A New Vision

Ed Ayers:
Throughout my time at BackStory, we’ve helped celebrate the opening of museums and commemorate important Civil War anniversaries. In other words, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about public history. These next two stories touch on the themes of historical memory and presentation.

Ed Ayers:
In this first segment, I travel to Richmond, Virginia for the opening of the brand new American Civil War Museum in May of 2019. The museum’s goal, is to tell an inclusive and balanced version of the Civil War. But that’s a tall order for an event that’s one of the most contentious topics in American history. I spoke with Christy Coleman, the museum CEO about the challenges of explaining the Civil War to 21st century visitors.

Ed Ayers:
So I have a personal investment in this story, I worked with Christy for seven years. I was founding chairman of the board, she was one of the CEOs, as we fused two museums, one, the museum of the Confederacy, which had been around for a hundred years. And another the brand new American Civil War Center, which was trying to tell the story from a more inclusive perspective.

Ed Ayers:
We had to build a new building, merge two boards, get the city along with it, and raise almost $50 million. So it was an interesting journey. But what this means is that when I spoke with Christy a few days before the museum opened, we were both filled with a sense of expectation and accomplishment, but a certain anxiety. After so much investment in such a place, would people actually like this museum?

Ed Ayers:
So here’s my conversation with Christy Coleman from the show, The Civil War in the 21st century, a New Museum Marks an Old Conflict. Christy Coleman is one of the most extraordinary museum curators in the country. As an African American woman, tasked with creating a new museum of the Civil War, she needs vision and diplomatic skills of plenty. And she told me she had a very early, very visceral immersion in Southern history.

Ed Ayers:
At Colonial Williamsburg we’re talk-

Christy Coleman:
This was at Colonial Williamsburg, yes. A summer job as a character interpreter, is what they were called.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah.

Christy Coleman:
And it was portraying a person of the past. Her name was Rebecca. She was an enslaved young woman about my age. I mean, they had to find somebody for me. And she was the property of John Blair. And the premise behind her story was that he was sick and dying and it was creating anxiety because young Rebecca didn’t know what was going to happen to her if he died.

Ed Ayers:
Wow. That’s a pretty heavy debut as an acting role, huh?

Christy Coleman:
It was. It was. So I did the summers, went away, worked at another museum, came back to Colonial Williamsburg, and eventually became director of African American Interpretations and Presentations. And one of the first actions in that role was the decision to re-enact an estate sale, which included the sale of slaves.

Ed Ayers:
Wow.

Christy Coleman:
And that’s the first time I was thrust into the public and the public relations and media spotlight when Colonial Williamsburg decided that I should be the face of this thing.

Ed Ayers:
That was very controversial at the outset.

Christy Coleman:
Yes.

Ed Ayers:
But it seemed that in some ways, you brought people along to understand why this would be a helpful scene?

Christy Coleman:
Absolutely, I mean, it was an extraordinarily important moment. Even though there was so much anxiety going into it, lots of controversy. People felt this isn’t appropriate to do in a museum setting in particular at colonial Williamsburg or whatever. But what it did in the post days of that, is that I received letters from academics around the nation, around the world really.

Christy Coleman:
Other museum colleagues, particularly those at historic houses and plantation sites contacted me and said, “If they can do that, we at least need to have an honest conversation about the enslaved populations at our sites.” And so that began what I think was sort of the birth of us finally knowing the stories about Hemings and the other 300 plus people that were at Monticello. And learning about the 300 plus people that were in Mount Vernon and so forth and so on. I mean, that was the moment.

Ed Ayers:
When was that moment?

Christy Coleman:
1994.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah.

Christy Coleman:
Which is ridiculous, right? 25 years ago. But that was the moment.

Ed Ayers:
There aren’t many topics in American history that are still as contentious as the Civil War. So what were the issues that Christy and her staff faced creating this new institution?

Christy Coleman:
We had to completely reimagine the meaning of the war. We had to start there. And then from that it’s like, okay, well if you’re imagining the meaning of it, why it matters in contemporary life, then that means you really have to examine it the way that people lived it. So we started saying, “Okay, well how did they live it?” And then it was like, “Well, they lived in constant chaos.”

