Waterloo Black history grant axed
"Black Stories Collective" oral history project falls victim to federal cuts; Waterloo's Grout Museum resolves to continue initiative.
In the Community Foundation of Northeast Iowa video above, Experience Waterloo executive director Tavis Hall, a Grout Museum District ex officio board member and now a Black Hawk County supervisor, explains the significance of the Grout’s “Black Stories Collective” oral history project.
“A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.”
– Robert Heinlein, author
"History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history....Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
--James Baldwin
Editor’s note: The author of this article is an oral historian with the Grout Museum District and involved in the project in question. It represents the author’s best effort to relate the status of the project, but also convey its signifcance to the public.
WATERLOO — Last week the state of Iowa informed the Grout Museum District that a $20,000 grant awarded last August to help continue video-recorded oral history interviews of local residents for the museum’s permanent “Black Stories Collective” exhibit has been terminated.
Despite this setback, the Grout Museum District will continue conducting oral history interviews for the “Black Stories Collective” exhibit with other private funds available.
We are resolved to continue a project we feel is worthy, central to our mission to the community, and, quite frankly, heretofore largely neglected.
The Grout will continue to conduct these interviews to fulfill a commitment to the museum’s partners in the exhibit, the other funders who have supported it and most importantly to those citizens who have and will continue to come forward and want have their stories told and recorded for posterity about their roles in the important history and ongoing story of civil rights in Waterloo and beyond.
The grant, a State Historical Society of Iowa Humanities Projects grant awarded through the Iowa Arts Council, was terminated because it consisted of federal funds from the National Endowment of the Humanities. That NEH funding was terminated.
State Historical Society officials were notified in an April 2 letter from NEH, provided to the Grout, that “NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”
The April 2 letter noted President Donald Trump issued an executive order Feb. 19 mandating that the NEH “eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions.”
The letter continued, “Your grant’s immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its funding priorities.”
Consequently, the State Historical Society noted, since the Grout’s grant was a “subaward” from the state’s NEH money, and since those funds are no longer available, “we are terminating your grant award effective immediately.”
The “Black Stories Collective” exhibit opened in June 2022. It is an exhibit of the history of Waterloo’s Black community. Waterloo has the highest percentage Black population of any community in Iowa, at 17 perent. A major component of the exhibit is oral history interviews of Black citizens and others who were and continue to be involved in the civil rights movement, locally and beyond.
We at the Grout have interviewed Black business people and professionals, Black educators, Black performance artists, and Black citizens who served in our nation’s armed forces as well as civil rights activists and their white supporters who strove for justice alongside them. The interviews are used in the exhibit and accessible in the museum library.
The Grout Museum District, on the initiative of now-retired executive director Billie Bailey and with the support of the Grout trustees and board, entered into this project in partnership with the Black Hawk County NAACP and Experience Waterloo, the local tourism and visitors organization. An advisory committee formed by those organizations and working with museum staff has guided the effort by suggesting prospective interviewees and different themes.
In an excerpt below from one of those interviews, former longtime Waterloo City Council member Willie Mae Wright, a native of Mississippi, talks about her enslaved grandmother. The former council member has been active for decades with the Black Hawk-Bremer League of Women Voters.
One of the early funding sources for the exhibit was a grant of almost $50,000 from the federal Institute for Museum and Library Services, or IMLS. That grant was awarded in October 2021 and closed out in March 2024. The Grout used the money frugally. We were able to spend less than the amount budgeted to get the exhibit off the ground and the unexpended portion of the grant, $12,971, was retained by the federal government. The IMLS now also is effectively being shut down with 80 percent of its staff placed on administrative leave by executive order of the president. We also received private business, individual and foundation donations in the community.
