Caroline Forbes-Bright received a $10,000 grant from ETSU’s Research Development Committee to continue her work on exploring the role African-American History museums have in conveying past and present race relations.

Candace Forbes-Bright (Contributed / ETSU)

Bright has a doctoral degree in international development with a focus on sociocultural development, which means she studies how cultures relate to each other, how they develop and how they communicate.

Since 2010, Bright has been researching southern plantations and has found that slavery is rarely discussed at these sites. They tend to represent a romanticized version of history.

“One of the questions we ask ourselves is why do people come here, but we’ve been asking people who go the sites why they come here,” said Bright. “We wanted to capture a different audience of people who would not maybe go to a plantation, and instances where the slavery is being told with more emphasis on the enslaved and slavery and less emphasis on the white population.”

Bright began her research by creating a typology of museums.

Some museums are less frequented but serve a bigger role in the community with educational and artistic outlets. These museums are more likely to be responsive to current events.

Other museums serve a more traditional role with specifically curated artifacts, and they mostly focus on the history.

Bright is also creating heat maps to see where the museums are geographically.

“When we think of African American history museums now, a lot of people think of the Smithsonian, but really most of our hot spots are in southern cities like Montgomery, Birmingham, Atlanta,” said Bright.

Bright is also involving students into her research. She is taking a group of students to the Smithsonian at the end of February, and she is taking another group to view important civil rights sites in May.

The project is still ongoing, so they have applied for grants from the National Science Foundation and Spencer Foundation.

Overall, they are hoping for an educational mission to come out of the research. They are currently working on creating a curriculum for teachers to incorporate into the classroom and to use for field trips to these museums.

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