Inclusive museums require docents to speak to a multitude of audiences who do not approach history through the “heroic, white, male-dominated narrative.”⁴ Historic Columbia’s attempt to prepare docents for this best practice resulted in the creation of an interactive training session on cultural and language sensitivity. Both the volunteer base and the weekend staff, often pulled from the ranks of public historians trained at the University of South Page 121 →Carolina, attended. This training was necessary because Historic Columbia was a predominantly white institution. Of the eighty-six thousand nationally designated historic sites in the United States ca. 2015, just 3 percent “explicitly represent minority populations defined by race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.”⁵ The two women of color volunteering at the time of the MoRE reinterpretation embraced the exhibit and tour and participated in training. Outside obligations detoured them from becoming MoRE docents. Historic Columbia offered the hour-long inaugural workshop twice to accommodate docents’ schedules. Eighteen volunteers and five paid docents completed the first sensitivity training before the museum reopened in February 2014. The organization ultimately extended the session to ninety minutes because the guided activities generated lengthy conversations that needed more time to finish. Thirteen volunteers, eight of them new inductees, and two paid docents attended the second workshop held in April.⁶ In later sessions participation declined to a handful of recently recruited docents.

As a predominantly white institution, Historic Columbia sought Black voices to teach the cultural and language sensitivity workshops. That the MoRE’s interpretation heavily emphasized the Black experience during Reconstruction required materials and discussion about interpreting Black history and white docents interacting with nonwhite visitors. However, the workshop also opened the opportunity for docents to consider audiences they may unknowingly exclude with their language. Daniella Cook, assistant professor in the Department of Instruction and Teacher Education at USC, crafted and led the first session two weeks before opening.⁷ Cook specializes in understanding how students, teachers, and communities underserved in public education are affected by class, race, and power. The training and the tour explored these three themes, but inclusivity stretched beyond them to areas such as gender and disability. As preparation for the workshop, Cook assigned trainees “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by Peggy McIntosh, a classic, introductory text that offers an accessible list of the ways McIntosh herself had benefited from her whiteness. Cook provided activities, readings, and handouts on normative language, the social construction of race, and tour tips for well-intentioned docents to make visitors feel included and welcomed. Tour tips ranged from not asking visitors to speak for their “race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or nationality” to not letting “racist, sexist, or homophobic language and comments go unnoticed.” The tips also stressed the importance of body language, such as spreading “eye contact around” rather than primarily looking at women when addressing reproductive rights or Black visitors when discussing slavery.⁸ Docents also challenged their assumptions by identifying normative language in a series of thirteen sentences. The exercise illuminated ageism, Page 122 →sexism, racism, and classism as well as biases against the disabled and non-Western cultures.⁹

For subsequent trainings the language and sensitivity workshop resumed under the leadership of Porchia Moore, who studies museum inclusivity. Moore continued to use the activities and handouts selected by Cook but brought her own insight as a public history practitioner and frequent visitor to museums.¹⁰ She opened sessions with a twenty-minute presentation of her own research on museums and inclusivity. She generated complex conversations, particularly when she asked docents to identify appropriate terms for referring to enslaved people and people of color from a larger list. These issues surrounding language choice initially prompted Historic Columbia to develop the workshop. That several docents came of age during Jim Crow and were taught antiquated racial language that is inappropriate today concerned the organization.¹¹ Moore insisted that docents should know why they use a specific word and be able to explain that choice if asked by a visitor about it on the tour. She also introduced docents to the concept of the privilege walk, a visualization of privilege, in which they considered how their gender, class, sexuality and race benefited or hindered them by moving forward or backward based on a series of questions.¹²

