It’s been said repeatedly that we are living in historic times but how can historic times help us navigate this one. For that, we turned to Ernest Dollar, Executive Director of the City of Raleigh and Pope House Museum so we can learn more about what history can tell us now and how it can help us move forward.
It’s been said repeatedly that we are living in historic times but how can historic times help us navigate this one. For that, we turned to Ernest Dollar, Executive Director of the City of Raleigh and Pope House Museum so we can learn more about what history can tell us now and how it can help us move forward.
In this episode, we cover…
About Ernest: Ernest Dollar is a triangle native and has spent most of his work in the history museum field since his first director job in 2001 at the Orange County Historical Museum in Hillsborough. He serves as the Executive Director of the City of Raleigh and Pope House Museum
Links
Follow the City of Raleigh Museum on Facebook (City of Raleigh Museum), Twitter (@CORMuseumFriend), and Instagram (@cormuseumfriends)
Related Podcast Episode: Our conversation with Eric Dorfman, Director/CEO of NC Museum of Natural Sciences included a bit about where he sees the future of Natural History Museums. He even edited a book about it.
00:00 Kenneth Brown Jr: There is no doubt that we are living in times that is and will continue to be documented in books, classes, art, and social media just to name a few. Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.” This quote is a favorite of our guest today and can help us begin to make sense of the moment we’re in and figure out how to tell its story, how to be a better society, and how to make sure it doesn’t rhyme in the future.
Ernest Dollar: I think that there is a value in looking back to avoid the mistakes of the past and I think that's what one thing we as a city and we even as a nation have such a bad job of doing. My favorite bumper sticker is "The most radical thing is a long-term memory." Americans notoriously have bad memories.
Music: “Curiously and Curiously” by blue dot sessions
01:00
KBJ: I’m Kenneth Brown Jr and this is Pivots, a podcast about navigating transitions, negotiating change, and reimagining our world. Today my guest is Ernest Dollar, the Executive Director of the City of Raleigh and Pope House Museums. During our chat, I learned some things about the city I didn’t know but most of our discussion centered around the role of history to help us understand the time that we’re in and the ways history museums can help tell more truthful honest accountings about their communities.
KBJ: What is the City of Raleigh Museum? What is the Pope House Museum? What do you do with them?
Ernest Dollar: That's a great question. The City of Raleigh Museum. We're located in the historic Briggs Hardware Building in Downtown Raleigh 02:00 and our job is to basically talk about Raleigh, history of Raleigh, what's going on in Raleigh today, and to see if we could use the past and the present to sort of say "Can we chart Raleigh's future by looking backward?" So, we do a number of exhibits, programs through the museum. We do a lot of collecting of historical objects from Raleigh's past. We try to be a downtown partner, trying to work with our friends downtown, keep downtown a vibrant and fun place to be. The Pope House is a hidden gem at Raleigh. It's an incredibly important, historic house museum that was built by Dr. Manassa Pope who is one of North Carolina's first licensed African-American doctors, who graduated from Leonard Medical School at Shaw and went on to found perhaps one of the first drugstores, African-American drugstores in North Carolina in Charlotte. An incredible man went to, was a veteran 03:00 of the Spanish-American War and ran for mayor incredibly in 1919. So, we have his house open as a historic site and we give tours and we talk about the family. We talk about the evolution of the African-American neighborhoods in Raleigh.
KBJ: Gotcha, I didn't know that he ran for Mayor in 1919.
ED: It's crazy. That's why I love Dr. Pope. Only he could get away with doing that at a time as such incredible racial violence in the United States. It's a little bit of a testament to see how Raleigh just revered and respected that.
KBJ: Right, right. Thanks for that. I want to ask you how do you define a pivot?
ED: A pivot is something that we pride ourselves on here at the City of Raleigh Museum. Just because we are a smaller institution, that we have the ability to change in midstream is what I would say. If we find that something is not working, we have the ability to stop on the dime 04:00 and change it up, an entire program from top to bottom. There are a lot of circumstances outside the museum that dictate how we do business. Either it's some factors that are in the community or just in the historical field that we bow to two m tastes at the museum. The City about how we operate as a city entity but then again we are a museum and we have our own professional organizations, theories, and thoughts, which are constantly evolving about what is the best way to history? What is the best way to tell whose history? Right, so pivot to me is a way that, to change how we do what we do in an incredibly short amount of time. There's gradual change and there's a pivot that has to be done yesterday.
KBJ: I like that you started to touch on, how do we tell history and I'm excited to ask you that question that I have coming up but on the topic of pivoting, what has pivoting in this time looked like 05:00 for the museum?
