ABSTRACT
This chapter moves forward in time to the Smithsonian Institution’s responses to the different strands of the Civil Rights Movement. The 1960s and 1970s saw forceful calls for Black control over existing cultural representations and demands for new spaces of self-definition. This chapter shows how, amidst a climate of activism, White professional self-interests were nevertheless maintained through a reframing of the agency of museums as progressive sites that could accommodate and champion ‘diversity’, yet without an attendant insistence on the process of self-definition, participation, or ‘singling out’ of specific under-represented groups. At the same time, new forms of Black empowerment were also subjected to increasing White scrutiny, which called into question not only the legitimacies and standards of alternative perspectives, but also the logic of collective histories along racial lines. Culturally focused museum programmes were frequently rendered as inferior to what was seen as a more ‘sophisticated’ and politically desirable intellectual frame.
