Kevin Young

♪ Corrigan: Artists, teachers, and people who design museums wrestle with a Herculean task-- how to make people feel something they haven't experienced, how to fill their senses such that something shifts, and they think and act in new and better ways.

Kevin Young is a celebrated poet, essayist, and the director of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, an idea that was first proposed 101 years ago by Black veterans who hoped the country would remember their service.

Finally, 5 years ago, the 400,000 square foot museum opened to tell a more complete and true story of America.

I'm Kelly Corrigan, this is "Tell Me More," and here's my conversation with scholar, poet, and curator, Kevin Young.

♪ ♪ This place was a long time coming.

The idea for it came up, I don't know, 101 years before it started.

That's right.

What were some of the biggest decisions that had to be sorted out before you could begin?

The wish on the part of the veterans and others who 50 years after the end of the Civil War asked, demanded, marched for a memorial to African Americans and Black folks who fought in that war.

I think we're really trying to say we're here.

You know, we've been here, and this is our contribution.

And they wanted that reflected on the National Mall.

And since then, I think, you know, it's become a century's a dream, and to see John Lewis fight for this, to see George W. Bush sign it into law, and to see the way that this became a reality, it's been a really powerful century.

I think of it as taking 15 years to build physically, but also a hundred years before that.

And to me, I think the debates are really around the centrality of African-American culture to American culture, the Black experience as part, and in fact central, to understanding American history.

Well, that gets to this really interesting thing that I read that said that they polled the public, and they polled scholars and said, "What should be here?"

"What should the emphasis be?"

And both groups said the number one thing that you should include is slavery, and both groups said the number one thing you should not include is slavery.

I mean, the idea that you could not tell the story including slavery seems silly now, especially because of how well the museum told it.

I got to walk through the museum before being director when this was long off in the future, and I was walking with my young son, who was 13 at the time.

And to see the ways that the story is told, because remember, it's not just a story about slavery, it's about slavery and freedom.

It's also about that undeniable and unrepressable urge for freedom that African Americans demonstrated.

You see all the ways that folks ran away.

You know, they self-emancipated themselves constantly.

And you also see the ways that slavery was different in different regions.

I'm really always amazed at the culture and the world that the enslaved created.

And I think what's powerful about the museum is it tells that story.

It tells how they survived, how they innovated, how they were actually skilled labor.

And to understand that larger freedom that they sought all the time is really powerful.

I remember Stevie Wonder at the opening ceremony sang a song like, "Where Is Our Love Song."

Where is the song we will sing for love?

It's kind of like that.

It's kind of like this is one big long song.

It is.

And, you know, love songs sometimes are sad, you know, but they're also transformative.

We're here in this gallery with our latest show, "Reckoning," and we're sitting in between these two portraits, one of Harriet Tubman by Bisa Butler-- "I Go To Prepare a Place For You."

And the portrait of Breonna Taylor by Amy Sherald.

And to see the ways that across these centuries, really, they're looking at each other, but they were both made in the past year.

And I think it's important to say these Black women artists making art of these Black women figures is really transformative.

And they're taking history, and they're helping us understand and then see it again and see it anew.

So our first guest ever on "Tell Me More" was Bryan Stephenson.

And I wrote him to ask, "What should I ask Kevin Young?"

And he said, "Ask him about the research, "the certification, the validity of the work that went into this place."

Well, you know, we've had such luck with these wonderful objects that people kept safe, and it's so important to then authenticate those objects, to research it.

And we also go out and do that research, and the historians, the curators, the panel of experts who sit on our board and help us understand this history is really crucial.

Part of what we do is preserve it, we research it, we connect to it, we tell its story.

But these objects also to me tell their own story.

Having Harriet Tubman's hymnal, to see her ownership signature in that book, to think of her singing and how much that history is singing to us today is so crucial.

But it had to take someone first to save it.

And then we're happy to keep it safe and to tell its story and to research it and prove its authenticity.