The language and cultural sensitivity session combined with content training eased fears among docents related to the discussion of race. Before and after the first training program, Historic Columbia administered a survey to gauge docents’ comfort level talking with museum visitors about historical issues related to race. After training, 6.5 percent of docents taking the survey that previously were “not comfortable at all” dropped to zero. Those “somewhat comfortable” remained nearly unchanged at just over 35 percent, but those “very comfortable” rose 6 percent to 64 percent. However, these statistics are not conclusive. Thirty-one docents completed the pretraining survey, but only fourteen of the twenty-three docents who completed all training took the post-training survey. Furthermore, three volunteers during their formal staff evaluation displayed obvious discomfort with talking about historical issues connected to race. They compensated by ignoring racial aspects of Reconstruction and focusing on Wilson content instead and did not pass those evaluation attempts.¹³ However, of the 628 visitors who visited the MoRE in 2014 and completed a survey on their experience, nearly 84 percent thought docents handled sensitive issues “extremely well.”¹⁴ Survey results and the high standards set for the docent’s tour evaluation that were built into the training process demonstrate that sensitivity programming is critical to a museum where docents interpret complex issues of race and create inclusive environments for all of its visitors. The training provides tools and Page 123 →language on the front end and identifies potential problems before placing docents on the front lines.

Although the training appeared to have correlations to positive feedback on visitor surveys and was thus a success, a docent survey and docent oral histories that I conducted around the MoRE’s second anniversary reveal that older white volunteers were more likely to be critical of the sensitivity workshop than paid docents. Ten volunteers and six paid weekend staffers participated in the survey, and eleven gave oral histories. Sensitivity training divided volunteers. Some enjoyed and learned from the training, while others openly admitted disliking aspects of the session. Conversely the weekend staff welcomed and benefited from the training.

Four weekend docents praised exercises related to white privilege, with one calling the session their favorite. The discussion of privilege resonated most with them. They spoke specifically about being able to “see visually” privilege during the privilege walk. Docents worked through their preconceived associations of the word privilege from wealth by listening to incidents of discrimination experienced by leaders and attendees. For example, that a person of color would return clothes to a department store with a white friend to prevent accusations of theft had never occurred to one docent. After the session weekend staff member Halie Brazier described being hyperaware that she was a white docent telling the story of “terrible things that happened to Black people” as a result of Reconstruction-era violence, and that she was a “descendant” and “beneficiary of that system” in the present. Unpacking Peggy McIntosh’s invisible knapsack drastically expanded Brazier’s understanding of privilege but also made her overthink language and her presentation of Black history on her tour. One docent, however, suggested some activities and examples be “more directed” at the Wilson home rather than general ideas surrounding inclusion.¹⁵

There was no consensus among volunteers about the training session. They expressed a range of opinions, which also illuminated characteristics of their racial philosophies. Volunteer docents approved of and benefited from the session, were ambivalent about it, or openly admitted disliking it. Several spoke of the session’s importance in both the training process and understanding white privilege. For the first time, some volunteers thought about privilege and considered the appropriateness of their word choices. Kathy Hogan wondered how much impact the training had on her tours. She believed language and behavior were “not conscious” and only had a few Black visitors to measure any language shifts against. Volunteers who dismissed the training did so because of their learning styles, their previous exposure to diversity training, or their belief that they possessed progressive or neutral Page 124 →views on race and racism. They argued that group work in general did little to facilitate their learning and labeled some exercises as too “touchy feely” or “silly.” Pris Stickney explained she was a “facts person” and neutral on race, finding no language she should correct on her tour. She worried about political correctness, how “we have to be so conscious nowadays.” Two volunteers claimed the session failed to add to their working knowledge of inclusivity from previous professional training. However, in their oral histories, both used the term “the Blacks” to refer to the Black community. This antiquated language suggests that their prior inclusivity training was outdated. Another volunteer used the same term on the formal tour evaluation required for clearance to conduct tours.¹⁶ Weekend staff who trained with volunteers encountered older volunteers with ingrained racial views, who had not attended college in decades or given tours regularly. One weekend staffer noted that two volunteers were surprised to hear that docents should not single out Black visitors and ask about their experiences with racism. Another recalled that a white male volunteer “piped up” with a comment akin to how Black people can also be racist. She “figured he probably wasn’t going to sit and marinate on his own white privilege.”¹⁷

