- Production funding for "Behind the Headlines" is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- The President of the National Civil Rights Museum tonight on "Behind the Headlines."

[upbeat dramatic music] - Eric Barnes with "The Daily Memphian."

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by Russ Wigginton from the National Civil Rights Museum.

Thanks for being here.

- My pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

- Absolutely, along with Bill Dries, reporter with "The Daily Memphian."

You are the relatively new president.

You came from Rhodes.

You've been involved in civic life in Memphis for quite some time, but you came in August, I think, right?

That you took the job at the Civil Rights Museum.

- August of '21, yes.

- August of '21?

- '21.

- It's been a year?

- A year and a half.

- See, this is COVID.

[Russ laughs] I really thought, I was like, "Oh, yeah, August.

It's been like six months that he's had this job."

So that's all on me.

Since you've been there for a year and you're coming off COVID and all the kind of everything that goes on in the world and has been going on the world, and we'll talk about a bunch of those things, your priorities have been what?

- You know, it's a great question.

I would say really reinforcing to the amazing staff that we have at the museum that we're healthy, we are robust.

Our mission is still very much focused on civil and human rights and recognizing the legacy of Dr. King, of course, and really focusing on how the foundation that was left by my two amazing predecessors, Beverly Robinson and Terri Freeman, to build upon that and really have a intentional focus on lifting up core pieces of the museum on a national platform.

And so we've gone about that work for the last year and a half and very excited about what's happened and what's on the horizon.

- Let me quickly say too, that, and we'll talk about all kinds of things today, big picture and small, current and national, or even international, but obviously we're taping this on Thursday morning and there's a big moment about to happen of Tyre Nichols, who was a young man who was killed while in custody.

the details are murky, but, potentially, as early as Friday and possibly before the show airs, that that video, which is by all accounts gonna be pretty disturbing and very violent, may have played, it may play not until next week.

There's an investigation underway of the officers involved.

TBI's involved now, the Justice Department's involved, the US Attorney's involved.

So if it seems odd, and we booked you, you know, two months ago, but you all and your predecessors have had a lot to talk about with Black Lives Matter and talk about, you know, not just the history of the civil rights movement but the modern day as part of y'all's mission Is these kinds of issues.

I don't wanna put you in a weird place, but I wanted to tell everyone that, that we're not dodging that comment on it but we just don't know exactly where we are in such a fast moving story.

So with that explanation, talk about more broadly that balance between the Civil Rights Museum and the history of the Civil Rights Museum and the history of Martin Luther King and present-day issues that certainly your predecessors and you to some degree have gotten involved in as a leader or commenting your perspective on today's issue.

- Sure, absolutely.

And it's really important that we connect that historical context to present day and really think about the future.

So there is a relevance and there's a context that we set through the museum that allows people to find their voice and their place and, in some cases, their identity that resonates today.

And so when you think about the Civil rights movement and you think about Dr. King's last book, "Why We Can't Wait: Chaos or Community?

", we spend a lot of time thinking about the continuum of chaos and community.

And when you do that through the civil rights lens, moments are going to happen.

And we have a responsibility as a place that focuses on civil and human rights and social justice and through the lens of Dr. King and his non-violent approach to be a center of perspective, a place for healing and a place for uncomfortable conversations.

And we stand ready to do that.

- Yeah, let me bring in Bill.

- And that balance is not always going to be an easy one.

Martin Luther King Day, the federal holiday that we are just coming out of, saw once again what happens every January, and that is the courtyard of the museum really becomes a place where the issues of the day, more so I would say than the memories, are talked about.

Sometimes they're shouted through megaphones, sometimes they are conversations that people are having in small groups that become larger groups of it.

But I don't sense that you or the past presidents of the museum ever really feel uneasy about that, right?

- That is 100% correct.

We are the epicenter in this country on Martin Luther King Day.

We recognize that.

We're celebrating, we're celebrating his life and legacy, but that wreath is still above, or below room 306.

