More Than a Month: Black History at the DuSable Museum

Episode Notes

Transcript

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Hello everyone and welcome to the CBAs @theBar podcast where we have unscripted conversations with our guests about legal news, topics, stories, and whatever else tickles our fancy. I’m your host Maggie Mendenhall-Casey of the city of Chicago’s Law Department, and joining me is Mathew Kerbis owner and founder of the subscription attorney. Mathew, I’m excited to be on the mic with you. I think this is our first time recording together.

Mathew Kerbis:

That’s right, yeah, I’m excited too.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Should be a good one. And joining us today is our guest, Perri Irmer, who is president and CEO of the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, an iconic Chicago institution. Perri began her professional career as an architect. She then moved into commercial real estate and construction management before pursuing a legal career. Perri was a litigator in private practice and then transitioned into enjoying a distinguished tenure in government. Perri serves on the Obama Presidential Center Inclusion Council and the Afterschool Matters Advisory Board and is a proud graduate of the University of Chicago, Perri Architect litigator and CEO. It is an honor to be in your presence this afternoon.

Perri Irmer:

Well, thank you so much. It’s really a pleasure to be on, and I just am so happy that your audience is going to hear a little bit about the DuSable Museum. It’s a very important institution and we’d love to see everybody come down to visit us and become members. Hopefully.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

When you say very important institution, that’s definitely an understand statement. It is a Chicago jewel Chicago treasure. I was born in Chicago and area and I grew up going to DuSable Museum. I’ve been obsessed with history from a young age, and I remember as a child going to DuSable and being in awe of a museum that centered people who look like me. And I’m so excited to be able to talk with you, Perri, about this staple of Chicago cultural life. So for those that are unfamiliar with the museum, can you tell us about the museum and what makes it so special?

Perri Irmer:

Well, the Bel is like a mothership, right? We are the oldest independent black history museum in the nation. Founded in 1961 by Dr. Margaret Burrows, who was herself an educator, an artist, a poet, a real renaissance woman. And she started the museum in her home in Bronzeville, in the Bronzeville neighborhood here on the south side and outgrew that. And we moved to Washington Park in the early seventies and we occupy a former Chicago Park District administration building that also once served as a police station.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Fascinating.

Perri Irmer:

Yeah, it is. It injects a bit of irony right into the fact that we talk about black history, we talk about the history of oppression, the civil rights movement. We talked some about segregation in Chicago

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

And the museum has some affiliation with the Smithsonian, is that right?

Perri Irmer:

Yes. We are a Smithsonian Institution affiliate. And the Smithsonian, last time I looked, had a little over 200 affiliates around the country, but that was a real priority to me when I started my presidency here in 2015. Being a Smithsonian affiliate contributes to our reputation in a very positive way. So we actually earned our affiliate ship the same year that our National Museum of African-American History and Culture opened in dc. We became an affiliate in March of 2016, and the National Museum opened in September of 2016, and we held a really wonderful opening watch party, opening ceremony, watch party here at the museum early that morning. And it was a full house, very, very exciting time for the black community and all Americans. I would think it was very exciting time

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

In 2015 and 16, 17, 18 even that was the hottest ticket in the US to get a ticket to get of that national museum.

Perri Irmer:

Tell me about it. I was getting calls from all over the country, hi, can you get me a pass to the National Museum? And all of the Smithsonian museums are free museums, but the lines were so long to get into the new museum that a lot of people just were not able to get in even that same day or the next day. So it was heartening to see such a huge positive response to the opening of the National Museum, but also we experienced quite an uptick in our attendance and also greater diversity of our visitorship once the National Museum opened. So I think that’s a really great example and evidence of the important stories that we all tell.

Mathew Kerbis:

I want to pull on that thread, Perri, because when you saw increased diversity in attendance, I think that’s a great thing. But I also think it begs the question of who is the museum for and who could benefit from growing to check out the museum, everyone on the planet and why really? And I agree with that of course, but share the why.