It's really important to have that process of understanding, but it's also really important to show that material and let people who visit understand that this is theirs in some way, that we are saving it for the nation.

And you guys own 40,000 objects, and you have 3,500 on display.

All of this was kept precious material, documents, papers, handkerchiefs, proof that we were here and everyone does this in every culture.

Sure.

Did you guys put out a call for everyone to go to their family trunks to bring forward, like, this stuff from Grandma's attic?

There was a call, but I also think the call was answered is the important thing.

I think people were waiting in some way for a safe haven for this material.

Where I come from, at least, there's always one family member who's almost the de facto family historian who keeps the things, says you can't throw away that cast iron pot, you know.

And sometimes that's your only inheritance.

There might be seeds from a plant that your grandma grew that you're now growing.

That's the kind of inheritance that I think the museum values, and I love seeing it grow in that way.

It feels very organic to me as part of this long history, the history of the freedom struggle, but also the history of valuing things not only were we told weren't valuable, but also told didn't exist.

♪ Why is it important to show the violence, in particular around Emmett Till?

Well, there's many things.

And I think one of the things we've been entrusted with is Emmett Till's casket.

And to have Mamie Till-Mobley entrust us with that, which we restored and now is on display.

And you can't take photos there, but it's one of the most powerful parts of the museum.

And I remember lining up with my son who was the same age as Till was when he was murdered to see it.

And in a way, you're reproducing that same experience in Chicago.

People lined up to see Emmett Till in an open casket and what the lynching had done to his body.

And you can't go in that space and not be transformed.

And that story echoes down through the decades.

I edited an anthology of African-American poetry, and it has a number of poems to Till, including my own.

But what I think is most powerful is there could have been 50 more I included, because this was such a transformative moment for the society, and it was reflected by the poets who often were the first to write about Till and what he meant.

Someone like Gwendolyn Brooks, who was of course living in Chicago at the time, just writes so powerfully about it.

We see Rosa Parks, whose words were on the wall in that memorial room, talk about how Till's murder transformed her and made her want to be part of what eventually was the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

So those kinds of transformations are central and must be shown because they were part of history and part of why the Civil Rights Movement was going on and why it still continues.

You're so interested in story, and you're so smart about it.

And so I was looking at "The Grey Album," and I was looking at "Hoax."

Can you talk about the ways that stories get distorted and the great, terrific, unending need to get it right?

Yeah, you know, I was really interested in "The Grey Album," my first book of non-fiction, in the ways that-- Very cool title, by the way.

Thanks, thanks.

And I knew DJ Danger Mouse a little bit in Athens who did "The Grey Album," where he mashed up Jay-Z and the Beatles.

I'm sure everybody who watches PBS knows all about Danger Mouse.

Yeah, as you know, DJ Danger Mouse.

But, you know, he was just a kid in a record store, and I thought he was so great, and I remember buying some of his old mixes in one my better, forward-looking moments.

But I was trying to understand that mix and exactly what later I've come to see here, which is so wonderful, which is to see the ways that Black culture was central to American culture and in fact helped define American culture.

And so that centrality was really important, but I also wanted to understand improvisation and the ways that, say, the Negro spirituals sung by the enslaved were also coded and were ways of messages of escape.

And so I wanted to see, you know, had that coding continued, and I trace it through the blues and the ways there was all these double meanings, but also all the way down to hip-hop and the ways that that's still with us, this need to improvise but also to code and to what I call story, because in Louisiana where my family's from, you couldn't tell an adult, "Oh, you lie."

You could barely tell your cousin.

You had to say, "You story."

So that storying, I tried to connect from Louis Armstrong and the way his solo tells a story when he's playing trumpet... ♪ to the ways we tell stories all the time.

And often those kind of folktales are getting out another truth.

♪ ♪ Corrigan: Here we are...

Yes.

amongst some of the greats.

Yeah, with arts and culture all around us, which always is, of course, but it's wonderful to have it in this circle, which is so symbolic, I think, of closing the circle, continuing the circle, let the circle be unbroken.

