Road Trip Through History: George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural and Genealogical Center
Emancipation Day Celebration, 1900
The National Museum of the Pacific War was on our Austin must-see list for twelve years; we went to the George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural and Center because we had some time to fill. It turned out to be a happy accident.
Because we went to the museum on a whim, we hadn’t spent any time researching it. I expected the museum to be dedicated to the life and achievements of George Washington Carver. I had memories of visiting the Carver birthplace near Diamond, Missouri, as a child and looked forward to filling in some of the holes in his story. And that would have been a lovely way to spend an afternoon.* What we got was better.
The George Washington Carver Museum in Austin is a true cultural center, with a small theater, a dance studio, and a genealogy center dedicated to the heritage of Black families as well as a small museum. There are two core exhibits: one titled “The African American Presence in Nineteenth Century Texas” and a film about the history of Juneteenth and how it has been celebrated in Austin. Both were powerful.
The heart of the exhibit on nineteenth century Texas consisted of a revolving slide show of portraits, formal and informal, of Black families from the region, taken between 1860 and 1900 while modern voices read excerpts from the WPA interviews with formerly enslaved peoples. It was gripping enough that I sat through the slides twice.
The museum also has a very well done exhibit for children, and those with childlike curiosity, featuring Black scientists and inventors.
Our visit to the museum turned out to be an excellent, if unplanned, addition to my personal celebration of Black History month here on the Margins this year. If you’re in Austin, I strongly recommend it.
*****
Other things we did in the Austin area that I can recommend with an enthusiastic thumbs up:
- • Enjoyed a little bookstore tourism with a visit to Book People. The stock is extensive, the staff is helpful, and the coffee shop chairs are comfortable. (I was thrilled to find The Dragon from Chicago face out on the shelves.)
- • Ate at a food truck serving Nepalese food. (We had planned to eat at more food trucks, but the weather did not cooperate. We shivered through record-cold temperatures and drizzling rain for the first half of our visit. Even wearing all the layers we brought, it was not food truck weather.
• We didn’t make it to a dance hall, but we still got to experience Austin as a musical center thanks to the Texas Music Museum —a funky little museum kept alive by the passion of a single man, with the help of the local music community.** The museum is dedicated to the diverse traditions of Texas music, told through the stories of Austin musicians, famous and otherwise. Unlike the Museum of the Pacific War, the Bullock Museum of Texas History, or even the George Washington Carver Museum , the Texas Music Museum did not benefit from the latest museum exhibit technology. The exhibits are heavy on data and low on graphics. One of the highlights is the opportunity to hear original recordings played on the historical machines for which they were made. We were fascinated enough to go back to hear a program on the Austin Gospel and Soul music scene. It ended with the diverse audience holding hands and singing “We Shall Overcome,” led by a local music legend—one of the most moving moments of our visit.
I think we’ll be back, Austin.
* Adding the George Washington Carver Monument to the road trip list.
**Some of our favorite museums over the years fit this description
From the Archives: Champion’s Day: The End of Old Shanghai
Speaking of the Japanese invasion of China as the possible beginning of World War II, as I believe we were, allow me to share a post from 2020 about a book that introduced me to a very specific piece of that story.
***
I will admit that I approached historian James Carter’s book Champion’s Day: The End of Old Shanghai with seriously mixed feelings.
On the one hand, I spent some time last year reading about the International Settlement in Shanghai in the 1930s while I was working on a piece on self-styled “girl reporter” Peggy Hull I was eager to learn more. I have always been interested in the times and places where two cultures meet and change each other. Shanghai was definitely such a place. The fact that the book is World War II adjacent was a plus.
On the other hand, horse racing does not spark my imagination. And I knew going in that horse racing and horse-racing people would play a big role in the book.
Champion’s Day met my expectations on all counts.
In November 1941, the International Settlement in Shanghai had stood as a “Lone Island” within Japanese-controlled China for four years—surrounded by Japanese forces yet protected from invasion by Japan’s relationships with the countries whose nationals controlled it. With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Shanghai’s protected status crumbled. In Champion’s Day, Carter explores the history of the city through the lenses of a single cultural institution, the Shanghai Race Club, and the events of a single day, November 12, 1941, when the club held its last Champion’s Day races.
Taking the position that the Shanghai Race Club was the social heart of the International Settlement, Carter introduces readers to the world of Chinese pony racing in Shanghai: the breed, the owners, the horses, the jockeys, the gambling and the races themselves. He uses the rules for membership in the club and for attendance at its races as tools for understanding Shanghai’s history and cosmopolitan culture. He explores the complexities of racism and wealth in Shanghai, looking at the European population of the International Settlement (and its flexible definition of Europe), the role of interracial elites in constructing Shanghai’s international culture, and the attempts of the city’s Westernized Chinese elites to integrate themselves into that culture.
