Keynote Address:
Cultural Resource Stewardship

Dr. John Hope Franklin
Duke University
Monday, September 11

[These remarks are a closed-caption transcription edited by the Discovery 2000 Web team]

Thank you, Bill [Whalen]. I very much appreciate that generous introduction.

Ladies and gentlemen, it has been my immense good fortune to participate in the National Park System Advisory Board and I'm honored to have been asked to serve as its chair.

We gather this week because we share common commitment to the natural and cultural values that the National Park Service holds at its core. Those of us who are not career Park Service people are here to offer our support to those of you whose profession it has been to serve these values, and thus to serve our country. We are proud of you, proud of your work, and I do want to talk to you about the pride that we have in you and the role that you and I play to justify this participation.

I come to you after 60 years of teaching and writing history, and from time to time, of participating in making a little history myself. Because of that, I'm pleased to tell you why I'm so proud of you and of our parks and programs, and what they say about our country and our citizens.

The world has changed a great deal during these 60 years of my majority. Thinking back over the places at which it has changed for the better, it is consoling to know that some of these places have been chosen to become parts of the National Park System. I think of the school buildings in Topeka and Little Rock. I think, for example, of the place like Pettus Bridge and Selma where history has been made right in the middle of everyday life. Rather than isolated icons, then, these places have been chosen to remain where they cannot be missed.

The National Park System has broadened from places of natural wonder to places of natural accomplishment. And as a country, we concluded that we wanted to go beyond the doings of great men, including Independence Hall, for example, to the things of men and of women, both great and humble, and their doings. That broadening was itself a patriotic act because it meant that we wished to include the full community in our recognition of the deeds and thus to recognize the participation of all of our citizens in this fragile and noble experiment that we call democracy. That greater participation is reflected in the work of the National Park Service in helping citizens, states, and communities to preserve the resources that they hold dear.

As we have learned about each other, we've broadened our sense of what we have in common, our sorrows, as well as our joys. From the beginning of the inclusion of history parks, we accepted among them the places of tragedy and loss, as well as places of celebration. Gettysburg is a tragic place, so is Valley Forge, and so is Yorktown. People died there; people suffered terrible injuries there. Lives were ended that might have produced great things.

The sense of mingled pride and sadness was with us from the moment we included our national military cemeteries in our National Park System. It was not a new idea to share our sorrows as well as rejoicing, Manzanar, or the Washita Battlefield and Little Bighorn in the National Park Service represents no departure from that tradition.

Gettysburg is a sad place-but it is also a place of celebration. It is sad for the loss and the suffering. It is a celebration, too, as President Lincoln told us, because though it terminated many possibilities for all those young men who died there, it also opened up other possibilities for generations of people who were there moved closer to a new birth of freedom because of their experiences there.

Manzanar, too, is a sad place, and a place of celebration. It is a sad reminder of what we have done to our fellow citizens, but it is also a celebration that we can admit our errors and resolve to do better. The strength and the pride of the American system is that we can admit error, purge ourselves, and resolve to do better. That is also the message of the Monroe Elementary School in Topeka. The Declaration of Independence was created in a hallowed place, but so was Brown vs. Board of Education. At Monroe Elementary School, we were reminded that it is a terrible thing to waste a mind and a life-and many minds and lives were wasted because of the failures of our education system to provide decent schooling for all our children. In the past two generations, we've come a long way toward diminishing that kind of waste, that kind of shame. We can take pride in that.

Moved by that pride, we can resolve to recommit ourselves to the inclusive demographic ideal brought before our eyes and hearts at Gettysburg and Manzanar, and the Monroe Elementary School in Topeka Kansas, and thus justify the sacrifices made for us by our predecessors.

During the 1930s, the great historian, sociologist, and public servant W. E. Dubois wrote in his study of black reconstruction this statement, and I quote, "One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over…. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and as an example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth."

The key words are incentive and example. The places that commemorate sad history are not places in which we allow, or wallow in remorse, but instead places which we may be moved to a new resolve, to be better citizens.

The upward progress of this nation has been achieved by the struggles of people whose heroic actions on our behalf we are learning to celebrate. Patriotism and loyalty are aroused by full sense of participation. That is why it is important for us to hear, in our parks, as in our classrooms, about labor struggles, about heroism in the achievement of racial justice, and to listen to the voices of women in their struggles.

The National Park Service has not remained passive while groups like these reclaimed their place in telling the American story. The Service has not been nearly as acquiescent as others lobbied Congress to expand the holdings and the responsibilities of the National Park Service to represent them. For the most part, it has been a strong supporter of the expansion of the recognition of sites, associated with all its citizenry.