And everything from books, some of which, you know, taught me about how to write, how to think, everything from Lucille Clifton to Langston Hughes.

To Dave Chappelle.

"Every Black American is bilingual.

All of them.

"We speak street vernacular and we speak job interview."

Yeah.

I love that.

So there are people like Aretha Franklin and Venus and Serena and Colin Powell and, of course, the Obamas.

What's the power of exceptional people like that, what's the danger?

You know, it's just these are incredible individuals who when you read about them, you understand the will it took to make themselves and remake themselves in a world that often said they couldn't do what they ended up doing.

But I also think we see the ways that they were ordinary like us.

They have these ordinary lives that become extraordinary.

And we have to understand that ordinary people make history.

♪ So you're a poet.

Is that your true love?

Is that like at the very bottom?

I mean, you do a lot of things.

Yeah, I suppose.

I've come to understand that I also approach some of these other things as a poet.

You know, writing non-fiction, I'm interested in these leaps and making connections between things that might not seem obvious.

I try to understand the ways that the idea of race was central to the idea of the hoax and making it up, and that both were these kind of fake things that have real effects on the world.

Can we dive into that a little bit?

Sure.

Because you start with P.T.

Barnum.

Yeah.

And you carry it all the way through to our previous president.

I carry to the present day, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I try to understand the ways that's what's happening now has to do with the past.

You know, I think one of the things about the hoax is that it was so dependent on race.

Barnum's first big hoax was that he said that he had George Washington's nursemaid.

Joice Heth was her name.

He displayed her.

He probably took out teeth of hers to make her look older.

He claimed she was 161 years old.

People came out of everywhere to touch her, to physically touch the hem of the garment that touched our founding father.

And so to understand that need to fictionalize around her, but also to make her a Black figure who he probably had bought and enslaved himself is really troubling 'cause you get to see the ways that this fakery is dependent on race.

And then after she died, 'cause she--probably from exposure-- he conducted an autopsy in public, charged admission, and then revealed what he already knew, that she was of normal advanced age.

What's also interesting about that is how long the lines were and that people were willing to and excited to shell out their own money-- Oh, yeah.

to see a thing that they must have known could not be true.

He was great at not only revealing something that would be part of the hoax, but also saying, "See for yourself."

One of the things I think he did is made every visitor, every viewer, every American an expert.

You know, and you could get to decide for yourself.

We love that.

We love being experts.

And you got to decide for yourself, yeah.

As he said, "Every crowd has a silver lining."

And that kind of saying, I think, is very much what he was interested in.

And then you go out of the way into like Lance Armstrong.

Sure.

Why do we love a hoax?

I think one reason we love a hoax is 'cause it tells us a story we wish were true, sometimes about belonging, oftentimes about horrors we wish were true, sometimes about survival.

We wanted to believe that Lance Armstrong's lungs were somehow different than ours.

Looking back on it and looking at the ways that hoaxes often do this, it seems such an obvious falsehood.

But we want to kind of believe that because we want to believe both that someone's different than us, but also that we could be different.

♪ Young: And then here we have Chuck Berry's Cadillac Eldorado.

Oh, my god, let me in it.

Someone asked me, "Is it real?"

I was like, "Yeah, that's a real car."

We had to get it in here.

We had to drive it in here.

So this is iconic.

Yes.

And also was a big discussion point.

Yeah, I mean-- What should the outside be?

Can you imagine trying to decide?

It's so--such an honoring of African and African-American ironwork, artistry.

I know growing up in part in Louisiana and seeing--this ironwork, of course, you see a lot in Charleston and New Orleans.

And to honor those traditions, which are, of course, deeply affected by enslaved people, by artistry, and the culture they made.

♪ What's the shadow book?

It's an idea I was really interested in in "The Grey Album" and still I think about, which is that we have to understand not just what's there, the archives, the artifacts that you find in this museum, which wasn't built when I was writing this, but also the things that aren't there.

