Guided Virtual tour of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia

The virtual guided tour I took of Ferris State University’s Jim Crow Museum of Racist

Memorabilia took place on February 9, 2021 at 1:00 p.m. The museum provides public guided

virtual tours every Tuesday at one, and though registration is required they are free. Tours of the

museum were always free, even when it was open for in-person touring. The museum’s mission

is to be a leader in the anti-racism movement by addressing race, racism, and race relations. They

encourage collaborative work with the community, from high schools to government agencies

and are committed to producing original research, planning and hosting tours and conferences,

and conducting anti-racism training. Since the museum closed to the public last year due to

Covid-19, these online tours are how they fulfil the tour aspect of their mission. The tour itself

serves to be a tool of anti-racism by explaining the ways in which the Jim Crow era was

supported by an entire system of material culture that reinforced and justified cultural stereotypes

and white supremacy. These tours are open to everyone, and private tours are available for

school or other groups, including businesses. Given this, I believe the intended audience of the

tour to be the general public, although they do have an age limit of high-school and up, so the

general adult public.

The guided portion of the tour is particularly important, because the sensitive nature of

these objects requires extra interpretation and facilitation than other exhibits might. The museum

offers an unguided 360-degree tour on their website which can be accessed at any time and

includes interactive panels that can either be read or listened to. However, these interactive

options are only available for the main panel text, and the museum cases are quite full of objects

which make the text’s point. Given their inflammatory and hurtful nature, I think these objects

need more interpretation than what any reasonable main panel text can provide. The guided tour
is able to provide more context and explanation of these objects and can constantly reaffirm the

problematic nature of the artifacts and explain in real time one of the museum’s tenants of using

intolerant objects to teach tolerance, something the tour guide explained on my tour. This is

particularly important because the harmful nature of these objects often leads to the question

“why collect racist items at all?” Having a facilitator on screen (ours was the museum educator)

leads to a productive dialogue around how knowledge and education of these objects and

stereotypes can lead to breaking down their power.

The tour lasted for about an hour and was done through Zoom with the tour guide sharing

her screen on the 360 tour. She used that platform to move through the space but did not engage

with any of the interactive elements, filling the information in herself. Sometimes she would

zoom in to focus on a certain artifact, but most of the time we were looking at full cases of

objects. This was where I noticed a problem with the tour. I felt like I was missing out on

information because while the stereotypes the objects portrayed were discussed, few of the actual

objects themselves were discussed. I felt that there needed to be more context for what we were

seeing and an explanation for how they fit into American culture. For example, the guide did a

wonderful and comprehensive break down of American minstrelsy, noting how it was the height

of American entertainment for almost fifty years and touched almost every aspect of

entertainment while being completely exploitative. However, this explanation was done while

the screen was in the middle of a wide room that looked as though it could be used for

performances or perhaps discussions, with none of the actual artifacts. If we had been able to see

artifacts directly related to minstrel shows, objects used in them, and objects influenced by their

caricatures I feel like it would have been a much richer learning experience.
 While the tour was full of interesting and very important information (I had to remember

ten minutes in that my notes needed to include thoughts on the program elements not only the

program information) it was also dry. After thirty minutes it became a little boring because it was

presented more like a lecture than a tour. There were even moments when, despite my genuine

interest in the topic, I realized that I was zoning out. Perhaps that was because all the tour

participants kept their cameras off and were muted throughout the tour so there was no

participation, or opportunities for in-group mediation. As discussed in Falk and Dierklings,

Learning from Museums, in group mediation is essential for learning because memories made

with people are emotional and aid in future recall (32-33). This lack of social interaction made it

difficult for me to anchor my focus and coupled with the presentation of the material resulted in

a tour that violates one of Freeman Tilden’s main principles: talk with your guests, not at

(Interpreting out Heritage, 36). Even if we had just been encouraged to put in the chat if we

recognized any of the items or stereotypes in the museum I feel I would have felt more engaged.

After the tour there was a short Q&A that lasted about ten minutes. We were promised

that a resource list would be emailed to us after the tour, which I received two days after the tour.