Perri Irmer:

Yeah, because black history is American history, right? Black history is world history. You really can entwine the two stories of America would not be the same without the contributions. Some involuntary contributions by black people. We built the country as slaves, we built the White House. So I think that there is just unfortunately a dearth of misinformation and a lack of information and unfortunately a lack of focus on black history academically in our elementary schools, our public schools and our public high schools. Knowledge is power and education really is the cure to racism and bigotry. And I guess it’s no accident that those who are trying to hide that history and rewrite it and throw up roadblocks against learning it have certainly a very different mission that we do. And we’re the safe keepers right of the history. And we’re not going to stop.

Mathew Kerbis:

I’m curious to get your perspective on this. I’m someone who actually, I like ai. I use ai, I try to use it in the right way, but in this you talk about misinformation in this AI world where you could now make videos, you can make images, you can make all kinds of things that are fake and they look real. It’s digital. It’s all digital. But in a museum you could come and it’s tactile and you could see things and you could touch things and you could experience things in a way that in the digital space you don’t know what’s real and what’s not. But when you come to a museum, it’s a different kind of experience.

Perri Irmer:

Absolutely. And that points to the importance and the power of archives, of original documents, original photographs. The source materials really are what historians rely on to write and create their pedagogy. And I think that a return to that, or at least an understanding of it or a demand by viewers, that the source materials be cited is really, really important. We have a huge archive here at the Bel. It’s one of the oldest and richest in the country. You can see an example of it in our military exhibit, which contains so many archival documents, handwritten in script, which is also something that needs to be maintained. Young people need to know how to write script because they need to know how to read script. I mean the majority, or at least a good portion of our historical documents, documents that we rely on as guides and promises of this nation were written in script.

So again, source material, very, very important and facts. Right? And it’s interesting because museums are next to family members, the most trusted source of information in the country, and that’s based on research by the American Alliance of Museums. And you can find that on their website. But I was really excited to hear that because we feel that way too way. I want to harken back to the X-Files and say the truth is in here in front of the building because that really is how it is. If you want to know the truth about history, if you want true quotes and true images, come to the museum.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Perri, you definitely have converted me. So I have a five-year-old and I definitely have been of the mindset that why does she need to learn cursive? It’s antiquated, it’s outdated, but you really got me at the heart with being a history major, being the person that loved going into the stacks deep, deep into the archives. You need to be able to read script in order to interpret what’s going on in those archives. Is there sharing or an exchange that’s going on between Bel and other museums to make sure that the information is not just preserved but also disseminated? Well,

Perri Irmer:

Sure. Anyone can get access with an appointment to our archives.

Exciting. The Chicago History Museum also has a great archival collection. We are actually currently working on creating our own archival processing and storage area in the roundhouse. And so we not only need to finish processing what we already own, what’s already part of our permanent collection, but also other archives related to black history. So it’s our hope that that can grow, that folks will actually come and bring us their archives for preservation. We’ve also conducted community archiving projects in past years, the most successful and the most fun was the one we did with the Smithsonian. They sent out a group of archivists and folks were lining up with their family bibles and photo albums and love letters and things that they wanted to preserve and properly archive. And those items, they were able to get digitized right here. So these types of services and this type of knowledge and training is so incredibly important because our best records of history are often found in grandpa’s attic or grandma’s closet or the China cabinet underneath the box, right? And of course the family religious texts that marks down birthdays and death dates and marriages and so forth. And next to the census, private documents are probably the most interesting and the most reliable for that type of information.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

So Perri, I was a bit surprised when Lakeshore Drive was, I don’t know, it’s renamed Codenamed when you go on Google Maps, both names popped up to John Point, Abel Drive. And for those who are unaware of Abel’s impact on history in Chicago, what is the significance of the museum’s namesake?

