What A Day - A Georgia Man's Life Mission To Preserve Black History

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

Speaking at a Juneteenth event at the White House this month, President Joe Biden warned about the “old ghosts in new garments” trying to erase the nation’s Black history by banning books and restricting diversity programs. But across the country, people are also working hard to preserve that history in the face of Republican opposition. So, on a special Juneteenth episode of “What A Day,” we speak to an organization doing just that: The Jack Hadley Black History Museum in Thomasville, Georgia. Jack Hadley, the museum’s founder and curator, has spent his life collecting thousands of artifacts that help tell the story of Black history in America. We speak to him and the museum’s executive director, Daniel Pittman, about how the museum is growing and what it means to do this work right now. Show Notes:What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

It's Wednesday, June 19th. I'm Josie Duffy Rice. And I'm Traevel Anderson, and this is What A Day. On today's show, we're celebrating Juneteenth, the holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. Right. On this day in 1865, the last remaining group of enslaved African-Americans in Galveston, Texas, finally learned they were free. The news arrived two months after the end of the Civil War and more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Now, Black Americans have been celebrating Juneteenth for more than a century. And in 2021, President Joe Biden signed legislation making it a federal holiday. And at this year's Juneteenth celebration at the White House, Biden talked about the many ways Black history is currently under attack.

They're all ghosts in new garments trying to take us back. Well, there are. Taking away your freedoms, making it harder for Black people to vote. Or have your vote counted. Closing doors of opportunity, attacking the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. If you can believe it, banning books about Black experiences. Trying to erase and rewrite history. And while the president didn't explicitly call out Republicans in his speech, we know that they're the ones leading the latest charge to rewrite American history from banning books that talk about race from schools to ending programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Right. And just the last few years, we've seen lawmakers across the country introduce hundreds of bills to ban or restrict how race and racism are taught in schools and banned DEI programs at public institutions.

But we also know that there are people across the country who are working hard to preserve that history in the face of this opposition. Absolutely. And so on this Juneteenth, I wanted to spend some time talking to someone doing just that. And that's how I came across the Jack Hadley Black History Museum in Thomasville, Georgia, just a few hours southwest of you in Atlanta, Josie. Yeah, tell me more. So the museum was founded by historian and curator Jack Hadley in the 90s.

Mr. Hadley just turned 88. And he spent most of his life collecting thousands of artifacts that helped tell the story of Black history, particularly in America, things like newspaper clippings, vintage photos, and priceless antiques. The Jack Hadley Museum just learned it's getting a federal grant worth nearly half a million dollars through a program that started under President George W. Bush to preserve and protect African American history and culture. And the Biden administration is trying to push the grant program to historic highs with an expected six million in this coming fiscal year. The museum plans to use the money to create audio guides and new museum exhibits for young people.

It's also in the process of building an entirely new museum complex next to two historically significant structures in Thomasville. I wanted to learn a bit more, so I spoke with Mr. Hadley and the museum's executive director, Daniel Pittman, about what it means to be doing this work right now. I started by asking Mr. Hadley about how he started collecting and curating Black history artifacts, which he says began while he was stationed in Germany with the U.S. military in the 70s. In one of our tours, which was a long-term tour, which was in Germany, 1979, my son was in junior high school, came home one day and said, Dad, you know, the teachers don't seem to have no interest in observing Bank History Week.

And I could have easily told my sons, boy, get yourself outside and go play. But somehow, evidently, it sparked me to go and pull those Ebony magazines, Jet magazines, Elson magazines, the Pittsburgh Curious paper, and cut out articles. We clipped them from that and created some poster boards. And we, you know, took a day or so, and Jim took them to school, and the teachers liked it. And so then a few days later, he went back to school. They had moved all the trophies out of the trophy case and placed his exhibit inside the trophy case so that all the kids can look at it trophy case and place his exhibit inside the trophy case so that all the kids can look at it. Well, that was the beginning of it.

And so as a result of that, it sparked me to ask my squadron commander. I was in the first combat communications squadron. My commander told me, he said, Jack, go ahead on and get the young people together and y'all do an exhibit. And we made that announcement, and it was amazing what came out of those kids' room, artifacts, pictures, and y'all do an exhibit. And we made that announcement. And it was amazing what came out of those kids' room, artifacts, pictures, and stuff like that. Plus, I had started picking up a few items myself. We did exhibit on the base. It was turned out real good. Even the schools brought kids to see the exhibit. So that was very exciting.

