The Grove Museum inside the historic Call/Collins House is one of Tallahassee’s newest museums, and it’s changing how the city interprets its own history. Instead of focusing on the mansion house’s famous owners, including Florida Governor LeRoy Collins, Executive Director John Grandage oriented the museum around civil rights. Cleverly tracing how Collins’s thinking on race relations evolved, the museum uses the house and the land it sits on to tell the story of the forced removal of indigenous people from the area, the enslaved craftspeople who built the house, and the Tallahassee Bus Boycott.
Grandage says the museum’s interpretive plan and focus on civil rights wouldn't have been possible without the work of Black Tallahassee institutions like John G. Riley House Museum created by Althemese Barnes or the Southeastern Regional Black Archives built from FAMU Professor James Eaton’s collection.
In this episode recorded at the museum, Grandage describes how historic preservation has always been about what the dominant culture finds worth persevering, the museum’s genealogical role, and the white backlash to Collins’s moderate positions on civil rights.
Topics and Notes
00:00 Intro
00:15 Ian at the 1992 Springtime Tallahassee Parade (https://www.dropbox.com/s/qiq5hou4dow64fa/627511115.586189.jpeg?dl=0)
00:55 White Supremacy in Tallahassee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tallahassee,_Florida#Black_history)
01:20 Smokey Hollow (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/85)
01:40 John Grandage
02:35 The Grove Museum (https://thegrovemuseum.com)
03:05 Developing the Interpretive Plan with a Focus on Slavery and Civil Rights
03:30 Governorship of LeRoy Collins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeRoy_Collins)
04:36 Tallahassee Bus Boycott (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallahassee_bus_boycott)
06:08 Presenting the Narrative through Collins
06:50 White Backlash to Collins’s Moderate Position on Civil Rights
08:15 The Construction of the House by Enslaved Craftspeople (https://thegrovemuseum.com/learn/history/)
09:45 The Genealogical Role of the Museum
10:50 Forced Removal of Indigenous People in Tallahassee
12:25 How Tallahassee Interprets Its History
13:00 The John G. Riley House (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/85)
13:10 The Meek-Eaton Black Archives (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/86)
14:08 Outro | Join Club Archipelago ?️ (https://jointhemuseum.club)
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 90. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.


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I found an old picture of me, taken about a block away from what is now the Grove Museum in Tallahassee, FL.

The picture was taken in March