Perri Irmer:

Oh my goodness. So Jean Baptiste Point Dab was a Haitian French African explorer really. And he was the first non-native settler in Chicago, making his home up at Bend of the River. He married a Potawatomi woman and traded heavily with the Potawatomi and other Native American tribes. But he is widely recognized as the founder of Chicago. And I think that it is, again, ashamed that kids don’t learn that earlier in school for those reasons. But it’s great that Bel is being recognized. I love that the name was added to Lake Shore Drive. It’s a really, really important story. And you know what? It’s an American story and he should be credited with that. And I think if young people realized, especially black kids recognize that they were living in a city founded by a black man, I think that would go a long way to better perception better.

And I feel that way very strongly when it comes to teaching and showing and exhibiting African-American history in particular. Most stories, most books, most classes, they want to start with the slave trade. But we were born in freedom in Africa. We were born into magnificent civilizations, family networks, tribal networks, customs, music, food, different practices, different religious practices, and very, very, very close family ties. So rather than start with the Black American identity as one of an enslaved people, we start with the story of a free people in West Africa. And we center that story around the life of Ano. But a Luda Eano was born in an IBO village, and that is spelled IGBO for anyone who wants to look it up, an IBO village in West Africa. And we actually made a film with our partners, Stello Stories, who added us to their consulting team when they were creating this film, which was shot in Hollywood quality cinematography, but for the small vertical screen, meaning the cell phone. And it was released on Instagram and TikTok in segments. So you can look that up. Eano is E-Q-U-I-A-N-O. So the story begins, and really the whole first half of the film is about his childhood as if he had an iPhone and social media and could show his friends and show everyone what his life was like and what he was doing. And it was just a beautiful story.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

And Perri, we’d love to hear more about Eano. I think we’ll take our first break and then hop right back into the movie

Mathew Kerbis:

And welcome back to at theBar. So Perri, now we are, and our listeners too are dying to hear more about Ano, so please do continue.

Perri Irmer:

Well, I would encourage people to get on Instagram or get on TikTok and while we still have it and just search Ano and you’ll be able to see what a beautiful film this is. And the reason we start with the story of Ano is because he’s a real person who was enslaved, spent most of his early life on merchant ships throughout the Caribbean, but also England at that time for the British merchants, they allowed their slaves to also make their money on the side. So after they were finished with their unpaid work, they could do their own business, their own trading, et cetera. So Quiana was able to save up enough money to buy back his freedom and proceeded to become a very well-known, a very famous abolitionist beseeched Queen Charlotte. As a result of him writing his memoirs, which were the first, I should say the earliest known first person narrative of an enslaved African.

And his book became extremely popular, went into I think eight or nine printings came to the attention of the Queen, which was Queen Charlotte at the time. He beseeched her to please in this horrible practice of slavery, and that’s how the United Kingdom abolish slavery many decades before America did. So a very impactful historic figure in different literature courses. His story has been taught for many, many years but was never popularized. And now we are very happy to start our origin story in freedom with Eano, and then we move up through the slave trade and the Civil Rights Movement and the Great migration and our African-American history, white our American history up to almost present time.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

I love that you mentioned that this was filmed in a format that’s very accessible, so something that’s made to distribute on social media as many people and as many as young people can see it as possible. Was that a part of the calculus in determining the way that Quiana was shot?

Perri Irmer:

Oh, absolutely. And our film partner, Stella Stories, this was their second film, their first was about a young girl in the Holocaust, and they made that film based on her journals that were found so very fact-based and very accessible, especially to young people. You can’t continue to deliver information and teach in ways that are no longer paid attention to in ways that don’t capture the imagination and attention of young people. And that’s now this little computer that we hold in our hands and that they have their noses stuck into all day every day. If social media has a great use, this educational use is really, really important. And I love the idea of a teacher standing at the front of the class and instead of scolding her students about putting away their cell phones, she’s able to say, now take out your cell phones and we’re going to watch Eano and we’re going to talk about it. And you’re going to learn the real history and the real origin of Africans in America

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Meeting people where they are.

