The Rubric | Engaging Descendants in the Interpretation of Africatown’s Historic Sites

In February 2018, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund partnered with James Madison’s Montpelier to convene the inaugural National Summit on Teaching Slavery. The organizers wrote of the event as “an important step towards creating a rubric for [a] more honest and equitable version of history for future generations…” During this interdisciplinary workshop, educators, curators, scholars, activists, museum and historic site practitioners, and descendants deliberated on ideas and practices for teaching slavery in a more engaging and inclusive manner that incorporates the stories and experiences of enslaved people through the voices of their descendants.

The rubric generated by this workshop¹Learn more about the workshop. serves as an assessment and development process tool that measures the commitment of institutions to tell the truth about slavery. It grades the research and curatorial practices of an institution’s approach to slavery according to five criteria:

• sources and methods that institutions use in performing research about slavery,
• transparency and accountability of institutions to “own up to mistakes or omissions from the past and to strive for transparency and truth telling” about slavery,
• multi-vocality to uplift the voices and perspectives of marginalized people, especially descendants of enslaved people, and the former slaveholding families,
• collaboration in building community with descendants around common goals and visions, and
• accessibility, by giving access to documents and artifacts to descendants and the general public.

The Rating
The rubric rates all curatorial actions about slavery interpretation as exemplary, proficient, developing, ambivalent, or unsatisfactory.

According to the report, engagement occurs when “descendants are increasingly inside the interpretive organizations, instead of outside.” Otherwise, their views may be excluded from dominant historical narratives, and institutions will define criteria for engagement and interpretation, but may not follow them. Notably, the rubric defines museum performance as unsatisfactory when a curatorial institution does not acknowledge former or ongoing mistakes or omissions in telling the story of slavery.

To ensure an equitable outcome for all involved, the editors of this report have urged Africatown descendants and community leaders to contact both the National Trust and report co-author Dr. Michael Blakey for assistance in organizing interpretive workshops around the rubric’s measurements for progress in interpreting slavery, which include: 

• multidimensional representations, 
• descendent community engagement and collaboration, 
• institutional commitment, 
• tools/interpretive techniques,
• inclusive and equitable narratives, and 
• audience. 

An event such as this would represent the first time that the rubric’s best practices would be applied in a real-world setting. Africatown stakeholders must tear a page out of this book and use the process as a clear roadmap for descendant engagement and storytelling from as many authentic viewpoints as possible.