Some of them are things that used to be there, things like Phillis Wheatley, who wrote a second book of poetry, which got dispersed, we don't know all the contents of.

Things like Ralph Ellison's second novel, which burned in a fire in part, and he didn't quite finish.

And then we also have to understand that this book isn't always literal.

It's the things we don't hear from our grandparents, the question we didn't get answered.

And it goes out the door when an elder dies.

There's that saying that when an elder dies, a library is burned.

And there's something in that that I was trying to understand in this idea of a shadow book.

I was thinking about all the ways that story serves us and how it can be this, like, imaginary respite.

Then I was thinking about story in terms of invention, as a way to convince yourself and others that you could be something that you are not yet.

How do you think about the roles that story can play in a person's life or in a community's life?

I think imagination is so crucial.

I mean, this is perhaps self-serving as a poet and a writer, but I also think about the way you have to imagine yourself somewhere else, what I call elsewhere, in order to transcend and to get there.

You had to imagine the afterlife or what a jubilee would be like in order to run away and cross that river.

There is this quality where the imagination is one of the important nations that African Americans are building.

That kind of creativity, the cultural inheritance that is so rich that if you say I can't play the drums, I'm gonna play my body.

If you say I can't dance and dancing is crossing your feet, I'm gonna do everything but cross my feet.

And those kind of inheritances are still with us.

And so that's the kind of improvisation and storytelling in a different form, a physical form, that was so important to forms of resistance down through the centuries.

At "Tell Me More," we like to give everybody a chance to shout somebody out.

It's called Plus One, and it's a way of revealing a very true fact, which is that we are all influencing each other all the time.

So who's your Plus One?

It's so hard to pick.

I know.

I mean, what a powerful and great question.

I'd have to think about someone I think about a lot who's Fannie Lou Hamer, the amazing figure who not only formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, who has that great quote, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired," who used music as part of her revolution, but also I'm interested in her activity after that, the ways that she helped found the Freedom Farm Cooperative, which was commonly known as a pig bank.

You could buy a pig, you'd raise the pigs, you would give back to the pig bank.

It was a way of asserting agricultural and economic independence.

She bought 40 acres-- sounds familiar-- and created this cooperative, and it was successful for a few years.

And I think it's really important to think about the ways that she wasn't just transforming out in the world or in politics, she was also transforming and seeking to transform the land, the very thing that folks knew, but also didn't own because of the systems of sharecropping.

And these are systems that are found in my family.

You know, and to see her resilience, but also her inventiveness.

This is in '69 and '70.

This isn't forever ago.

Right.

You know, and that's what we have to remember.

This is part of our living history, and the ways that food is part of that self-determination for her.

Yeah.

But there's one other thing I would say about Fannie Lou Hamer, which is that recently in the internets, going around on Twitter, I think, was a picture of her laughing with her husband.

And someone was trying to remind us of the ways that these civil rights leaders, these important freedom fighters were also people who experience joy.

And I think very much about that quote by the poet Toi Derricotte, "Joy's an act of resistance."

And that kind of resistance, I think, is really important because joy is part of that story.

Do you remember the first time you were wowed by a museum or an exhibit in a museum?

I think it's an ongoing process.

I mean, I lived in Kansas, going to the Nelson Museum of Art was really important to me, but also the Topeka Capitol had this amazing portrait of John Brown.

He has a long beard, he's holding a rifle in one hand and a bible in the other.

He's terrifying looking.

And that was part of, like, right there in the Capitol.

It was telling the story.

And those famous murals were really part of my understanding of history.

It didn't seem far away.

It seemed like you could reach out and touch it.

Everyone who I know who has been here talks about the sensation of rising from the bottom to the top.

Can you describe that for people who haven't been here?

It sounds like a hip-hop song you're quoting.

Is it?

I'm very hip-hop, Kevin.

Yes, yes.

Yeah.

No, I think that that rising is really important.

I call it that soaring feeling you get in the museum.