Questions in the Q&A varied, although it seemed as though most people were part of the

industry (they asked how the tour guide got to the museum and their background in education,

along with how the museum was started, and how they dealt with visitors who might be triggered

by the content). It was during the Q&A that we learned the museum has an age limit, they

suggest that anyone under the age of high school not attend which I think is a very good and

important precaution – the content requires maturity. They did not use the Q&A feature, which

was a bit of a bummer, but the tour included less than twenty people and only a few of them
asked questions, so the chat alerts coming in were not too annoying, especially since people

waited until the tour was finished to ask questions.

I think the program was successful for me because I was someone already interested in

this topic. I found this program doing research for an exhibit I am curating for my job, so I had a

lot of incentive to pay attention to this program, and the information was invaluable. The

museum educator drew many parallels between what is in the museum and what are still

acceptable parts of our culture today that were extremely important for me to see the wider

context of the conversation my exhibit will be entering. For example, they discussed a 2008

Vogue cover where Lebron James was cast in the “brute” characterization next to model Giselle

Bundchen. The way the two of them are photographed, placed, dressed, and directed is eerily and

horrifically similar to the United States Army’s 1917 “Destroy This Mad Brute” propaganda

poster, which depicts a gorilla running off with a fainting, partially unclothed white woman. This

entire conversation was eye-opening, shocking, and very important to my research and in my

opinion, for people to know about and understand in general. However, this discussion came at

the end of the tour, and if I hadn’t had two large reasons to continue this tour, I might have

completed zoned out or even fallen asleep before reaching this important discussion. The tour’s

theme, if you are able to remain engaged all the way through, fulfills their mission perfectly by

explaining stereotypes that many people might not even know about and breaking down how

they supported Jim Crow throughout the nation, South, North, Midwest, and West Coast, and

how these stereotypes continued to show up in material culture and popular culture objects to

this day, supporting anti-black racism. My concern is that the tour in its current form is made for

academics, not the general public to whom it is marketed, and that the meaning of the tour would

be lost to wandering minds, or people simply leaving the zoom call. The docent was
knowledgeable, but their delivery was not engaging so much so that the presentation of this very

relevant and important topic became boring. Given that it is free there is no incentive to stay,

especially if you are bored. While the program was successful in its goals for my experience, I

am unsure if it would have been for a person who did not already have prior interest in the topic

and two reasons to continue paying attention.

My main suggestion for this program is to make it more interesting. Specifically, after

seeing what the Georgia Aquarium had for their virtual tours, if the educator added graphics or

close-up slides of artifacts it would help to make the tour more engaging. I also wish there had

been time for the tour to be a little more interactive – the museum educator admitted it herself,

that during in-person tours they can gauge how people are responding to the information and

what needs more explanation and context, which is something that can’t be done when everyone

is muted and just a blank box. But I feel like that gauging of people’s moods and acceptance

levels is so deeply important in a tour like this that there needs to be another way to address it.

There also needed to be more direct addressing of the objects in all of the cases that are shown in

the 360 tour, along with more full breakdowns of certain stereotypes. The museum educator

broke down some of the stereotypes like the “brute” and “mammy” while simply using “Uncle

Tom” and “Jezebel” with no explanation. I already knew what those characteristics meant

because I had read information the museum provides on their website about Jim Crow African

American stereotypes, but for someone who hadn’t read that information, an important point

about how we talk about African American politicians and celebrities today would have been

lost. This tour was clearly a ‘pandemic project’ and not something that was developed on its own

to be successful. I think this tour needs to be rethought as a piece of outreach that is an

equivalent experience to seeing the museum in person. I find having a good tour option
especially important since the museum in in rural Michigan, virtual programs are their chance to

reach a much broader audience with quality engagement beyond the end of the pandemic.

Bibliography

Falk, John and Lynn Dierking. Learning from Museums. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

Ferris State University. “Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia.” Ferris State University.

Accessed: February 10, 2021. [Link]

Tilden, Freeman. Interpreting Our Heritage. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

2007.