And so there's this continuum, if you will, of emotions for people.

And when you have 10,000 people on your campus going through your courtyard, from strollers to senior citizens, you need to be prepared and expect people to have a range of emotions.

And I love that about our space.

We give people the room to express themselves in all forms and fashions.

And that courtyard is magical.

When you walk on it when nobody's there, the air is different.

And when 10,000 people are there, it's a special place.

- So, this year, you had people who were there who were calling the police to account for the Tyre Nichols incident.

In past year, you have had presidential candidates who have come through that courtyard to make clear their stance on various issues.

So the museum is very much in the here and now.

And I think one of the perennial things that I've seen in every King Day observance since it's been a federal holiday is people who question the interpretation of Dr. King's words.

Why is someone picking this quote when maybe another quote from a later time in his development was there?

I don't think that's ever going to end.

- Probably not, but we are the place to really tell a comprehensive story.

Certainly, if you've never visited our museum, you're going to get the magical moment of hearing him give his speech on the march on Washington, his "I Have a Dream" speech.

But before you get to that part of our museum, you're going to have a much deeper understanding of the 250 years of slavery and what that has meant throughout this country and throughout that world and the residual impacts of that.

And so the entire perspective, I think, is what's really important.

And if people want to pick and choose different aspects of his speeches, I certainly recognize that's going to happen.

But it's important to think about the man in full context.

It's really important to think about the fact that, even if you are picking aspects that may or may not be in proper context, just before his death, he had a 70% disapproval rating from a recent Gallup poll.

And I think that's important for people to understand.

We lift him up, deservingly so, but by the time he died, not everyone in our country was as applauding him in the fashion that we do now.

And that's part of the story.

It's part of the complexity.

And we have an obligation to make sure people understand the complexity of him, the movement, and dare I say, the tenor of our current times - Right, and as opposed to, in history, I think sometimes the story becomes simpler the more times it is told.

That's not what happens here.

I mean, the museum's reach has been to say, "Yes, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a very important person in the movement, but there were lots of people whose names are not known."

I mean, you have a light wall at one of the exhibits that is the mugshots of people arrested during the Freedom Rides- - That's right.

- people that, unless you're related to them, you probably wouldn't know them.

- That's right, and many others.

And we're particularly excited because we've recently announced that we will be renovating the Legacy Building, the one across the street.

And one of the benefits of doing that is it will allow us to lift up even more of those stories.

We are in the process of digitizing our entire collection, 11,000 items in our collection.

Most of the items people have never seen.

And there are so many interviews and oral histories of famous people, but also people that you don't know.

And imagine when that renovation is complete the ability to be exposed to even more people.

And when you think about the unknown people who were involved in the movement, it makes it so much more powerful, in my opinion, because that could be anybody, it could be any of us.

And I'm encouraged that it's going to empower people today and tomorrow to see themselves as participating for the good of humanity and civility, something that we need so dearly.

- You talk about history, and, I mean, there's a big debate, you know, in this state and others about what is appropriate in a history book and what is the history of the United States.

And do you all enter into that or do you have thoughts about it?

And, again, you came from Rhodes where you were there for a long time, i mean, that notion of this history and changing history and changing perspectives on history or leaving out certain facts or beginning to include certain facts.

- It actually, the conversation, if you will, around critical race theory is what I think you're referring to, or some iteration of that- - Sure.

Yeah.

- it actually reinforces the importance of our work moving forward.

We have a distinctive voice.

We have a fact-driven, archive-driven presentation, if you will, that, really, the credibility of our voice has been earned since 1991.

And when you think about our affiliation, with having a Smithsonian affiliation, you think about us being a site of consciousness, you think about us being a convening place where what we say matters, we have this really unique opportunity to help shape and frame curriculum and materials to help make sure both that the story, a very complicated and very nuanced story, doesn't get lost, and that the simplification or the picking and choosing is at least done with the full repertoire of the 400 years of history of Africans in this country and American history.