In recent years, sites centered on women and labor and cultures other than the European American tradition have enriched the system immeasurably. The Park Service has responded to the opportunity presented by these new sites to incorporate new scholarship into its traditional stories. The "Untold Stories" project was designed, as I understand it, to bring to the people's attention alternative narratives, many voices, and multiple perspectives. Explaining history from a variety of angles makes it not only more interesting, but also more true. When it is more true, more people come to feel that they have a part in it. That is where patriotism and loyalty intersect with truth.

Our society, for all its perceived interest in the past, seems always on the verge of historical amnesia. Across the nation, fewer than 50 percent of all high school students tested earned passing grades on their standards of learning for history. Fewer than 50 percent! While history is increasingly popular on television and in the theaters, our society is increasingly ill informed about the centrality of history to a democratic society and more importantly, about the ways history is constructed and reconstructed, and revised with the shifting emphasis that answers new questions. All of this, of course, makes our work and your work even more important, and yes, more challenging, not to mention more exciting.

The cure for this country's seeming disinterest is to be more interesting. And to be more interesting, we have to be more truthful and to include stories about everybody that we want to interest. While the Park Service is leagues better, you (and we in teaching jobs and as writers and scholars) need to do even better if we are to engage and fascinate other Americans as much as we are fascinated by American history. For example, the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom project has a potential to illuminate a complex and heroic event in this nation's history, and clarify what it was (and what it was not), while shining a bright light on those who dreamed of freedom in the midst of bondage and turned their dream into reality. Some of those who dreamed of freedom did not wait for the Underground Railroad but struck out for freedom on their own. Some ran away, were recaptured over and over again. They would run away still more. They were called habitual runaways. They confirmed the assertion of one of them who said, "we were not born to bear the yoke."

Another program that tells the truth, and is exciting, is the recent expansion of the range of discussion of the Civil War at battlefield parks. Anyone with any curiosity about history wants to know what were the causes of that conflict and that among its consequences was the ending of slavery. Anyone who knows anything about the events leading up to that war knows that slavery was at the core of the disagreement between the North and the South. We all know that following the war and reconstruction, for a long time, it was difficult for some people to talk about these truths-truth was not a priority during the Jim Crow era. In both North and South, reconciliation among white Americans was thought to require leaving black Americans aside. Though more black troops were serving in the Union Army than the entire Confederate Army, and though black troops led some of the most heroic patriotic charges in the war, black Americans did not enjoy the usual benefits and were not invited to soldiers' reunions. Revisionist thinking about the Civil War is not a 20th century phenomenon! We are just now recovering from Jim Crow revisionism.

In 1997 and 1998, I had the honor of serving as chair of the Advisory Board to One America, the President's Initiative on Race. This body, composed of seven American citizens was given a mandate to initiate a dialogue on race among the people of the United States. As we traveled to various parts of the country, we were struck not only by the remarkable diversity but also by the willingness, even the anxiety of vast numbers of American people who confront the immense task of trying to eliminate race as an obstacle to domestic peace and social justice. We discovered that Jamestown and Montgomery, Selma and Wounded Knee, Little Rock and Gettysburg were all a part of the struggle to overcome the troubling factor of race as an obstacle to peace and justice. It became clear to us that the incidents that sacrificed these places in American history suggested a centrality of the National Park Service to the task of solving the riddle of race as a force in American life. That realization was a powerful factor in my decision to accept the invitation of the Secretary of the Interior to chair the National Park System Advisory Board.

Permit me to say something about how the National Park Service can do its job better and how it can and should turn its attention to friends who may be helpful. Director Stanton's sense of this agency's history and its responsibilities and urgency of its present needs was manifested in his direction to our National Park System Advisory Board to develop a report that will focus on the purposes and prospects of the Service and system over the next 25 years. That report is to help the Service take its part in describing what Director Stanton called "a national mosaic of efforts seeking to accomplish a larger conservation, education, and recreation mission. With this understanding, the review would consider that the National Park Service manages not only places, but also programs, and it works in partnership with all levels of government and private industries to promote common interests. We have been looking for answers to questions such as: "In what directions should the national park service and system be expanded? How should the service respond to the nation's changing population and demographics? What is the Service's role as an educational institute? How can we make certain that the personnel in the Service reflects the makeup of the country's diversity?" These and other questions will drive our deliberations in the next several months.

We will also pay attention to the steps your leadership has taken to work out arrangements with outside scholars in history and natural resources. Academics are not the repositories of all knowledge-much of that knowledge is known to you, too, it derived in major measure from what you have learned in the specific places in which you work. It is a very good thing to share with academics-you can teach them a great deal, but you can also learn from them. It is a good thing to prepare research studies on a nationwide scope, and to bring noted scholars into parks to share their emerging scholarship with all that you are doing and are doing on your own. Cooperative agreements are immensely popular within the academic circles, and they open the door for you to insist upon getting better at your own job of educating the American people about what they should know about their own resources.

