90. Civil Rights Progress Isn't Linear. The Grove Museum Interprets Tallahassee's Struggle in an Unexpected Setting‪.‬ Museum Archipelago

The Grove Museum inside the historic Call/Collins House is one of Tallahassee’s newest museums, and it’s changing how the city interprets its own history. Instead of focusing on the mansion house’s famous owners, including Florida Governor LeRoy Collins, Executive Director John Grandage oriented the museum around civil rights. Cleverly tracing how Collins’s thinking on race relations evolved, the museum uses the house and the land it sits on to tell the story of the forced removal of indigenous people from the area, the enslaved craftspeople who built the house, and the Tallahassee Bus Boycott.


Grandage says the museum’s interpretive plan and focus on civil rights wouldn't have been possible without the work of Black Tallahassee institutions like John G. Riley House Museum created by Althemese Barnes or the Southeastern Regional Black Archives built from FAMU Professor James Eaton’s collection.


In this episode recorded at the museum, Grandage describes how historic preservation has always been about what the dominant culture finds worth persevering, the museum’s genealogical role, and the white backlash to Collins’s moderate positions on civil rights.


Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 Ian at the 1992 Springtime Tallahassee Parade
00:55 White Supremacy in Tallahassee
01:20 Smokey Hollow
01:40 John Grandage
02:35 The Grove Museum
03:05 Developing the Interpretive Plan with a Focus on Slavery and Civil Rights
03:30 Governorship of LeRoy Collins
04:36 Tallahassee Bus Boycott
06:08 Presenting the Narrative through Collins
06:50 White Backlash to Collins’s Moderate Position on Civil Rights
08:15 The Construction of the House by Enslaved Craftspeople
09:45 The Genealogical Role of the Museum
10:50 Forced Removal of Indigenous People in Tallahassee
12:25 How Tallahassee Interprets Its History
13:00 The John G. Riley House
13:10 The Meek-Eaton Black Archives
14:08 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️


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Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 90. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.




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I found an old picture of me, taken about a block away from what is now the Grove Museum in Tallahassee, FL.


The picture was taken in March 1992: I'm facing the camera as the Springtime Tallahassee parade -- Tallahassee's biggest annual celebration -- goes by behind me. Positioned in the frame is a confederate flag, proudly carried by two people parading down the middle of the street. My three-year-old self is blocking whatever group came after the flag -- maybe a club, maybe a mascot, maybe a group of Civil War reenactors?


The fact that the confederate flag in a parade happened to be in the background of this candid shot hints at the white supremacy that undergirds Tallahassee, a city that had a majority Black population during Reconstruction.


In 1907, the city refused Andrew Carnegie's offer to build