Perri Irmer:

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And speaking of that, I don’t know if you caught the news, but if you’re familiar with Dilla Thomas, the historian, the urban historian whose ex extremes got maybe a quarter million followers on TikTok and Instagram, he’s joining our staff here at the DuSable Museum. So he’s going to be our brand ambassador and chief of social media, and we are just thrilled. So Dilla has already established himself as a tour guide and historian and just really accessible, really exciting. The stories that he tells are not only accurate, but you feel them and you see them because he takes you on a bus tour around the different historic neighborhoods of Chicago. So we’re thrilled to be connected with him now officially, and I can’t wait for him to start.

Mathew Kerbis:

All right, Vos about to seriously increase their content game, everybody follow all the social handles, links to those in show notes.

Perri Irmer:

Absolutely, absolutely.

Mathew Kerbis:

Since content creation got us on a little bit of a segue, I even want to bring us back to something that you mentioned a little bit earlier when we first started the conversation. But you talked about you hope even folks come to the museum, but not just come but also become members. So while on the topic of membership, the museum is a nonprofit, as I understand it, you only make money in a few different ways as a nonprofit. There’s grants, people could donate or you could become a member. And so grants aren’t always a sure thing, it’s a big process. You got to apply for grants, right? And now talk about the importance of membership to the museum and what that means, not just for the benefits of what the members can get for it and come to the museum and experience it, but what it means for what the museum could do in terms of counting on that revenue as a nonprofit.

Perri Irmer:

Absolutely, and I thank you for that question because I think people overlook the importance of membership and you can’t, I mean, first of all, you can’t beat the deal. Our memberships are very affordable. You can hop on the website, DuSablemuseum.org. My focus really is on the younger generations, really is on the youth. One of my former jobs was CEO of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, right landlord to the Chicago White Sox for seven years. And you create fans. You create fans when they’re children and they come to the game with their dads or their moms or their siblings or their cousins. It’s the same idea with museums. The earlier you can capture the attention of people, the better. And the more dynamic you can keep your exhibits and your programming, the better. We are fortunate to be in the middle of Washington Park, which is one of Chicago’s beautiful parks, one of the biggest parks.

So we have this gorgeous park that we can have events in the summertime and we do our outdoor events in the summer are simply incredible and they’re for most part free. And that is a huge advantage that we have and that our members have because they always will get first dibs or priority seating or early access to announcements, early viewings of exhibits. So it’s a really important revenue source. And building up the membership is also very important. Not only is there strength in a large membership, it keeps us afloat and it keeps the sense of ownership of our museum in the black community and other communities as well. As I said, we welcome the world. And when we rebranded, because we had been known as the DuSable Museum of African-American History for our first oh, 60 years, and then we rebranded as the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, and there were a lot of thoughts behind that.

Changing African-American to black history really was meant to expand our content and include all black people, right? Black people are everywhere. And while we’re connected culturally in some ways and historically and ethnically, the stories are different. The story of an African-American being kidnapped and brought on a slave ship here is different from a colonialized nation that had a slightly different experience. I mean, these people were living in their own land and were colonized. That’s different than we want to tell all of those stories. I think it’s especially important for young black children to know that there are nations where black people are running the entire government. I’d love to take them to parliament in The Bahamas and show them this whole wall of black faces of various shades and men and women who are running that nation. And many kids, I will tell you on the south and the west side have no concept of that and what it looks like and what it feels like.

And another really important message is that guess what? We’re not minorities. When you look at the entire world, people of color, black people, people from the African continent where all civilization started, we are a majority in the world at large. We’re only termed a minority in certain places, unfortunately, including the United States of America. And what we’re seeing now is not only heartbreaking and terrifying, but I don’t know, it’s just plain dumb. So we want to teach everyone. We want to show black excellence, want to show black history, art, culture, food ways, music, and especially through a Chicago lens.

Mathew Kerbis:

Well, with the rebranding to the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, that brings us to Black History Month, which is the month that this is going to air. But before we get to that first, we’re going to take our last break,

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Perri, as this is going to be airing in February. We’d love to hear the lineup that the DuSable Museum is anticipating for Black History month.