Volunteer Jean Morgan articulated the strongest objection to the training, which was rooted in a conversation that tested her racial and docent ideology. Morgan thought the session was not well prepared, citing a technical glitch and its quick pace, but that was not her primary complaint. She acknowledged institutional racism and the challenges of having white docents interpret Black history but found the workshop “one-sided.” During the workshop Morgan shared a volunteer experience she had at the Mann-Simons property, another site administered by Historic Columbia devoted to the history of a Black entrepreneurial, middle-class family in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. A Black visitor argued that all white baby boomers of Morgan’s generation were racists. Morgan thought her presence refuted this claim, but Cook countered that the visitor may have regarded Morgan as a “white do-gooder.” The docent thought the comment contradicted an earlier session conversation that all people have biases but that racism is institutionalized prejudice. Both experiences reinforced for her that “maybe racism runs one way, but prejudice runs both ways.” Morgan no longer volunteers at Jubilee, the long-running Black festival held each fall around the Mann-Simons site, because she does not want her presence to be misunderstood. She advocates for Historic Columbia finding a way to staff Jubilee with Black volunteers because Mann-Simons is considered by the Black community as “their” site, and “the presence of so many white faces is probably offensive to them.”¹⁸

Page 125 →Regardless of the level of acceptance among volunteers, both volunteer and paid docents acknowledged that exposure to the concept of white privilege mattered and was a critical concept for the tour. However, the majority of paid docents had already been exposed to these ideas, because they attended university more recently. And while three weekend docents concluded that the training appealed to them on an intellectual level cultivated in graduate school, education level was not a factor in volunteers’ ambivalence about the session.¹⁹ Among the volunteers who spoke on record, five held master’s degrees and two earned PhDs in a range of fields including history, English, political science, education, library sciences, and hospital administration.²⁰ Four docents, three of them volunteers, had previous exposure to diversity training as part of their professions. Survey data and the educational background of docents reinforce that language and cultural sensitivity are best practices. These practices keep an organization’s cadre of well-educated, retired volunteer docents current with cultural sensitivity theory and trends even if they do not fully embrace the ideas. It also appeals to professional public historians on staff. As one weekend staffer surmised, “We can all use a little more training on sensitivity and language.”²¹

Sensitivity and language training provided tools to tackle but not completely resolve the unique challenges of interpreting rooms that narrate the lives of Black individuals who occupied the Wilson home during Reconstruction. The pantries and dining room emerged as the central spaces for interpreting Black workers and their relationship with the Wilsons. Interpretations of middle- and upper-class homes struggle to expose the domestic complexities involved when people across racial and class lines occupy these spaces as laborers. Some HHMs omit these complexities or leave out controversial or potentially offensive information that traditional white museumgoers may not be prepared for or wish to learn. Nonetheless most sites are moving toward more inclusive narratives. In the mid-1980s and 1990s, HHMs began to address this important gap in their interpretation of domestic servants. A 2003 nationwide survey of 358 postbellum HHMs revealed domestic servant interpretation had been introduced in nearly three-quarters of house tours but still lacked proper racial and class contextualization vis-à-vis white elite occupants and domestics. Most tours limited discussion of racial and economic dynamics at play. Organizations wrestled with this interpretive turn. They believed that they lacked the material culture and primary sources to elucidate properly the lives of workers. To compensate, tours interpreted the architecture, original fixtures, and spaces associated with domestic service, Page 126 →such as the kitchen, servant stairs, and laundry room. Period tools rarely original to the home helped docents facilitate discussion with guests about tedious domestic tasks. This method explains why most HHM tours that interpreted domestics, according to public historian Jennifer Pustz, sidestepped uncomfortable subjects tied to race, class, and gender and instead focused tour attention on less contentious themes, such as the use of appliances/technology and working conditions.²²

