Reckoning and Preserving: Historic Preservation, Public History, and Legacies of Racism in Madison
By Kevin Walters
During my two-year tenure as Chair of the Madison Trust’s Community Education Committee, a continuing source of inspiration and collaboration has been the Public History Project at UW-Madison led by public historian and award-winning museum curator, Kacie Lucchini Butcher. As we explained in the Community Education’s last blog post, last November, the UW Public History Project was launched in 2019 to conduct “a multi-year effort to uncover and give voice to those who experienced, challenged and overcame prejudice on campus.” You can read more about the project on their website, which includes a video introduction, an annual report and numerous other resources.
The cover image from the UW-Madison Public History Project website showing a selection of the photos and articles from their team’s research.
I’m particularly excited that the Public History Project has culminated this fall in an exhibit at the Chazen Museum of Art. Entitled “Sifting and Reckoning: UW-Madison’s History of Exclusion and Resistance,” the exhibit opened on September 12th and continues through December 23rd. It will be free and open to the public from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, and 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday (the same hours as the museum). Anyone not in Madison during the exhibits run can visit an online version of Sifting and Reckoning hosted on the university website.
The Community Education Committee encourages trust members, history enthusiasts, and anyone with a connection to UW-Madison to schedule some quality time to take in the full exhibit. Early reactions describe it as beautiful in its quality, arresting in its content, and an altogether moving experience. “Sifting and Reckoning” documents histories of exclusion of all kinds, whether based on race, gender, disability, or orientation. The exhibit also demonstrates that, throughout the university’s history, there have always been members of the community who resisted injustice and envisioned a better future.
At the same time, some might ask, what does UW-Madison’s history of exclusion and resistance have to do with historic preservation? After all, the Madison Trust’s mission focuses on the built environment in the city of Madison and surrounding municipalities, not the university campus, per se. And most of the history presented in Sifting and Reckoning focuses on people, organizations, and documents, not buildings.
The Madison Trust supports historic preservation in the Madison area. This particular map if Madison shows the neighborhoods that were “redlined” as part of discriminatory housing policies as color coded by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1937. Provided courtesy of the Mapping Inequality website. To view the full, interactive map see dsl.richmond.edu.
It’s a reasonable question, and one that has at least three good answers. First, no institution has had as much influence on the built environment of Madison as the University of Wisconsin. Consider, for example, the agricultural campus, where the Madison Trust hosts historic walking tours every summer. Or Bascom Hill, which contains several of the most culturally significant and oldest buildings in the area (not to mention millennia of history as a sacred site for the Ho Chunk people).
The Dairy Barn, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is one of the hidden gems of the UW-Madison agricultural campus. Photo by the author.
Beyond the technical borders of the UW-Madison campus, students, faculty and staff have shaped the built environment of Madison through the styles and configurations of the housing they choose and by the neighborhood designs that their ways of life tend to dictate. Madison is a university town, and historic preservation both on and around campus requires a “reckoning,” in the words of the public history exhibit, with all of the complex legacies that led the university to shape the history of how our city was built.
Second, continuing to live in close proximity to a university of the size and dynamism of UW-Madison brings with it a range of challenges and opportunities unique to what historic preservation means in this particular city at this specific moment. On the one hand, having a high number of residents per capita with advanced degrees gives the Madison Trust an educated, curious audience and a strong base of support from which to draw volunteers and activists. On the other hand, growth of the university brings new construction and redevelopment, both of which place consistent pressure on historic neighborhoods and protected districts. We need only walk down State Street or Langdon Street to see how rapidly the construction of new student housing can reshape a city’s landscape— for better and for worse.
Third, and most important, the Sifting and Reckoning exhibit gives us an opportunity to examine the difference between what might be called the “privilege” of historic preservation versus the “responsibility” of historic preservation. The Madison Trust has the distinct privilege of celebrating and helping to protect beautiful architectural marvels in neighborhoods like Mansion Hill, Maple Bluff, and Nakoma. We should continue to take that privilege seriously.
The South Madison building at 1610 Gilson Street that was once home to Ben’s Barber Shop and then the Style & Grace barber shop and beauty salon. Photo Courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society, https://wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Property/HI241086.
But we should also remember the responsibility we have to preserve the historic character of every community in Madison, not just the most celebrated or those most well preserved by those who came before us. Understanding the complicated legacies of exclusion and resistance in our communities should expand the diversity of places that we protect and teach us new ways of thinking about the built environment in every neighborhood and about how we make decisions about what’s truly worth saving.
The lessons we learn will also force us to confront the buildings we failed to save, or that were never built in the first place. We can all think of at least one example of buildings—in some cases, entire neighborhoods—that were destroyed, not just because of neglect but because of racism and structural inequality. Harder to conceive are the buildings and landscapes that might have been built had our predecessors been more willing to consider a diversity of interests and more willing to invest in every neighborhood.
The UW-Madison Public History Project has given the Madison Trust a golden opportunity to learn how to better embrace the responsibility of historic preservation in all of its diverse fullness. I hope everyone in the local historic preservation community will have the opportunity to witness and absorb “Sifting and Reckoning” this fall, and I look forward to hearing the thoughts and feelings it provokes. We can only become better preservationists as a result.