Perri Irmer:

Well, black History Month is our busiest time of the year. King Day is our busiest day. We get over 1500, sometimes 2000 people coming through the museum on King Day. But like History Month, we started staying open every single day of the month last year. So you can come to the DuSable every day, Monday through Sundays, Sunday through Saturday, and not only view our wonderful exhibits and other offerings, but you can also partake in some amazing programming that our education department has put together. We have school programs during the mornings from the minute we open at 10:00 AM and then we go into other programming. There are film offerings, there are lectures. There’s actually a course that is an online course on black history. It’s like an African-American history primer, and you can check out our website and subscribe to that. And just so many different offerings, arts and crafts for the kids. We have our children’s exhibit, which is called The Mini Colors of Us, and that’s really designed for little ones by our partner, the Dolores Cole Education Foundation. That’s really for two years old through maybe 10. And it’s all about diversity. So we love that exhibit, and there’ll be school groups coming through and families coming through to experience that every day of Black History Month. And that exhibit actually will be with us for another whole year.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

So you guys are really, really thinking about reaching everybody from the little ones two years old to the teens that are on social media. And then you have some more of the traditional exhibits, including troubled waters, talking about the 1919 race riot. Is that correct?

Perri Irmer:

Yeah, that’s correct. We have our 1919 exhibit, which again is not commonly known history in Chicago. That’s such a tragic story. During the summer of 1919, which was also dubbed the Red Summer because there were so many race based riots in many, many cities around the country, mostly the eastern half and the South. But in this particular case, this happened on the beach at the 29th Street beach time. And the beaches, just like our neighborhoods were also segregated, right? Defacto segregated. There were no Jim Crow laws up here in Chicago, nothing written as a rule or a public policy, but defacto, the beaches were segregated and it was a very hot summer, and these kids were out on a homemade raft. And Eugene Williams, young man, Eugene Williams, I think he was about 14 or 15 years old, fell asleep on the raft and drifted into the quote white part of the water, right?

And he was set upon by White Beach goers throwing rocks and stones at him and knocked him unconscious and he drowned. And the police were called in 1919. Of course, there were no black policemen, and they refused to arrest the perpetrators who were pointed out by many witnesses. And that escalated and escalated to the point where some of the gangs in the white working class neighborhood of Bridgeport came across and attacked the Bronzeville neighborhood, which was the mecca for black people. During the Great Depression, I think well over 30 people were killed. Most of them black people properties were burned. All of this took place in Bronzeville, which is now finally really being redeveloped. But a lot of those arson houses were torn down and remained as vacant lots for decades and decades. So it’s really a fascinating and ironic story because in 1919, we had the same issues that were going on in 2019.

There was economic inequality, there was civil unrest. Again, you had the murder of a black child and the perpetrators getting away with it, like George Floyd, although of course in George Floyd’s case, his murderer was convicted, but you also had black soldiers returning from World War I, and that was seen as a threat to white working class people because all of a sudden these black men were back then. What else did you have in 1919? You had a pandemic. You had the Spanish flu, which was another misnomer because it had nothing to do with Spain or Spaniards, but they called it the Spanish flu. It’s amazing that history can hold such parallels, and yet the outcomes or the handling of it may not be all that different after a hundred years.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

And that’s why institutions like the one that you’re the CEO for are so important because the idea with history is that hopefully people aren’t forgetting. So the same thing is not repeated over and over again. A big part of the 1919 riots was, as you mentioned, black soldiers coming back from World War I as well as the Great Migration. Can you talk a little bit about how the Great migration impacted the city and what role it may have played in the 1919 race riots?