The goal of HHMs should be to present the servant narrative as central and not tacked on to an elite white story. Domestic workers were part of an inclusive “cast of characters,” yet in the nearly two centuries of HHM history, tours rendered them invisible throughout the home and landscape. A multivocal HHM provides a richer, more holistic understanding of the past and domestic spaces. The four HHMs devoted to Woodrow Wilson vary in their levels of success incorporating servants and enslaved people. Pustz argued that the first step for HHMs in discussing domestic servants is to rethink the sites’ previous history “as shrines, collections of antiques, and architectural masterpieces.” The majority of America’s shrines and museums are institutional spaces of white privilege dedicated to the history of white male conquest. The MoRE’s new, inclusive interpretation erased its Wilson shrine origins, presented positive gains from the Reconstruction era, such as public education and voting rights, and centered Black South Carolinians in the narrative. Thus the discussion of domestic life in traditional workspaces that are considered segregated in other HHMs did not operate as a supplement to a white narrative. The Black experience is present throughout the exhibit and home. However, public historian and weekend docent Casey Lee believed that exhibiting the pantries, although “great,” still “tacked on” Black domestics in a way similar to other HHMs. She concluded this might be unavoidable, since they were workspaces attached to more hospitable family spaces. The three other Wilson HHMs, like 85 percent of HHMs with publicly open spaces that would have been occupied by domestic workers, designed tours with tacked-on inclusivity. However, after the MoRE reopened, other Wilson sites were trying to maintain their relevance by challenging this lenticular logic and including nonwhites. Lenticular logic, as defined by Tara McPherson, is a fallacy in which one sees only one of two linked histories or images at a time, usually that of whiteness, when they are in fact bonded together.²³ While the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson was the most inclusive of the other three Wilson HHMs, by 2015 the other two had yet to incorporate fully a diverse racial narrative that includes the stories of Black occupants of these homes.

A decade ago the house tour at the WWPLM in Staunton, Virginia, retained its original interpretation highlighting the “virtues and sensibilities” Page 127 →of America’s Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism, but more recently it updated its coverage of those who performed labor in the home.²⁴ The tour started at the back entrance of the red-brick Greek revival manse, reflecting recent trends in moving tours through workspaces first rather than the front door. The scene was a typical breakfast in 1857. The first room unveiled the cook’s world in the kitchen. She started her day at dawn, firing up her modern range stove, and likely had access to a few chickens, other livestock, and a garden on the property. Implicitly referring to the labor performed, the guide called this space the most important room in the house. Entering through the kitchen and addressing slavery immediately was a conscious choice to avoid stirring in slavery at the end of the tour. Staff changes in the curatorial department, script issues, and the recognition that Staunton was likely the setting for Tommy’s first exposure to slavery prompted the revisions. The tour never clearly addressed the latter subject. The church where Joseph pastored leased one to three enslaved people under a strict contract with owners detailing specific provisions.

After passing through the family-centered sitting room, entry into the cook’s private bedroom, a perk of her position, wove Black domestics back into the narrative. Other benefits awarded to the highly skilled enslaved cook included a nice bed, hand-me-down clothing, and a five-day Christmas break.²⁵ The interpretation in this final space of the floor painted the Page 128 →Wilsons as benevolent paternalists who treated enslaved people well, even like family.

A racially segregated second floor removed enslaved workers from the remainder of the tour, though several opportunities for a more inclusive narrative exist within the script. The parlor transformed to a church room for weddings, church meetings, and evening devotionals. The image of enslaved individuals laboring during church-related services expanded the scope of the tour’s primary theme: “a middle-class minister’s family in antebellum Virginia and the household and values that produced a future President of the United States.” The tour did not ask visitors to consider how enslaved labor in the manse where Tommy was born shaped the family as benefactors of slavery, which operated in conjunction with their values as Presbyterians, other than that they utilized it. In the dining room, a newspaper and scraps left on plates signal that the Wilsons just finished their quiet breakfast. The tour could have induced visitors to imagine the clearing of the table while the family enjoyed the leisure time that slavery produced for white families. Rather this space introduced Joseph’s domestic life and career as a segue to his office. Cementing Wilson’s status as southerner and Virginian, the tour concluded in the master bedchamber with Tommy’s birth.²⁶

