After The Nudge Podcast | Black History On The Go | Toyota
Welcome to After the Nudge Podcast. I’m Soledad O’Brien. I’m J.R. Smith. So on this podcast, we chat with some outstanding grassroots community organizations. All received a nudge from Toyota in the form of a $10,000 grant. Today, we are joined by Dr. Khalid al-Hakim, who’s put a unique, innovative twist on education
By creating a black history one on one mobile museum. Dr. Khalid, welcome to the notes. Thank you for the invitation. It’s so nice to have you with us, Dr. Khalid. Often when people think of museum, they think of a big building. But a mobile museum is a very different take on that.
Tell me a little bit about how you got started. So, black history, One, two, one. Mobile museum is a collection of over 10,000 artifacts, a black memorabilia that dates from the transatlantic slave trade all the way up to hip hop culture. As a social studies teacher.
One of the ways I engage my students in a classroom that was lacking in textbooks, representation of African-American history, as well as a curriculum that was lacking in terms of representation. I would bring in primary source material to spark the interest of my students and engage them in learning about the history.
Over time, I decided to take this concept of artifacts and put it in public spaces and really in tribute to the Black Museum movement with people like Dr. Charles Wright, Dr. Barbara Burrows, who both had mobile museums and found after going to two public spaces, the demand and the value
That people saw of this type of material was really overwhelming. And I started to get invitations to go to different schools, public libraries, corporations, other K through 12 schools as well as colleges. And it just grew and took on a life of its own.
How what’s the process of finding artifacts like that, which is date all the way back to the transatlantic slave trade, to modern day hip hop? What is that process like of finding? So the process for me is really going in and digging through antique shops, used bookstores, garage sales, people’s attics,
And sometimes when people just throw things out. I just know, stop people and say, let me go through. Especially when you have elders transition in the community. People just throw things out. So before that happens, I like to kind of dig through things
And know you find so much history in in photographs, photograph books. And I just people do it. So we find out what types of material. Give us an example of some of the artifacts that you have. So one couple of artifacts that I love to talk about.
I was born and raised in Detroit. Detroit has a history of it. If you look at the landscape of Detroit, there’s a lot of abandoned buildings and houses in Detroit. And so that’s created almost like an underground economy industry where people actually go into those homes and take out material.
That’s their historic material, take it to antique shops, and then people like me go to antique shops and buy some of this material. Like what kinds of things? One one day I got a phone call from a gentleman who said that he found some paper goods in the house in those three
Paper goods, one was signed by Mary McLeod Bethune. Wow. The other one was signed by Dr. Carter G. Watson. And the other one was signed by Paul Robeson. And these things were just sitting in the house. Amazing. And they’re just fantastic pieces.
They they take you to a time in Detroit’s history where, for example, Dr. Carter Watson was coming around to the churches in the area and talking about Negro History Week, which, you know, has become Black History Month. But so it’s material like that.
Going into antique shops, you might buying Jim Crow related material, stereotypical type of material. This year, we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of hip hop. Right. And I have a deep roots in the Detroit hip hop scene. It’s a manager, a artist by the name of Poof from Detroit.
But with us celebrating the 50th anniversary of hip hop last year, Christie’s auction house in New York auctioned off Deejay Quirks Archive. And I got some of that material, some fliers, some jackets and some other material. Oh, wow. How important to you is it?
Like, obviously it’s important to you, but how important is it to let everybody else know about history, their history and where they come from and where our roots are? Well, history gives us a sense of who we are as a people, who we are as humanity. And when people who have been denied
The opportunity to learn about themselves, when they denied that, then, you know, it causes problems in terms of identity. So once people get a chance to see themselves in history and I think about how many students I’ve met who’ve never been into a black history museum before. So going into,
Say, like state museums around the country as I travel and not seeing representation, but to know that I can bring representation in the form of a modern museum for people to see examples of where we are in history, in the contributions that we’ve made, whether is in science, arts, education, sports, entertainment
For people to see themselves represented is very, very important. So and to be able to take this material to our schools and different communities around the country has been a phenomenal experience. And I bet it’s an interesting time, I think, to write. On one hand, I think more Americans than ever are learning
About things like the Tulsa race riots, which I would say most people had no knowledge of, even though it’s been 100 years. And on the other hand, we know that books about Ruby Bridges, you know, are being banned in some school districts or even just books by black authors are being banned.
