Week 8:
Organizing and Curiosity

July 23, 2021

Organizing

Much of my week in person at the museum was spent reorganizing the museum’s institutional archives. This has been a pretty fun project because it is the type of organizing that I really enjoy. It ended up satisfying to finally finish it and have the archives completely organized in its new filing cabinets. Part of what I had to do was go through every single item, put it where it was supposed to go, and decide if it was worth keeping in the institutional archive. As a result, I ended up learning a lot about the museum, which was quite interesting. I do not think I had really realized the importance of this little museum to Cedar Rapids. Especially in its beginnings, there were dozens of letters of support and appreciation, so it is clearly very important to so many people. It feels nice that I could help, even if I have mostly only been doing small tasks.

The Clark Family

My time working from home was spent almost entirely working on the Summer History Adventure videos (if you are interested in watching these, these are posted on the AAMI Facebook page). For context, these are a virtual replacement for the lessons and activities that the museum would host for children during the summer. Of course, I had done one already, so I had a better understanding of what I needed to do, especially when it came to editing. The topic I chose for this week was Susan and Alexander Clark. They are notable as Susan was the first black child to attend public school in Iowa. Alexander went to court on her behalf, and ultimately she was granted this right. Her brother also became the first black lawyer in Iowa (after graduating from the newly integrated high school), and her father was the second. It ended de jure segregation in Iowa’s schools and set a precedent for Brown v. Board of Education. This lawsuit was in 1868, meaning that this was a whole 86 years before Brown v. Board and the rest of the country outlawing dejure segregation in schools. This was super interesting because Iowa’s history generally was not great as far as race relations go. Black exclusion laws in the state were only gotten rid of in 1864- only 4 years prior. However, that’s not to say that this case was a complete turnaround for racism or de facto segregation in school. Regardless, this family was pretty interesting to learn about, and of course, now be able to teach. 

Learning new things!

The rest of my week after I finished the filming and editing for the video about the Clark family was spent preparing for next week’s video. I did a bit more exploratory research for this one because I was really unsure of what the topic would be at first. This is something that I have really come to appreciate about this opportunity. I have already learned so much more than I knew and often have found myself just researching random things out of curiosity. I can say without a doubt that I have learned more about Iowan and African American history than I ever thought I would.