Staunton introduced slavery upfront but did not weave the histories of Black lives throughout the entire tour. As such the home missed its potential Page 129 →to become what Jennifer Scott defines as a radical house museum that challenges biased power structures and “narrow histories” of white elites.²⁷ Over a decade ago, a study of plantation museums found that 60 percent “symbolically annihilated or erased” the lives of enslaved Americans, skewing the visitor’s perceptions of antebellum society.²⁸ This magnolia-scented world erased the enslaved people who maintained the pristine gardens and produced agricultural goods, cooked and cleaned the big house, and lived onsite. Almost 30 percent depicted Black laborers as faithful and their enslavers as moral, hardworking people. Staunton’s Presbyterian focus ensured the tour at times drifted into this second category. The remaining 10 percent of plantations fit in one or both of two categories: relative incorporation or segregated information such as irregularly offered or supplemental tours. The birthplace tour pushed the boundaries of relative incorporation but fell short of moving beyond the “add and stir” approach it wanted to avoid.²⁹ I argue that a bolder claim would build on the presidential library’s assertion that the Wilsons were a “Northern-raised and educated couple” that “liked the Southern people and their way of life and remained in the South the rest of their lives.” The tour could easily surmise that slavery was one of the things the Wilsons liked or easily accepted; after all, they remained in the region during the Civil War. Wilson biographer A. Scott Berg argues that Jessie Wilson was more conflicted over slavery than her husband, whose “ambivalence … would follow Tommy to the White House.”³⁰ However, an 1857 letter Jessie wrote to her father on display in the WWPLM reveals the benefits and pleasant experience she had operating a slave household. Following her inquiry as to how her father was adjusting to his move to the slave state of Kentucky, she revealed, “My experience has taught me that there are some disadvantages connected with the peculiar institution, as well as advantages. The responsibility incurred by the housekeeper is so much greater than in a free state.” Jessie performed less labor in Virginia, described her domestic sphere as “pleasant,” and never feared Joseph’s traveling because the two women and man sleeping beneath her in in the basement were “reliable good creatures.” Jessie felt comfortable with the institution and her family’s safety and appreciated the work and morality of the three individuals.³¹

Slavery continued to be an important force in the Wilsons’ lives when they moved to Augusta, Georgia, in 1858, though the Woodrow Wilson Boyhood Home diminished the institution’s impact on the family far more than the WWPLM. The WWBH’s depiction of Black laborers and citizens rested between symbolic annihilation and the narrative of faithful Black workers and moral white employers. A detached two-story kitchen still stands on the property. However, the WWBH detached Black Augusta from the narrative just as the labor in this space was separated from the Wilson home during Page 130 →the Civil War and Reconstruction. The tour’s most vivid description of a domestic was of Mitty, who, according to tradition, was famous for fruit pies. Also included on the tour was that domestics may have used a pump for running water. Because Augusta allowed free Black people to work, move, and worship freely and Joseph was not listed as a slaveholder in the 1860 census, Historic Augusta believes the family had two or three paid Black servants and that Mitty came with the family from Virginia. Again, according to tradition and Montgomery’s research, one of them was an unknown man, most likely the butler, who supposedly said that “‘Mr. Tommy was his father’s boy outside the house but his momma’s boy inside the house.’” Executive director Erick Montgomery took Staunton’s older tour when it depicted the laborers as servants, which corroborated Augusta’s traditional interpretation that Mitty was free. Augusta’s interpretation is likely inaccurate given that the Staunton church leased enslaved people to work in the Wilsons’ home. Montgomery rightly observed that the mystery may never be solved, but addressing this ambiguity exposes visitors to ideas about how Mitty and her peers reacted to emancipation and Reconstruction. Reconstruction brought an expanded labor market, voting rights, and more power in wage negotiation with employers if the laborers were free before the Civil War. If not, Reconstruction thrust these formerly enslaved people into the free labor system for the first time, making them dependent on Wilson’s sporadic pay as a minister. Through the first year of Reconstruction, the church paid Joseph irregularly.³²