Christy Coleman:
There was always changing choices. There was never knowing what was going to happen around the next corner. There was this period for some of is this my moment? Is freedom coming? For others, there was just the basic question of where should my allegiance lie? And we also quickly realized that this conflict impacted native nations.

Christy Coleman:
While it wasn’t a global crisis, it had global impact because of the trades.

Ed Ayers:
Certainly.

Christy Coleman:
We acknowledged that if we’re thinking about this as constant chaos and death and destruction at a scale that had never been seen before, you’re also dealing with trauma. It is a high emotion thing. So how do you tell that story in an impactful way? And so it meant to me, that it could no longer be a story that was just fixated on the military or the political.

Christy Coleman:
It had to intertwine again, the way that people lived it. And so that meant there was this constant flow of impact. Something that’s happening in the society is going to affect a military action. Something that the politicians do, is going to end up impacting what happens on the battlefield. And what the community is railing against or rallying for is going to impact political actions.

Christy Coleman:
So all of these factors are constantly in play and people are changing their minds constantly about their support for the war or its aims and so forth. So creating that kind of fracturous environment, actually became sort of a visual vernacular for us.

Ed Ayers:
So in many ways, what you’re trying to do is tell the story both on a global and a personal scale at the same time?

Christy Coleman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ed Ayers:
It’s not that we’re not telling the stories of military history and political history, but we’re weaving them together into the stories of abandonment and of death on a battlefield and of homesickness, and of political conflict, right? So how is a museum the place that that story can be told in a way it can’t be told anywhere else?

Christy Coleman:
Well, every time Pew Research Center does a study on trusted institutions, museums always rank number two behind libraries. Which means that’s a tremendous amount of power and importance to help communities navigate.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah.

Christy Coleman:
And I tell people all the time, “History has never ever been for the dead.” It is about our lived experience. It is about our environment. And so museums have the capacity through its collections, through its storytelling strength to help people make sense of the past and make that usable. And because we use a variety of learning techniques, whether it is the text on the wall that can never be too much, whether it’s the visual image that has an emotional impact, whether it is the artifact, there is something about the real thing that people really relate to and it helps.

Ed Ayers:
And we have a ton of the real thing.

Christy Coleman:
And we have a ton of the real thing. That when they see it, it brings even more truth. And I think that those sort of, that center, that vision and that understanding is what helps us be successful and has enabled us to really re-examine every single program and event that we’ve done through that lens.

Ed Ayers:
So what’s this new building like? What were its priorities?

Christy Coleman:
Well, the priority certainly was, be mindful of the historic fabric of the site. There are original buildings here and there are industrial artifacts buried in the ground. I mean, we have tunnels and canals and all kinds of things that dot this nine acre site.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah, this is one of the largest industrial sites in the United States at the time.

Christy Coleman:
Absolutely. And we were also concerned what we would find when we started digging.

Ed Ayers:
So you’ve invested so much in this for so long.

Christy Coleman:
Yeah, yeah.

Ed Ayers:
Now you’re waiting just days until the world shows up.

Christy Coleman:
Yep.

Ed Ayers:
What do you want them to take away from this experience?

Christy Coleman:
I want them to be awed and inspired. Look, this thing is beautiful. It’s beautiful. It’s impactful. From the moment you walk through the doors of the new building, you know you’re in someplace different. Because immediately, you see the honoring of the past. Because we built this building around a ruin of the original Foundry here.

Ed Ayers:
So what if you’re a relatively recent arrival to America, you don’t really feel any investment in this story. Why in the world would you come to the American Civil War museum?

Christy Coleman:
Because as soon as you walk through the door, and not only would you potentially see people of your ancestral ethnic group, but you would also immediately begin to understand just how much this particular conflict and its aftermath impacts American life. You will begin to recognize whether it’s an ideologies, whether it is the way sort of American culture, particularly political and social culture evolves. You will see it. It will be very apparent to you.

Christy Coleman:
Anyone that wants to understand America and who and what she is, will get a glimpse of that because of this conflict. And let’s not forget, I mean the American Civil War was an attempt at a birth of a new freedom, but it is the saving of a Republic, it is the saving of an idea. And that, I think is inescapable.

Ed Ayers:
Christy Coleman was the chief executive officer of American Civil War Museum in Richmond. She’s now executive director at the Jamestown Yorktown Foundations.