ED: Again, it's the pivoting within the city and within the institution so those are two things. I think within the city, it has been incredibly difficult to pivot with such a large department and a lot of these interwoven, interconnected people, the Parks and Recreation and Cultural Resource Department. Our job is to provide services to the community for recreational and education and with the pandemic truly shut that down and ground halt. We were closed from mid-March to mid-September which was incredibly difficult for us because our number one thing we do is to talk to visitors, come in and share the exhibits, displays, and have them come to meetings. So that was difficult. As a museum and as a museum field, I've seen this through the United States museums. It has forced museums to 06:00 come to grips with technology.
KBJ: Yeah
ED: Most museums and historians, we spend a lot of time looking backward and not a lot of time moving forwards. So we kind of don't have a real handle sometimes on technology and the best ways to use technologies and newer technology. So for us in the museum, we saw that, we quickly saw that the way we're all communicating to each other, the way we are all learning, the way we are all talking to each other has to come down to a digital internet format. So, we tried to really do what many museums are doing and provide all online programs. It's truly not as engaging but it allows us and I think a lot of museums have discovered that it's really has given a huge, wider audience that we'd only dreamed of reaching, right? So only having these folks walk in for your Saturday lecture, you do it online. You could be giving the lecture to somebody in Bangkok or Fiji 07:00 through the internet. So, I think most museums have been utterly surprised at being forced to change the way that they deliver their content, has paid off in ways they probably did not know existed.
KBJ: Gotcha, gotcha, and continuing on that line, what/where, in terms of the museum field, where do you see the role of history museums or museums in the next few years given that this kind of digital transformation has happened and people are learning to do things online and as we begin to think about the end of the pandemic and kind of doing more things in person but also still keeping some of that online/digital tactics and habits in place. What do you see when you think about the field? What do you see the role of history museums over the next few years?
ED: I think outside of technology 08:00 I think there's going to be an incredible explosion of people coming to museums because I think we have lived through a historic year. We are still trying to process what just happened in 2020 cause it's so much that as we try to make sense of it, that's sort of what we do. We kind of, bring down the past and try to explain it to the future. So, I really think there's a great interest as we begin to rethink about how we view the past, how do we honor the people from the past, how do we put modern events in a historic context. So I think we've seen a real thirst of people trying to understand the historic fabric of their communities much more. I think that once the pandemic lifts, that I hope museums keep up this digital outreach program 09:00 because the real bread and butter is getting those people in the door, donations, the gift shop but at the same time they're becoming much more effective in reaching more people. They stick to this digital content that they can broadcast from around the world. And as we become more of a digital-savvy and digital-dependent culture, this is something that is, keeps museums fresh, keeps them popular, and makes them part of the community conversation rather than a relic.
KBJ: Yeah, yeah. Earlier you mentioned about who tells history and in an interview with Walter Magazine you talked about your Master's degree in public history and you said that it had a "basic question: how do we teach the public about history?" So, living in a historic time and knowing and understanding that the ways history may have been told may have not been a total, full 10:00 accounting of the story. When you think about the question, "How do we teach the public about history?" how does that sit with you?
ED: Yea, I mean that is sort of our main job. We teach people. We try to look back in the past and make sense of it today and it is certainly our voice in trying to pluck out what themes and facts to put together in some narrative that people will enjoy, want to read and to learn from. But I most certainly think in the past year, we have discovered that the faults in the history field have widened. So, it has shown that because we have fundamentally, as much as we like to teach a full spectrum view of history, that, and that is an evolving process; whose history do we tell and how do we look at the past that’s because we have not done 11:00 a good job of that in our past and it has come to roost. Hens has come to roost. So if we talk about, especially that we were dramatically impacted with the unrest in Raleigh last May that we found ourselves in the middle of that history and we did a lot of soul searching to say "Hey, have we as an institution done enough to explain why these things have happened." Why are there all these people in the streets? Why are they so angry? Why do we look at these confederate monuments as a controversial point? So, it is, it has forced us to really be more cognizant of expanding how we bring history that is relevant, right, and how, what history is more meaningful that can actually help shape society for the better? So, you know, that's for historians we have to be half journalists, at the same time and third 12:00 psychologist, and a quarter-inch anthropologist. It's not as easy as preparing the past but trying to make sense of it for the better good of the community. The way I look at it is that we're, museums are a yardstick of humanity. We can show how far we've come and we're able to show how far we need to go.
KBJ: Speaking of that, just this time: pandemic, social unrest, big political divides, and even for Raleigh itself just trying to ask, to answer the questions of "What city do we want to become over the next few years?" When you look in Raleigh's history, are there any characteristics, or any moments that can help/that has helped the city either navigate this time or things from Raleigh's past that can help Raleigh 13:00 aim towards the future it wants to go toward?