So how did you go from, you know, starting with this little small exhibit in your son's school to eventually founding the Jack Hadley Black History Museum in Thomasville, Georgia? Once I started that, I started getting articles out of the evidence magazines. Again, I ordered posters, large posters, prints. I would get the local paper, anything that was important. I would laminate. Didn't know anything about curating stuff that you preserve it the right way. I would laminate

my articles in the paper. Then I left Germany, got a station in Murdaby, South Carolina. And there was a lack of interest to me, in my opinion, of back celebrating Black History Week. In fact, it's almost month now.

So I got them involved, and so we started doing a small exhibit on the base. But then I retired from the Air Force after serving 28 years and 14 days and came back to Thomasville, Georgia, my hometown, where I was born and raised at, which is where I was born on Pepperell Plantation. Then I opened a museum up. At that time, I went to about 1,800 pieces collecting.

And it just continued to grow. People began to call from all over. What I did was, it was like an international state highway coming to Thomasville. People had a place to deposit their Black history. They know that what we was trying to do in the community. And that's where we are today. I love that. Daniel, I want to bring you in here.

What drew you to the museum and how has it changed during your time as executive director? I come from a history background. I always loved history and I met my wife in school and my wife was originally from Thomasville. I'm originally not from Thomasville. And one of the things that the museum does really well is really educating our local students. For example, for February Black History Month alone, we usually see a few thousand local students. And when I say local, I mean, Thomasville, Tallahassee, Albany, Georgia, Bainbridge, kind of our entire region comes to the museum all throughout the month of February.

And really throughout the year, we've always tried to tell, you know, teachers, you don't have to come to the museum only in February. And so I think that's starting to kind of stick with some of the teachers now because we are seeing a lot more tours outside of February. But I say all this to say, the museum's always been a staple to our public education here in our community.

And then about two and a half years ago, the museum received another IMLS grant. Part of that grant was capacity building, looking at trying to future-proof the museum received another IMLS grant. Part of that grant was capacity building, looking at trying to future-proof the museum. And one of those was bringing on an executive director. Mr. Hadley has done this since 1979, has never taken a single dime for all the work that he's put in. And so Mr. Hadley really just, you know, for the majority of his life has just really dedicated and volunteered

his time as leading this organization to the point that it was before I became executive director. It was recently announced that you all got another grant $400,000 from the federal government to support preserving Black history. What is your museum planning to do with those funds? Douglas, the site that we're currently located, was the site of the all-Black segregated city high school. It is built in a historic Black neighborhood called Dewey City, and it's kind of off from any of the main roads in our community. So a map assessment program was done on the museum, and one of the recommendations was to have a secondary site somewhere near downtown Thomasville, which has a very robust tourism because of our closeness to

Tallahassee and some of the surrounding other cities. So that was a few years before the Imperial Hotel was purchased by the organization. The Imperial Hotel was Thomasville's only Green Book location, one of the last standing Green Book locations in the entire region. Built 1949, stopped operating in 1969, and right next door was an original 1907 shotgun house. And what makes that structure so historically significant is we just finished up a historic structures report at the end of last year on that building, and we found it was the start of the color line on Jackson Street here in our community. So all the other houses that were built heading towards downtown Thomasville were all white owned. So for a community to have an original Green Book location still standing, to have an original shotgun house that actually was the color line

in our community is so incredible and just was such a unique opportunity for the museum to be able to purchase those two structures. So like what Mr. Hadley started back in 1979 of preserving Black history, the museum was able to preserve those two historic structures by purchasing them. When we first started kind of in the middle of the pandemic, regrouping and trying to figure out our future plans. We were still planning to have it to where it's just a secondary site. And then when Mr. Hadley was getting his first COVID shot, one of the foundations who's heavily supportive of the museum, their director came up to him and said, hey, just want to let you know that we purchased the entire lot next

to the Imperial Hotel for you to use to enhance the site. And then wanting to make sure that the museum is future-proof for future generations and really for our students, a new idea formed, which is what was called or what is called the Jack Hadley Yards. And so what the Jack Hadley Yards consists of is a brand new museum building built right next to the Imperial Hotel and Shotgun House to really create a very special campus for the celebration and preservation of African-American

history. Another thing that we're doing with the new museum building is taking Mr. Hadley's collection kind of to the next level, and that's where that new grant that we received kind of comes into play. When we started looking at developing the floor plan and what the new museum will look like and how the exhibits will kind of work in the new facility, it became apparent that we really needed to bring on an exhibit design firm. The work that we started doing with them was how can we preserve that same feeling that guests come into the museum and they see that passion and they see that love that Mr. Hadley has just poured into this organization. But how can we start to incorporate some new technologies so for future generations and the young students who come into the museum can have it a little bit more immersive.