And so it sometimes feels like talking about black history is problematic, especially when it comes to kind of a K through 12 audience. Have you been feeling that? How do you deal with that? So over the years, I found my tribe in different educational institutions
Around the country and people have been very supportive of the work. It wasn’t until this year that I’ve traveled where I’ve had to deal with people being afraid of bringing me in because these type of conference stations in this climate right now is the difference between somebody having employment in that way.
There’s a difference between institutions receiving state funding and that. So there’s a lot of things tied to this, but this is also a reminder of the legacy of those who came before us and sacrificed for us to get this far. And so this is really a call for us to reengage
To reengage in this work of struggle and stand up at this point in time and understand what we’re tasked with as educators, as citizens of this country. And we really need to take full advantage of these times right now. Put into it, like for me, description of what
This mobile tour looks like, a set of busses that are there, how many people continuously try to have a day or how long is it open when you do the tour? When I first started off, I actually had a van of a mobile unit
In the city in Detroit, and I had that for about ten years before I started getting invitations to come outside the state. And once I started going outside the state, there was a cost factor in terms of taking this trailer around the country.
So I started taking the collection itself out and just using the spaces of the K-through-12 schools or the colleges or the corporations that I go to. So now I travel with about 150 to 200 artifacts, show up, set up in a space people come through throughout the day. I give a lecture.
Some places keep me for a day or two. Sometimes I’m up for a week, but usually from ten to about 3:00 people come through and, you know, it’s it’s very powerful because it gives a space for these difficult conversations to happen. I grew up in Long Island, the north shore of Long Island,
And I only recently learned that at one point in Long Island, we had more members of the KKK than people in the South. One in every seven people was in the KKK in the 1930s in Long Island. Our our our public libraries across from the cemetery.
And there are photos of like guys in white hoods, you know, holding a funeral, a burial for a leader of the KKK. I mean, it’s like literally down the street from where I went to high school. And I was always sort of surprised that none of my social studies teachers ever mentioned it.
I mean, we didn’t go do a field trip there. You don’t think of the KKK and Long Island, New York, as sort of a a breeding ground for the KKK. And so I guess I’m curious if your focus is, hey, I want black people to know their history.
If your focus is, hey, I want white people to know black people’s history or if it’s kind of open to everybody is open. I mean, it’s it’s it’s really all American history, right? And so speaking of the Klan and speaking of how I obtained some of these artifacts
In 2005, I actually went to a Klan auction in Michigan and got some material from the Grand Dragon of the Klan in Michigan, whose name was Robert Miles. I have a photograph of him standing in front of a burning cross.
But I also have a Klan hood that I take around in the exhibit as well. And so it’s important for that balance to be shown. And because I come from a hip hop perspective, we keep it real. So when you walk through the black history
One on one mobile museum, yes, you’re going to see a Klan who. Yes, you’re going to see lynching photographs. And so when I think about lynching photographs of a very famous photograph that was taken in Marion, Indiana, that Public Enemy put on the cover of their song Hazy
Shade of Criminal Habit, that hip hop album cover, and the original photograph of that lynching from Marion, Indiana. Really connecting the dots. Connecting the dots. Right. And so it is you know, it’s very important to see that in the state we’re in right now. My very first experience coming down to Daytona Beach
Back in the early nineties, I walked into a souvenir shop in on this wasn’t displays for sale was a T-shirt that said our dream came true. It was an image of Dr. King with a target over his head with a bullet in his head.