ED: Yea, my favorite quote is from Mark Twain says “History doesn’t always repeat itself but it sure does rhyme.” Right, so history doesn't repeat itself but we can look back and look at the chapter of the city's 200 plus year history and we've learned in the past year, we can mirror what happened. I'd like to say that last year was everything from the Civil Rights Movement, Spanish Influenza, Great Dust Bowl, it just runs the gamut of historical chapters packed into one year and sometimes it can be overwhelming as we try to. Historians view everything through the historical lens because it was just overload last year. I certainly think that one thing that sticks out is comparing a lot of the unrest of 2020 to the unrest of Raleigh in 1968 with the assassination of Martin Luther King 14:00. I remember when I first came to Raleigh and discovered that I was like "Wow" and I'd discovered it by accident really. Where did this come from? I started finding pictures on eBay of National Guardsmen, people laying on the ground, and gas in the pictures. I was like "What is this?" That's one of the practical moments where you can say “Hey, we could’ve seen this coming.” Even looking back at the Spanish Influenza in 1918, we did an exhibit on that a few years early in 2017. How did people respond to mask regulations and how did that respond to this wave of death that sort of inundated the city? I think that there is a value in looking back to avoid the mistakes of the past and I think that's what one thing we as a city and we even as a nation have such a bad job of doing. My favorite bumper sticker is "The most radical thing is a long-term memory 15:00 ." Americans notoriously have bad memories.
Music: “Night Light” by blue dot sessions
KBJ: So, when you look at the past and when you look at the present, and when you think about, you're are a North Carolina native, been around here for a minute, what do you hope to see in the next 10 years, when you wake up and look outside your window, what do you hope to see for your community?
ED: Now you're asking me to look into my crystal ball instead of my history book. I think Raleigh and the Research Triangle are increasingly becoming a global community. The international airport, the Research Triangle Park. We are attracting an incredibly diverse community 16:00 here and I think that I would love to see some of the stories of people who have been here. The story of Raleigh as it has been, to use as, we need to remember these stories. We need to sort of do a better job of collecting the oral histories because we're going through a time of great change and my future, when I look out, is that we will have, we will share histories that everybody can see and learn from and there's such a diversity of history that we're only starting to tap. Certainly, with the African-American experience, we are trying to get into a public display of a lot of this history, right. Even more so, we did an exhibit in 2016 about the Southeast Asian Indians and there's such a huge collection of 17:00 those people moving to Western Wake County. Who is collecting their story? of these sort of first-generation immigrants. Same way with the Latino community. We've been working with folks in the Mexican Consulate so that we can capture these stories and artifacts of these first generations of Latinos to come to this area so when 10 years, their grandchildren can say "What was it line?" "What was it like coming to this strange little southern town, not being able to speak the language and a different culture?" So, I hope that in 10 years we'll be able to provide a much more in-depth and much more engaging story of the people who make us the social fabric of Raleigh.
KBJ: What have you been learning and what do you hope sticks around when the pandemic eventually ends?
ED: I like not having a lot of traffic driving to work is pretty awesome.18:00 I think that. I think the pandemic has kept so many people inside and it has forced a lot of people to engage the community around them, I guess. To be with their families more. So my hope is that coming out of the pandemic is that we will have a better understanding of what values the community has. 2020 has tested so much who we are, has tested who we think we want to be and it is truly tested who we think we were. So, it really pushed a lot of buttons and made people think about society. So, I hope that as we go forward that we will continue to sort of do this introspection because last year was a deep year of trying to understand who we really are and I hope this kind of continues and I hope that all of the bad 19:00 experience of 2020 will evolve and grow into good experiences. People will grow again through the generosity of their wallets and helping nonprofits. The idea of trying to share the stories of “the other”, people not like them and just try to understand, to redefine, and to state themselves in "What in the world does it mean to be an American?" What are American values? So, I think we will be feeling 2020 for generations to come.
KBJ: Sometimes, for some people, they tend to think about things from their past that have kind of told them that "You've been through this before. You got this. You've been through change." I was wondering for you whether professionally or personally, are there moments that have come up during this pandemic that you have kind of latched on or just recurring moments from your life?
ED: About 20:00 about the pandemic sort of how I have changed in the pandemic maybe?
KBJ: Yeah.
ED: Yeah, I think much more of politics, the national politics, again you know as historians, coming through any schooling, we're taught the basic narrative of American history and we believe, I believed that there were the ways in which politics and society worked and I thought "Oh, there's this safety net for these. There's somebody there at the door making sure this or that doesn't happen." or "We believed that government works in this way." So, in watching some of this stuff break down has really caused me to go back in history and say "Hey, did I miss it?" Are there other points in our past where there has been these complete breakdowns or this crazy stuff that I missed where I can say "Alright, this is part of the 21:00 revolving cycle of the American experience. History repeating itself." Did I miss something that I should have caught that would have said "Ahh, this is coming. It happened before and it's gonna happen again." I think personally though, the scariest part of the pandemic for me was trying to use my historical filter to predict how this, how this thing would end and you know the craziest thing I found myself doing was food insecurity, strangely enough. We bought a bunch of food and stashed it in the back of the closet just in case because I'm like "I don't know how this is going to pan out." Sometimes history lets you down in trying to figure out but some often she got the answers you just need to read it.
