Final week a handful Missouri Republicans tried to erase historical past.
In keeping with stories, staffers and elected officials in the legislature pressured the Missouri State Museum into eradicating after which relocating an exhibit known as Making History: Kansas City and the Rise of Gay Rights, which paperwork the early days of LGBTQ activism within the state. The exhibit, in response to legislative aide Uriah Stark, was “pushing the LGBT agenda in our state capitol” with a number of “actually in your face banners that you would be able to’t stroll by way of the museum with out seeing.”
Mr. Stark and his Republican colleagues are unsuitable. And I ought to know, as a result of I helped curate the exhibit alongside fourteen considerate and thoughtful college students on the College of Missouri-Kansas Metropolis.
The exhibit’s origins lay in an “Introduction to Public Historical past” I taught once I was on the school at UMKC. In October of 2016, a gaggle of citizen volunteers installed an official marker in downtown Kansas Metropolis to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the first-ever nationwide assembly of homosexual rights activists. To assist the town acknowledge this historic occasion, my college students and I designed a twelve-panel touring exhibit that instructed guests in regards to the assembly’s background and pointed individuals to the brand new marker.
As a trainer, you at all times hope that your college students will do good work. Nicely, the scholars who helped design Making Historical past hit it out of the park. The exhibit they created acquired funding from the Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area with a view to be constructed. Their completed challenge acquired awards from the National Council on Public History and the Midwestern History Association. And the bodily exhibit has been touring to museums, libraries, and historic societies throughout Missouri for the reason that summer time of 2017, to optimistic opinions. It was presupposed to be on show on the state capitol for 4 months. It lasted all of 4 days.
Making Historical past is an award-winning work of scholarship. It isn’t a piece of advocacy, as a few of Missouri’s Republican officers keep. It paperwork in nice element how in 1966 homosexual rights activists from throughout the nation met in Kansas Metropolis to debate how they may attain full and equal rights. This was at a time when police raided bars that allowed same-sex {couples} to collect, and the federal authorities banned the hiring of homosexual workers. The organizing work these residents did in Kansas Metropolis would pave the way in which for the trendy LGBTQ civil rights motion that took form after the famed rebellion on the Stonewall Inn in June of 1969.
That is Missouri’s historical past. That is America’s historical past. That is our historical past. And to counsel that remembering this previous is by some means tantamount to “pushing the LGBT agenda” is to counsel that homosexual ladies and men should not full and equal members of the USA.
In keeping with Gov. Mike Parson, Making Historical past got here down as a result of the State Museum didn’t observe Missouri legislation in buying it — an excuse that many have questioned. The Division of Pure Sources, in the meantime, claimed that it moved the show as a result of “reveals on mortgage from different establishments like this one are sometimes housed at Jefferson Touchdown State Historic Web site.”
Each merely add insult to damage, for they reinforce the notion that Missouri’s LGBTQ residents are second class residents as a result of their historical past is second class historical past.
If the show really was relocated due to errors wrought by present insurance policies and procedures, then we look ahead to the speedy revision of those protocols in order that Making Historical past could be reinstalled on the Missouri State Museum.
There’s an previous saying that goes, “Those that don’t study historical past are destined to repeat it.” The phrase rings true in Jefferson Metropolis. Of their removing of Making Historical past from the Capitol, Missouri’s Republicans did greater than merely try to forestall individuals from studying in regards to the previous. Additionally they reenacted the sorts of discrimination the LGBTQ group as soon as confronted. Possibly as an alternative of canceling historical past, Republican legislators ought to research it.