Because the PWWH was Wilson’s last home at S Street in Washington, DC, its tour need not address slavery; however, in 2015 the narrative tacked on domestic servitude at the end of the tour. The last spaces of the tour, like those in Staunton, privileged the functionality of rooms and technology that facilitated domestic labor but omitted an in-depth account of the Black laborers’ lives. Visitors learned that the uppermost floor had more recently provided storage space but that originally the Black couple that worked for the Wilson family slept there. The home boasts a working elevator that aided staff in moving the frail former president through the home. The stairs to the butler’s pantry, the pantry itself, and the dumbwaiter all could have been used to talk about non-elite people in the home and how they interacted in caring for the Wilsons, a glimpse of which visitors obtained in the nurse’s room. The tour ended in the kitchen, which featured the original stove, toaster, and icebox used by the domestic couple and a series of pictures circulated to visitors. The docent, unaccustomed to being asked the names of Isaac and Mary Scott, could not recall them.³³

A post-tour conversation I had with a PWWH docent, documents at Wilson’s presidential library, and Wilson biographies demonstrate that a more open dialogue between Wilson sites expands our knowledge of the Scotts’ and the Wilsons’ most personal relationships with Black people. The paternalist relationship revealed offers greater context to Wilson’s policies on race, such as allowing his cabinet to segregate the federal government. According to docent Betty van Iersel, a letter suggests that Isaac was a porter at Galt’s Jewelry Store. The Scotts maintained a house, although they had no children and slept at S Street six days a week. They worked for Edith Galt Wilson, the president’s second wife and widow, the rest of their lives.³⁴ Edith’s relationship with the Scotts illuminates a paternalistic household reminiscent of the Old South. She called them “the best of the old-time coloured Virginia stock.” Isaac “protected” the president in the hours before his passing after Edith requested that he shoo the press away from Wilson’s death vigil.³⁵ In 1954 Edith described Isaac, once the president’s valet, as “old—deaf now—but faithful as a watchdog.” That year she brought Mary for an event at the Staunton museum and told its leader, Emily Smith, to “make use of” her maid of thirty-three years “if she can be of help in the kitchen or elsewhere.”³⁶ Other than Edith, the Scotts occupied S Street longer than anyone else. They spent nearly all of their time at work. A tour that names them and discusses their lives crystalizes the privileges and power that the Wilsons enjoyed and how the president’s life was filled with Black lives and their labor from his birth to his death. Far from the first, the Scotts were the last Black domestic workers to engage intimately with the dying southerner at his most vulnerable. In recent years the PWWH began to address “important issues of race, class, and wealth in 1920s America” with a seventy-five-minute tour, “Under One Roof: Living and Working in the Wilson House.” Offered on Tuesdays only, the specialty tour, representing what Jennifer Scott labeled segregated information, includes the Scotts as well as Wilson’s private secretary, chauffeur, and male nurse.³⁷

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Page 132 →The MoRE, similar to other Wilson HHMs, relied on architecture and room function to illuminate the lives of those laboring in the home and America’s newest citizens. However, the MoRE’s silence in naming and going in depth about specific workers lives was a product of the historical record rather than intentional omission. Those who staffed the Wilson’s home in Columbia during Reconstruction do not appear in Wilson family documents or Columbia municipal records. As a result several MoRE docents used the built environment to illuminate their lives and labor. These guides also excelled in generating points of engagement and open-ended questions in two pantry spaces. Four MoRE docents emphasized the stark differences in workspaces from the rest of the home. Tour and program coordinator Heather Bacon-Rogers sarcastically introduces visitors to “a perfect lovely space just like the rest of the house.” These docents build on the visual inconsistencies by asking questions about air conditioning, heat, insulation, and claustrophobia, the latter being effective with larger groups. The MoRE differs from most HHMs, which commonly interpret the kitchen, because the home’s detached kitchen no longer stands.³⁸ However, Historic Columbia designed and constructed an accessibility ramp that corresponded to the kitchen’s size and location. The ramp led to two segregated back porch doors and was visible through the pantry window. A panel from a Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from 1919 labeled “Domestic Servants” provided another visual reference. In the script’s earliest version, visitors were to answer a question about the segregated architecture and locate the kitchen-turned-ramp. The first few months of tours demonstrated the butler’s pantry provided docents the opportunity to ask a follow-up to an engagement question for visitors who showed great interest in the space. The final script set up the pantry, telling visitors that they had “passed through the dining room and are standing in spaces devoted to food storage and preparation.” From there docents asked, “What is missing from the space?” Visitors generally responded correctly with “kitchen,” which allowed docents to invite guests to view the ramp from the window, located next to a servant’s entrance. Docents, if they chose to, followed up by asking how the architecture separated people by their staff position (and race).³⁹