KBJ: Yeah, yeah. How did the 1918 pandemic end for Raleigh? Was there anything in looking back that came up that was 22:00 people was like "yes, this is the end, we can do normal things."?
ED: Well, you know just as today, there are people who were at first resistant to wearing masks and resistant to believing they would catch the disease. I think one of the, as we really compare the two experiences almost one-hundred years apart, which is the interesting thing that Raleigh was coming right out of World War 1. So they were truly, everything was mobilized. Women were mobilized for the canteens, the Red Cross. The city was very much functioning in a wartime atmosphere so when the pandemic comes,it's easy to convert assets and personnel and to sort out and react to the pandemic which we went into the pandemic pretty much cold and had to ramp up everything.
KBJ: Yeah.
ED: And I think the thing that we did not have was the wave of death that washed over Raleigh 23:00 in 1918 with a much smaller city and much more of a personal impact for a lot of people that, it took me a while to actually know people who got COVID and kind of feel a creeping, it get closer to us. So that was a little different from the experience between the two and even the ability to talk about 1918 sometimes in the official capacity was just people were terrified and they didn't want to be reminded just what had went down in 1918, it had scared people. I think there's a little of trying to, there are certain aspects of the two experiences but on the other had they're a little different. When it ended, I don't think there was a real hands up, we're done, we're finished. I think it'll be hard for us today to figure out when we're through it. 24:00 I think when Governor Cooper lifts the mask mandate, that may be kind of close as we get.
KBJ: Gotcha and speaking through navigating through this time. What has been giving you hope?
ED: What has been giving me hope? That's a great question. I think you actually stumped me on this part which is strange. I don't know. As history has taught me that, it too shall pass, everything kind of comes to an end and America, it is an imperfect ship. It is a ship sailing on its course and it hits rocky waters sometimes and the ship,it pitches and ebbs through its rocky seas that I think just looking back in the past and seeing all of the adversity so many people had to face in so many different ways. And again, with so many issues 25:00 plucked through our past in one year, I just find some solace in how we have gone through those as a nation before and how we have reacted to make sure that to improve ourselves based on that lived experience. It's the old adage, "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger." So that's what gives me hope. That we can be a better nation coming out of this than we did going in.
KBJ: Yeah, I hope so too. Someone listening to this, they may have been, in addition to the pandemic, has undergone other major shifts and changes. If someone was to come up to you, do you have a message or some advice or a word or something, to help me, help guide them, what would you tell them?
ED: I would say that 26:00 History does teach us lessons. It shows us strength. It shows us overcoming adversity. It acts as a mirror that tells us who we are. It gives us an opportunity to understand our culture better and it understands, it gives us sort of a rough fuzzy guidebook on the way forward. I would think that if somebody is feeling overwhelmed with the state of society, with the state of the government, with how the pandemic is sort- of oppressing us and economic hardships. History tells us so many people who have overcome these that have done it under much more difficult circumstances than us. That we follow in the footsteps of the people who have already gone through this and probably a lot worse. So, it offers us a role model basically of some people who 27:00 we can look up to and say "If they got through it, then so can we."
Music: “Plum King” by blue dot sessions
KBJ: How can people learn more about the City of Raleigh Museum and the Pope House Museum?
ED: Sure, website, go to the web. That's the best place to learn about us and again we're right down Fayetteville street in Raleigh and we're open Tuesday through Sunday The Pope House is open by reservation only. It's open on the weekends. It's kind of small but then again, if we talk about people who have done a lot under a lot of duress Dr. Pope, it's an incredible story. Certainly, as we begin to understand what happened last year especially with the African-American experience, we still have a long way to go to share that experience 28:00 in order to understand what just happened to our site. So, I think it's a great time for a lot of people to do a lot of introspection and if you don't love history, maybe now is a good time to check it out because it's a good time.
KBJ: Thank you very much, Ernest.
ED: Oh, thank you so much.
KBJ: Ernest Dollar is the Executive Director of the City of Raleigh and Pope House Museums. Both are located in Downtown Raleigh. The City of Raleigh Museum is open Tuesday through Sunday. The Pope House Museum is only open during the weekends and tours are by appointment only.
MUSIC CONTINUES
KBJ: You've been listening to Pivots, a podcast about navigating transitions, negotiating change, and re-imagining our world. Pivots is a project of the A.J. Fletcher foundation produced and hosted by me Kenneth 29:00 Brown Jr. Our music is composed by blue dot sessions. You can hear this episode end more by going to our show page at www dot pivots-a-j-f dot simple cast dot com or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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