,” an article by Senior Editor Monita K. Bell, which can be read here.

Teaching Tolerance hopes to partner with the museum to develop resources to help educators teach racial history in U.S. schools. As part of the racial history initiative, educators could digitally access materials and artifacts from the museum to teach the history of slavery and racial inequality – including the pieces from and about Bond.

Julian Bond: A voice for justice

Bond was the SPLC’s first president, serving from 1971 to 1979, and sat on the SPLC board for many years. He served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 1967 to 1974 and in the Georgia Senate from 1975 to 1987. He later taught civil rights history at the University of Virginia for two decades and chaired the NAACP.

The letter Bond wrote to James Baldwin, which will be included in the museum, is dated April 28, 1964, just prior to the Freedom Summer voter-registration campaign in Mississippi. Bond writes to ask if Baldwin would participate in a “hearing on civil rights in Mississippi” later that year in Washington.

“We have learned through bitter experience in the past three years that the judicial, legislative and executive bodies of Mississippi form a wall of absolute resistance to granting civil rights to Negroes,” Bond wrote.

Bond continued to be a voice for racial and social justice throughout his life. “America is race,” he said at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, in March 2015, “from its symbolism to its substance, from its founding by slave holders to its rending by the Civil War … from Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin and to Michael Brown.”