For the exhibit, we wanted to significantly increase our inventory of oral history interviews of Black residents of our community. We accomplished that. Prior to the establishment of the Black Stories Collective exhibit we had 26 interviews with Black military veterans and a handful of others. Over the past two fiscal years, from July, 1, 2022 through June 30, 2024 we have done 63 additional interviews for Black Stories Collective, nearly tripling our inventory of those interviews. We have continued interviews since then. Interview subject receive a complimentary DVD as a keepsake to share with family and friends.
We were able to expand our inventory of those interviews while continuing to interview Iowa veterans from all over the state for the Grout's Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum, as well as farm and other local history interviews, as part of our ongoing "Voices of Iowa" oral history project.
We wanted the Black Stories Collective interviews conducted from a Black perspective. To that end we enlisted two Black interviewers, both former journalists, working in conjunction with Grout staff.
We engaged in this undertaking to right a wrong. For too long Black history was treated as though it were a separate history. It isn't. It's part of the overall fabric of American history and Waterloo history. And all of us.
The organizers of local protests following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis impressed upon this museum the need to proceed with more fully representing Black history in Waterloo. We agreed and responded.
We stepped up during a period when the African-American Historical & Cultural Museum in Waterloo had been dormant for several years. It recently reopened. We fully support the board and staff there and see our role as complementary to it. They have wonderful artifacts in a historic setting - a remodeled railroad boxcar symbolic of the Great Migration of the early 20th century. The Grout has provided display cases and staffs and directors of the two museums have exchanged ideas and advice. The Grout’s forte in this effort is the oral history component and we plan to continue that to the best of our ability.
The Grout's "Voices of Iowa" oral history project was initiated almost 25 years ago by state renowned museum historian Bob Neymeyer, who holds a Ph.D in history from the University of Iowa. He has taught at the University of Northern Iowa for many years and in 2019 received the William J. Petersen and Edgar R. Harlan Lifetime Achievement Award from the State Historical Society of Iowa. Under his leadership the Grout has compiled more that 2.400 oral histories, mainly of veterans but also farmers and those important in local history, including Black history for the Black Stories Collective project.
Interviewing and recording oral histories provides a permanent record directly from those who were participants in or witnesses to history as it happened — and not just the facts, but the mood and emotion behind those events as they happened, which is also part of the story. It is important, even essential, to record those stories while the history makers and witnesses to history are still with us, particularly those of advanced age, for their loved ones and for posterity.
The "Voices of Iowa" oral history project was one of the initiatives for which the Grout Museum District received its highest marks from the American Alliance of Musuems on our recently completed reaccreditation process. Black Stories Collective interviewers met with AAM re-accreditors as part of that process.
Like many nonprofit institutions, the Grout Museum District faces financial challenges from the recent federal budget cuts, as well as property tax changes at the state level which threaten to significantly constrain if not eliminate our revenues from a cultural and scientific property tax levy Waterloo voters approved in 2015 which has provided nearly half our revenue to sustain museum operations.
Nevertheless we remain committed to the "Voices of Iowa" oral history project and all aspects of it — including Black Stories Collective — by any means necessary.
One of those means is the people who love history, believe it is vital and care about preserving it. We encourage anyone and everyone who realizes the importance of history to contact elected officials every level of government — state, federal and local — and let them know that history matters and is essential to the vitality of a free society.
Democracy demands an informed public. Part of that information is history. Just as democracy is not a spectator sport but an ongoing, participatory effort, preserving our history requires not a "hands off," but a "hands on" approach by everyone. We have to be able to see where we’ve been to gage how far we’ve come and know where we’re going.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. They are listed below. Clink on the links to check them out, subscribe for free - and, if you believe in the value of quality journalism, support this column and/or any of theirs with a paid subscription.
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The Grout Museum District does such important work in preserving African American history--the "Black Stories Collective" is one great example. Is there a link or contact information for ways people can offer support?
What a shame. I have added to the Iowa Impacts tracker: https://bit.ly/iowaimpacts
For those interested, Rod Library at UNI has an archived oral history video collection "African-American Voices of the Cedar Valley". Available online at: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/aavcv/