So I think about that as a very important opportunity for us to enter the national stage in a very different way with the kind of intensity and the kind of respect and regard that perhaps we've never seen before.

- And in that, you know, that balancing act, you talked about the exhibition, you talked about renovation, you also run, and it's kind of a weird but to me a very interesting segue, you also run a museum, a business, a tourist attraction.

I don't mean that in a flippant way.

I mean, it is tourists come through.

And if you're at all down that end of South Main, it's a pretty incredible thing that all these people are coming through.

Do you ever balance that out and look like, "Hey, we can't go there because that could hurt business"?

You're in fundraising, you've got to put, you know, tickets in the turnstile.

Or do you say, "Look, this is our mission and we think if we pursue our mission, it'll all come together," because you are running a business?

- Yeah, I would say the latter because of what our mission is.

That is our business.

And so what that means is we have to be dedicated to the legacy of Dr. King, his approach, a non-violent approach, but also the discomfort and helping people through the discomfort of a conversation related to race and socioeconomic status in this country that we are still having.

And so if we step away from that, that conversation's going to continue to happen whether or not we're in it or not.

So our stepping to it with respect and with a certain kind of authority is what we are supposed to do, and doing it with support.

Not everybody will necessarily opt to support us, but there are a whole lot of people who will support us.

We've been fortunate to bring new national support to the table for the National Civil Rights Museum.

We've launched a Corporate Equity Center in the last year thanks to support of AutoZone here in Memphis.

It is a program that is a diversity, equity, and inclusion program just through the lens of the museum targeting corporate C-suite leaders from across the country.

And if you think about how do you enact change, you have to do it at multiple levels.

So we are engaging corporate leaders very specifically through that lens, but we're always going to be a place where anybody can find themselves, see themselves, and be welcome to the museum.

We have approximately 300,000 visitors a year.

Most of them don't come from Memphis.

Close to 40,000 of them come from outside of the US.

So we are already a destination and their support, their engagement, to me, part of the equation, part of being balanced is to make sure that everybody sees themselves and sees that they have a place at the National Civil Rights Museum.

- I didn't know about the corporate program.

What has that response been?

Because, you know, depending on the podcast or TV station or news we read or, you know, whatever, there's sometimes some cynicism about DEI stuff in corporate, that it's box checking, there's pressure to do it.

There's even sometimes investor pushback, like, "That's a waste of money, You shouldn't be you, you know, companies that are doing that, they're wasting their time.

They should be focused on profits and the bottom line, period."

I would love for you to name names, but I know you won't.

But the experience of bringing through corporate may be more, I don't mean politically conservative, but business focused people through the museum, is it an enlightening, is it a "I didn't know" kind of experience?

I mean what's that like?

- It has been extraordinary, and a little of what you just said.

So it's important to do this program, and, again, it's done through the lens of the museum.

So if you think about having an experience that's grounded in a curated tour specifically for these folks, most of whom have never been here, they're from other parts of the country, and they have this moment.

And then we step into all the dimensions that you mentioned.

We step into the social dimension, we step into why it's for your bottom line profits in order for you to be successful, if you don't embrace this space, you will decline.

So it makes business sense, it makes ethical sense, it makes social sense.

And so we share that with companies and it has been extremely well received.

I'm very confident that it's a place where we, again, can have a distinctive voice because what you can't step away from is the fact that the number of African American C-suite leaders in Fortune 500 companies haven't changed percentage-wise in 50 years.

So we throw facts and data and the experience.

And so, much like many of our visitors, those corporate leaders have what I call a collision between their head and their heart.

And that's how you get that stickiness that allows people to think of programs like that as not being a box check.

'Cause you have to go back and look at your data, look at your processes and determine why your numbers or breadth of people or types of people in your organization has either been in decline or has had modest or no growth.

- Yeah.

Bill?

- In digitizing your collection, and I assume this is videos and interviews from the Freedom Awards.