The result is a nuanced history of a complex, multicultural city, which was created as a compromise between European imperialism and Chinese isolationism, and developed into something that was both and neither.
I was fascinated by Carter’s depiction of the city as a cultural jumble,* including the role horse-racing played in providing a shaky link between disparate populations. However, I reached the point where I was skimping over the descriptions of horse races. They were well written and I just didn’t care. I suspect the failing is mine and not Mr. Carter’s
*I don’t think you can call it a melting pot when the different components obdurately resist melting into each other.
Road Trip Through History: The National Museum of the Pacific War
At the end of February, My Own True Love and I spent ten days in Austin, Texas. We were there several years ago for a wedding. Though we managed to squeeze in a little history nerdery,* there was more we wanted to see. We swore we would go back when we had more time. Almost twelve years later, we made it.
One of the things at the top of our must-do list, right under dancing the two-step every chance we got,** was the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, which we had by-passed with regrets on our previous trip.*** It was worth the wait.
The museum draws heavily on modern exhibit technology, and uses it well. It also uses the old-school tool of a timeline which weaves through the museum from room to room, settings events in the exhibit in the broader context of world history. (I was amused to note that the Republic of Texas had a place on the timeline but the American Civil War did not.)
The first room effectively uses all the AV bells and whistles to place the war in the Pacific within the larger scope of World War II—a useful introduction even for those of us who have spent a lot of time steeped in the history of the war.
The next section, titled Seeds of Conflict, looks at relationships between Japan, China, and, to a lesser extent, the United States, beginning in the early nineteenth century and ending with the fall of Shanghai, the Rape of Nanking, and the occupation of Manchuria in 1937. As far as I was concerned, this was the most powerful section of the museum, because it told the story of Japan’s transformation from “closed” world of the Shogunate to the militarization and expansionism that led to its invasion of China in 1931**** and ultimately to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The museum devotes a small exhibit to America’s political stance toward Japan in 1939 and 1940, which included cancelling trade agreements and embargoing the sale of high-grade scrap metal and gasoline. (New to me. And definitely not an act of neutrality.) It paints a picture of life in American in 1940, including but not limited to our lack of military preparedness.
Visitors move out of the small scale and quiet of the exhibit on peacetime America to a large dark room dedicated to a dramatic presentation on the attack on Pearl Harbor–the change in intensity in some ways echoes the shock of the actual event. From there, the museum follows the war in the Pacific campaign by campaign. (A few side rooms look at events in the United States, but that isn’t the main focus. ) Detailed descriptions of troop movements are accompanied by vignettes about individual participants and colorful details. The result is powerful and fascinating.
There are several additional exhibits on the museum campus: a gallery devoted to Admiral Nimitz’s life, several memorial gardens, an exhibit on aviation in the Pacific, and an immersive exhibit called The Rescue, based on a book of the same name by Steven Trent Smith. We didn’t get to most of the extra exhibits—the main museum was a full day event for us. But we started our day at The Rescue, and we were glad we did. It tells the real-life story how an American submarine rescued forty Americans, including 28 women and children and three Bataan survivors, who were stranded on Negros. (They incidentally rescued a box of top secret documents as well.) Led by one of the children, visitors creep through the jungle to the beach, board the submarine, and encounter a Japanese submarine. It was a surprisingly emotional experience, though I was distracted by how clean, coifed, and well dressed the women and children were.
Two thumbs up from each of us. Which would make four thumbs. But who’s counting?
*The Alamo! The Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library! The Bullock State Historical Museum. (Why no exclamation mark? Because we totally forgot that we had been there. Even after spending a day in the museum on this trip, I had no memory of the visit until I searched in the History in the Margin archives for what I had written about the previous trip. I stand by the account I wrote then.)
**How many times did we get to a dance hall? None. Sandy got food poisoning (or perhaps the flu) which wiped him out for a couple of days,Then I came down with a nasty cold. Such are the hazards of road trips.
***Why is there a major museum about the Pacific theater of operations in Texas, we wondered. Because Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander of the Pacific Fleet and of all forces in the Pacific theater in WWII, was a Fredericksburg boy. He ended up in the navy by chance. Unable to get into West Point, he accepted a slot at the Naval Academy as his second choice.
****Arguably the true beginning of World War II.