Also, how can we make sure that Mr. Hadley's voice is carried throughout the museum? And so working with them, they've came up with kind of the first look at the concept and design for the new exhibits to where as guests walk through the museum, they'll actually be able to hear Mr. Hadley talk about key pieces of the collection throughout the entire museum, including a large kind of hologram space or more so kind of a large projected video space of Mr. Hadley interacting with guests as they're walking through the museum. Let's take a quick break when we return more of my conversation with Jack Hadley, the curator and founder of the Jack Hadley Black History Museum in Thomasville, Georgia, and Daniel Pittman, the museum's executive director. But if you like our show, make sure to subscribe and share it with your friends. We'll be back after some ads. All righty, beautiful people, let's get back to my conversation with Mr. Jack Hadley,

the curator and founder of the Jack Hadley Black History Museum in Thomasville, Georgia, and Daniel Pittman, the museum's executive director. You mentioned childhood education is something that, you know, is central to your museum's mission. We know that there's been a widespread effort in the Republican Party, for example, to ban resources that accurately teach kids, you know, about our country's history when it comes to slavery or racism. I'm wondering how that backlash has impacted the work that you all are doing with young people. The only reason why that I push hard to preserve this history, Blacks have always been sort of like or trying to preserve their history.

That's what I recognized when I came back here. And then I noticed that our African-American kids, brown kids, white kids, they're suffering for that they don't have an opportunity to know this information. So I drive real hard, and that's why I'm hanging in there with Daniels and the museum to make sure the story gets told. And there's been a drop in some of the areas here that were really pushing kids through the museum, like in Tallahassee, Florida, to come up here. But overall, there's still a hunger for them to know this history. And when I take them through and talk about the Jimco era and all that, their eyes pop wide open.

Some kids didn't even realize what this was all about until we explained it to them. They may see an artifact there showing a black kid with the backside of it showing his behind. And they may grin at that. But then I turned around and said, OK, now you finish with that. Now look on this wall over here. And they see a man hanging from a limb, mean lynch. So then they politely hear the story that it is important that they know the past, they know what the ancestors accomplished. And that's the picture that we're

trying to paint to our young people. Just to kind of piggyback on what Mr. Hadley said, all of our local schools and all of our kind of South Georgia area schools, the numbers are still pretty strong, you know, of bringing their students in. But we have heard from, you know, and we have seen a drop off on schools from Florida, where we're real close to the Florida Georgia line here in Thomasville. And so, you know, there's a school that me and Mr. Hadley for the past several years, me and him would always do kind of a joint program at they would bring all of their elementary kids to and we haven't been invited. I think this is the second. And we haven't been invited. I think this is the second year that we haven't been invited back. And so that's always really

disappointing. And then there's other teachers that we hear from who say, you know, well, I don't care what's going on with the state. I think it's important that my students hear this history. And I think it's important that we come to the museum, despite the fact that, you know, they are, you know, in some of these Florida communities. So there's definitely been a decrease in seeing some of those Florida schools, especially after the pandemic, coming into the museum. But what is encouraging is the schools, like I said, in South Georgia, and the teachers that we interact with on a daily basis, you know, they want to make sure that their kids are coming through the museum, coming from, you know, kindergarten all the way up to high school, even colleges, You know, we have groups of college

students who come to the museum on recommendation of their professors, and it's so that they can get this history, make sure that they are learning and seeing this history alive on the walls. So it's just important to make sure that this history is preserved so students, whether, you know, they're in kindergarten now or 30 years from now, new kindergartners or first graders can come and see this history preserved on a location and hear all of these incredible stories that are on the walls. I just want to say this. I was born and raised on a plantation. My dad worked at Pepper Hill Plantation for 53 years, raising all 14 kids there. And even though I grew up and I started school on the plantation in a two-room school,

what I'd like to share here is that it's a situation where I know that I didn't get all the history that I should have been taught, even though I was in a black high school, elementary school, high school, but what is available today back in those days. So that's why I feel it's important that we share this information. That was my conversation with Jack Hadley and Daniel Pittman of the Jack Hadley Black History Museum in Thomasville, Georgia. We'll share a link to the museum in our show notes. That is all for today. If you like the show, make make sure you subscribe leave a review and tell your friends to listen and if you are into reading what a day is also a nightly newsletter check it out and subscribe at crooked.com subscribe i'm trey bell anderson i'm josey duffy rice and happy june team Well, today is a production of Crooked Media.

It's recorded and mixed by Bill Lance. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Natalie Bettendorf. We had production help today from Ethan Olbermann, Michelle Alloy, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare. Our showrunner is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adrian Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.