These are oral histories that people have come in specifically to do with the museum.

What do you do with that?

Does that become part of the exhibits or is it something that historians and others can come in and see and benefit from?

- Both, and.

The beauty of digitizing is that it does reveal the whole sort of catalog of our collection.

And scholars will certainly be interested in it, but it also gives us the flexibility of sharing a deeper dimension of the museum, if you will, from a virtual context.

It also gives educators from around the country a whole different toolkit by which to use for teaching and learning and education in schools across the country and the world.

It also gives us a opportunity to reveal, for folks who are physically at the museum, exhibits that can be rotated and interchanged in a much simpler fashion than what we're currently able to do.

- And just the number of authors who come through the museum and give talks is, over the years, since 1991, that has been a constant.

So it's not like it's the four to five award winners at the annual program every year, there are a lot of people who come through the museum in terms of viewpoints, current and which later become past viewpoints, over a lot of years.

- It's normal for us to have scholars and authors and inspiring speakers related to the movement reaching out to us and us connecting with them to design and implement in our programs.

From our Unpacking Racism program to our Catalyst for Change speaker series, so many opportunities that come to us that allow us to share, to share our gift, if you will, of this museum.

And when you think about what this collection will do, it just opens up even more opportunities for nuanced conversation.

You know, one of my favorite exhibits in the museum is the Rosa Parks bus and that sort of infamous scene.

What I like about that is, regardless of the group that may be coming through, if you ask them if you know who Rosa Parks is, most people say yes and they think they know her story.

What few people tend to recognize is that she was the secretary of the NAACP in Montgomery.

She was not this soft-spoken, tentative, feet got tired one day woman.

She had gone through the Highlander School, and she was a warrior.

And why I like that is that it takes a story that we like to wrap up in a nice, neat bow and complicates it.

It makes it even more powerful.

And so this collection will enable more of that to happen for more people across the country and across the world.

- Have you seen any decline?

Because several states, including Tennessee, have these critical race theory laws where critical race theory is not the specific definition, it's more or less a banner for a certain ideology.

Have you seen a decline in the number of school groups who are coming to the museum?

- I am happy to report that the school group coming has started to pick back up, and the decline that we had was really more associated with the pandemic.

With school starting the first semester, if you will, we are back on pace.

And so we're very excited about the the number of school groups who continue to come.

And in some cases, they look even more to us because we are received as an acceptable place for many communities.

Going to the National Civil Rights Museum is not typically viewed, I've got no indication that that's viewed as off limits, if you will, for any school districts that I'm aware of.

So that is actually, again, deepened our resolve to do the work that we do because it's more important now than ever.

- And just a minute left, MLK Day, also, you have a partnership with the NBA, with the the Memphis Grizzlies.

It's a big game for the Memphis Grizzlies and the symposium and a whole really weekend of events in and around, you know, basketball.

But talk about the importance of partnering with something the NBA.

They're the people who say, "Ah, just play sports."

But, actually, that ignores the whole history of sports in the United States and elsewhere in terms of the political and social dynamics that sports represents.

- That's exactly right.

And the Grizzlies have been a wonderful partner with us and we have hopes and dreams of even deepening that even further.

It makes me think about our 2011 Freedom Award recipient, who we recently lost, in Bill Russell as sort of, in so many ways, such a tremendous pioneer, having the success he did on the court and respect as a coach and then to deny the acceptance of the Hall of Fame award in the mid 1970s, and would've become the first African American to enter the hall.

And so he is the kind of person that we want to lift up and have lifted up.

And so this game and this partnership with the Grizzlies gives us this wonderful vehicle to do that on an ongoing basis.

- All right, well, thank you so much.

Thanks for being here.

We'll have you back, and thank you all for joining us.

If you miss any of the show today, you can get the full video online at wkno.org or on YouTube.

You can also get the the full podcast, the audio version of the show today on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks very much, and we'll see you next week.

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