And so this was, you know, in the state of Florida, you know, 30 years ago. You know, it’s interesting to see right now where we are in questioning how far we’ve come. Oh, yeah. And in a literally the same sort of question of how far we’ve come, like the progress of
The state of where we are in continuously talk about is not bad as it was 20 years ago. It’s not bad as was 30 years ago. In your sense, do you do you feel as though we’re moving in the right direction? Do you feel as though we’re continuously people are
Wanting to have the conversation more or is it more, you know, shunned and not wanting to be talked about? I think it’s still pretty much shunned. But we have to create opportunities for these conversations to happen. We have to be more intentional. The institutions have to be more intentional. And yeah,
We there’s a lot more work that needs to be done. And in many cases, it seems like we’re going more backwards than we’re going forward. But again, this is an opportunity for us to make a call to arms and in a have people come together and address some of these issues.
And this is, you know, across all institutions. I love that you do this because I think often America’s almost a historical right. We’d like to think that everything there was whatever happened started today, you know, and that there’s no connection to slavery, to Jim Crow desegregation.
I mean, just, you know, that it’s just like we are where we are today. And so I do love reminding people all the time, like these dots actually connect. You know, a lot of people are where they are today because of something that did happen 400 years ago.
I’m curious, when you heard that you were given the nudge, which was a $10,000 check, what did you what did you think? Oh, it was it was a game changer. And the type of support, the type of visibility that the commercial gave to the museum was amazing. And having the grant
Opened the opportunity to offer the museum at a lower cost to certain institutions who couldn’t necessarily afford the the the museum. And yeah, it was just a huge blessing. What’s what’s your goals for the future for this, for the museum, for the people? Like what do you see
Yourself in the the foundation going forward in the next couple of years? So we have two initiatives that we’re doing. One is a hip hop based initiative called the Michigan Hip Hop Archive. And so with the Michigan Hip Hop Archive, we’re documenting preserving the artifacts, the historical and cultural material
Of hip hop culture in the state of Michigan. People think East Coast, West Coast, is there a big, like, hip hop history in the state of Michigan? Oh, absolutely. I mean, we we get, you know, well done from stone from our pioneers, people like Awesome Dre in Isham and M.C. Breed.
But obviously you have Eminem. And of course. So and so. But we want to document all of that, but not only the contributions that the artists that are from Michigan, but also hip hop has that has come to Michigan. So when we think about the early tours
With Run DMC coming to Michigan and the places they went, you might ask where a Tupac go when he came to Michigan or somebody like Biggie. So we want to document all of those experiences. But I have a partnership with Western Michigan University, the Lewis Walker Center on the campus of Western Michigan.
I’m teaching a class on hip hop this semester. So we’re building up the Michigan hip hop archive there. So that’s one initiative. And then the second initiative is the Black Sea Legacy Project. And so with 10,000 artifacts in the archive right now, I’m only taking out 200 artifacts at a time.
So just got being sitting in. So the things I might critique other institutions, museums about, like, you know, you have these archives, they’re not accessible. So now I’m looking at different communities around the country where I’ve visited and found people who are interested in having community archives. So I’m looking at seeding archives
And conceding communities around the country with artifacts and having them build their local communities, their history, and make it accessible to them. That’s a great idea. So if somebody wants to support you either by saying, Yeah, hey, we’d love to, we’d love to seed an archive here in our community, or
Hey, we’d like to write a big check because we support the work you’re doing. Where can they reach you. On the website Black History Mobile Museum dot com or invite me to the communities. Fantastic. Well, congratulations. Thank you. Really incredible work that you do. Thank you. Sure.
And thanks for joining us on our podcast. And thanks for all of you as well for joining us at After the Nudge Podcast. And we always say never underestimate the power of a nudge. It obviously was a really big deal for your organization and so many others. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Soledad O’Brien and J.R. Smith interview Dr. Khalid el-Hakim, creator of the Black History 101 Mobile Museum. What began as a refurbished RV traveling to areas around Detroit without easy access to a brick-and-mortar Black history museum is now a repository of more than 10,000 original artifacts. Dr. Khalid continues to curate exhibits for a wide range of audiences all across the country. See Terms & Conditions at AfterTheNudge.com: https://www.toyota.com/content/dam/toyota/after-the-nudge/after-the-nudge-term-and-conditions-2023.pdf
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In this of the After The Nudge Podcast, Soledad and J.R. Smith meet with Dr. Khalid el-Hakim.
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