Let me be clear about this. The national park service is an educational institution, a cultural institution. It can be the most flexible and the most powerful teaching institution that exists. The strength of its position is that it teaches in real places about real history, and real nature with real things. And the teachers in the Service must be as diverse as the materials they use. That system must be used to tell the truth and to learn as well as to teach. We do not stop learning when we leave school. Certainly I did not. And I know that you did not, either. I've been learning for more than 70 years. And maybe some of you will go back to school and certainly, not maybe, certainly those of you who are supervisors should encourage all of your people to go back to school and to learn how to recruit for the Service those people who represent the diversity about which you teach.

And you should keep on teaching. I like what I saw in the newsletter of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), an organization of which I was at one time president. And I saw there one of its front-page articles was entitled the "OAH and the National Park Service." And I was particularly pleased to discover that this particular piece was written by the Superintendent of Gettysburg National Military Park. He shows how useful it is to invite scholars into the parks for peer review of interpretive programs. He concludes that the partnership with the OAH has "reconnected us to our professional field, provided us access to both scholars and scholarship, offered professional development opportunities for our staff, and is helping us move in the right direction with our programming." I take pride, as indeed we all can, in observing that the current president of the Of American Historians is a distinguished African American woman historian, the James Hannah Professor of American History at Michigan State University, Darlene Clark-Hyde.

I endorse with enthusiasm the concept articulated in your 1997 Education Initiative and Symposium that the National Park Service should encourage employees to pursue advanced studies to remain current in their field. As the report notes, quote, "This … investment in our employees will ensure that NPS educational programs and services will continue to evolve and that our employees will better understand the intellectual underpinings of the material they present to the public."

As we get better at doing our job, and draw to our work the increasing loyalty of our fellow citizens, we leave nostalgia and complacency aside. We know that support for the parks may be broad, but it also may be thin. And as we deepen our discussion of subjects that interest all our citizens, and as we demonstrate that we are committed to telling the full truth, we will deepen the respect with which our fellow citizens hold us and come to us.

Protection is important. You need no admonitions from me about resource protection. The first line of defense in our protection strategy is an informed and committed public. That is why you must undertake with great vigor these two tasks, to protect and to educate. You start out with the affection, broad though thin, of our fellow citizens, an affection that comes to you not only because of how well you do your work, but also because you work in real places and real activities will tell the truth. Real places. That reality principle is important. It is the basis of your work, which is telling the real story in real places.

You have reality going for you. And your natural allies in the scholarly community, the biologists and historians, are rooting for you, too. They're with us today, because there are lessons that can only be learned in real places. But let me emphasize the active, not the passive, side of resource protection. Just hunkering down will not do. The first line of defense, as I've said, is a committed public. Within that public, in circles around each park is a second line, passing through the communities to which the Park Service brings its educational message. The people of the Service are citizens as well as servants, as I am a citizen, as well as a teacher and writer. That is why I'm here. That is why you go outside the parks to communicate the messages that you learned in those real places.

Of course it matters to communicate what you actually are doing in the parks and that is exemplary. They show how science can be applied on the ground, and how history can both be learned and taught on the ground. So you are no mere custodians, nor even mere protectors, nor maintainers. You are exemplars and explainers. Some of you are missioners to the park ideal, as well.

Let me summarize these thoughts. The history of the National Park System shows a regular increase in the inclusiveness of the subjects to which it invites the attention of the American community. It also shows a regular increase in the candor with which the history of the nation is discussed in those places. The broadening of subjects and the increase of candor about sorrow as well as about joy. Our park are settings for celebration as well as remorse, leading to a determination to do better things in the future.

The National Park Service must also reflect in its personnel policy an increase in its awareness of the importance of the same inclusiveness in utilizing citizens of all racial and ethnic backgrounds and of sexual orientation that it reflects in the wide variety of subjects and objects that it embraces. Our parks are settings or stages to display the remarkable diversity of people who work at every level, and its mission and its task will be infinitely more successful if its personnel policy truly reflects that diversity.

For our part, the National Park System Advisory Board has accepted this challenge of envisioning the future of the National Park Service. We are here in St. Louis to listen to you and to discuss with you how we might envision a future together. We are not looking for easy answers. We're not expecting to predict the future. But we must envision the future that we desire if we are to achieve it. We anticipate charting the course of the Service built on its strong traditions, commitment to conservation, esprit de corps, its sense of civic responsibility, and its unexcelled ability to translate places of geography and history into places of this society's sense of self and purpose.

Parks are classrooms, and libraries for all Americans. They are the touchstones for our citizens who wish to preserve our history and culture and natural environment at home and throughout the United States. Today, and this week, we will dream together of a National Park Service that will continue to respond to its broad popular constituency and fulfill a public purpose even more expansively than it does today. What a noble endeavor we have ahead of us! And what a joy it is for me to participate in it with you.

Thank you very much.