You make your way, you know, from the past, and there's even that descent in the beginning to take a moment and go back in time and see the accompanying dates that are taking us back there to a time before enslavement.

That was really important for the museum.

But then also have a physical-- Why?

Why was it important to show that?

Because we have to understand what it meant to be African in the continent before enslavement.

We want to also understand the moment of that contact and what that transformed.

It transformed the world and changed societies, including the United States.

And each one of these societies had slightly different kinds of slavery, but the chattel slavery that was invented in those moments is so fundamentally different.

It's the kind of thing that it's inherited, it's passed down, it's located in a specific body and specific skin color.

It's accompanied by great violence and sexual violence.

It's accompanied by horrors that, as we're saying, you know, have existed forever, but are focused and fundamental and are side by side with us saying we want to be a free nation.

I mean, I remember coming across this section of "Caste" that talked about how the Nazis so admired the way that we did these lynchings.

Well, and Jim Crow.

You know, a lot of these systems, I think, were so effective in their way.

Because we have to remember they were legal.

I think that's part of the thing that we're-- you know, there was also the custom parts of it.

You know, I grew up in Topeka, Kansas in part where the famous Brown vs. Topeka Board case is from.

And in fact, Linda Brown, the little girl in the case, played piano in my church.

And Reverend Brown, who filed the case, he was one of many plaintiffs, and, you know, Brown v. Board is so important because it transformed us.

It began this process of desegregation.

But also for me personally, there I am in the vestibule of the church.

You know, we'd be a little late sometimes.

And there was Reverend Brown's picture, and he had preached in that church before my time.

And so to see that connection that history was living was really important.

And it's important now to help people understand this history's still with us.

I think of it all the time in the ways that living history means that history's with us, but we're also living through history.

How do we connect to now?

And what I'm finding is people want that connection.

♪ Corrigan: So do you have a favorite part of the museum, just gets you every time?

Young: Yeah, we're actually gonna go see it now, which is the mothership from Parliament-Funkadelic.

Oh, my god.

It used to descend from the ceiling.

And it still feels like it's about to rise up and take us off into wherever we need to go.

And you're a music fanatic, like, you're a Prince guy.

I'm afraid so.

Guilty as charged.

I mean, who isn't?

Prince is so great.

If you haven't danced to "1999," as the millennium's turning, you know, then you haven't lived.

Oh, OK, so that will take us right into the speed round.

What was your first concert?

I was trying to remember.

I think I saw a concert with Fishbone was the headliner, and the Beastie Boys were under them.

So it was like an early Beastie Boys, before their record was out.

Wow.

How the tides turned.

Yes, and I have a poem about Fishbone in a book of mine called "Brown."

That is great.

Yeah.

Last book that blew you away.

Gosh, that's a really tough one.

I really love some of my friends' books.

Tracy K. Smith just had her beautiful selected poems come out.

If your high school did superlatives...

They did.

What would you have been most likely to become?

What did you think I was?

Most...musical.

I was--I was best dressed.

Oh, my god, I'm so sorry.

I should have seen it from a mile away.

Kevin Young, Best Dressed.

What's your go-to mantra for hard times?

I really do return to Toni Morrison and her idea that the function of freedom is to free someone else.

And I think about that a lot, especially here in the museum.

Is there anyone you would like to apologize to?

I don't know.

I mean, I'd love to sit down and chat with my dad again.

There's nothing to apologize for, I just--I would love to see him again.

When was the last time you cried?

Probably talking or thinking about my dad.

My dad.

If you could say 4 words to anyone, who would you address and what would you say?

It's almost a way of talking to, if not my son, then our sons and daughters and children, which is, you know, "Let's get there together."

Let's continue this process of freeing ourselves and freeing each other.

♪ If you enjoyed this conversation, I think you'll love previous episodes with Bryan Stephenson and W. Kamau Bell.

If you're curious about the psychology of narrative, join us for a follow-on podcast on "Kelly Corrigan Wonders."

Everything we've ever made for you is available at pbs.org/kelly.

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