Perri Irmer:

Well, the Great Migration really made Chicago for black people, right? There were the Pullman Porters on the trains that went from south to north and north to south. Those Pullman porters smuggled the Defender newspaper into the trains and handed them out, handed the newspapers out to black folks in the South at the stations that they stopped at. Wow, that’s fascinating. And the Defender newspaper being a black newspaper. Absolutely. And the Defender had a very large circulation at the time. The publisher, Mr. Abbott was also very much a civil rights leader. Also, here’s another tidbit of history. He also raised the money for Bessie Coleman, the Black Aviatrix, to go to France to study, to be a pilot and get a pilot’s license because black people were not allowed to learn how to fly here in the States. So that was later in time. But all of these connections throughout history, so the more than half a million black people who migrated North, more than half a million of those millions of people who migrated north to escape post reconstruction, and Jim Crow landed in Chicago and stayed in Chicago.

The opportunities here were great between the stockyards and the steel mills and all of the other industry here in the Midwest, here, particularly in Chicago, and a lot of people had a cousin or someone who had come north and there were black neighborhoods, right? There were places where blacks could feel comfortable, not only get a job, but have a place to live and enough to eat. While those conditions weren’t ideal, certainly conditions weren’t ideal when you had overcrowding or so forth, but they were a heck of a lot better than what was happening in the south. Many families who fled North families from Oklahoma, families from Mississippi, from Georgia had to leave wicked in a hurry because they were threatening to be lynched. Someone in their family either had been lynched or was being threatened to be lynched. And that of course happened with Emmett Till’s uncle who testified against his murderers at trial.

And I think he got out of town the very next day, smart. And that was in money. Mississippi. Emmett Till being a young Chicago boy who’d gone down to visit his relatives for the summer ended up being murdered in a very brutal way. So there’s lots of history here. It’s not all dark and tragic and violent. We tell the good stories too. So our educational theme this year is winning the stories of survival and triumph. And so that is, again, a positive way to look at some of the things that we are still struggling for today, things that we thought were settled a long time ago, and they’re back. So we tell the good stories. We have stories about music. We have the story of Mayor Harold Washington, our first black mayor. We have a great gift store that has some beautiful things on offer. And again, our summers, oh my God, our summers are just amazing.

From Juneteenth, we have the largest Juneteenth celebration in the city. That’s an outdoor festival that can’t be beat. We have Pride South Side in July. That is definitely the largest Afro-centric pride event in the city. This year will be our seventh year hosting that the first Saturday in July. And we have book fairs. We have Due Summer, which is our annual jazz festival, our outdoor jazz festival, and we’re going to be opening a really exciting exhibit this fall called Paris in Black. And everyone’s really charged up about that because we’ll get to not only exhibit from our own permanent collection, an amazing collection of paintings and sculptures and other original artworks by black artists who fled the US again, fled the US for Paris in order to escape Jim Crow and to escape homophobia. And they could go to France, particularly Paris was a huge magnet during that era and freely practice.

They could stay in the hotels where they were performing. They could go into restaurants and cafes and markets where they couldn’t do the same here in their own land. So we will talk about all of the well-known artists who created work in Paris when they were living in Paris and in France. And then we’ll examine also some folks who should be very well known. Josephine Baker, who has an amazing story. She was actually a spy in World War ii, in addition to being an amazing singer and performer, and of course, James Baldwin, the great writer, James Baldwin, and then the Jazz age in Paris with Louis Armstrong and Sidney Behe and others. So that exhibit’s going to open in October. So again, stay tuned. Visit the website, become a member, so you get notices and reminders of all these wonderful things, and come out and see the museum.

Mathew Kerbis:

Perri, thank you so much, and thanks for taking us out on a high note.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Yeah, I really love ending on that note of Triumph, success, and culture. So thank you very much, Perri Imer for joining us today. I also want to thank our executive producer, Jen Byrne, Adam Lockwood on Sound, and everyone at the Legal Talk Network Family. Remember, you can follow us and send us comments, questions, episode ideas, or just troll us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at cba, at theBar, all one word. You can also email us at [email protected]. Please also rate and leave us your feedback on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, audible, or wherever you download your podcast at. It helps us get the word out. Until next time, from everyone here at the CBA, thank you for joining us, and we’ll see you soon @theBar.