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While discrete servant stairs traditionally are considered the most powerful architectural feature in an HHM to interpret domestic labor, MoRE docents relied less on these outside stairs and more on segregated entryways. Docents found that visitors easily imagined workers entering the space from the exterior door to plate meals for the adjacent dining room.⁴⁰ Because visitors forget that they just walked past a back door in the hallway, weekend docent Jennifer Gunter asked, “Why would you have this back door six feet away from the other back door?” The question unpacked the segregated racial dynamics of the household and Columbia. Erin Holmes, a weekend docent and historian who specializes in the built environment of elites and enslaved people, used the architecture to inspire complex conversations with her visitors. Some of them lingered after tours “to discuss how architecture Page 135 →expressed the ambitions of the middle class and was an instrumental part of the segregation of African Americans.” She described those experiences as “always fantastic, especially when they [visitors] came in expecting (and wanting) a ‘Woodrow Wilson: Future President’ kind of tour.”⁴¹

Despite the tight structure of the script, a highly popular BBC television program at the time of the reopening, Downton Abbey, frequently became a point of conversation between docents and visitors in the pantry. Depending on the docent, the show enhanced visitor understanding or reduced the conversation to one on class. Before programming like Downton Abbey, HHM guests had difficulty conceiving the experience of living with an employer while in a subordinate position.⁴² Although English country estates began the shift to prominently interpreting servants’ quarters in the late 1970s, by 2014 Downton Abbey served as the inspiration for renewed and increased visitation to sites that exposed the workers’ world. Visitors spent more time exploring servant quarters than other rooms.⁴³ Similarly the program inspired both docents and visitors to make comparisons between the employees at the MoRE and the fictional show, a process that I call the Downton Abbey effect. Docents expressed strong reactions to this exchange. Bacon-Rogers felt the show stymied her narrative. She estimated that “50 percent of the time” visitors responded to Black inclusion with something akin to “just like Downton Abbey.” This posed a hindrance in explaining Tommy’s domestic world. She wanted to get away from this association with the Downton Abbey and an earlier British series, Upstairs Downstairs. Domestic work in the South during Reconstruction was distinct from early twentieth-century Great Britain. She wished she could flatly reply, “No. These are former slaves who are finally able to make their own money, to make their own jobs. This is far more significant.” She appreciated that visitors were connecting the tour to their personal pop culture experiences but wondered if “they’re not getting the gravity of what work was like for these recently freed individuals.”⁴⁴ Public historian Oliver Cox argued that English country homes faced a similar challenge in “how to use the quasi-historical shorthand of Downton as a way of enticing visitors into the longhand stories of the country house that can only emerge through detailed archival research and effective interpretation strategies.”⁴⁵

To dilute the Downtown Abbey effect, MoRE docents encouraged visitors to consider the transition to wage labor beyond abstract terms and the impact of citizenship, a conversation rooted in historical scholarship. Docents asked visitors about their economic worth. This became a stepping stone for discussing the excitement of women negotiating “this whole new system, a wage labor system.”⁴⁶ Building on the work of Jacqueline Jones, historian Thavolia Glymph argues that in these early years of freedom, even Page 136 →when Black women were forced by economic necessity to take jobs in white homes, these women negotiated the terms of their employment and did not need to feign loyalty. Freedwomen capitalized on their knowledge of labor, calculating the time needed to perform tasks as free wage laborers rather than enslaved workers. They also resisted attempts by white employers to transform a skilled position into full-service domestic help, similar to what the Wilsons required of the Scotts at S Street. Black women chose parttime work for its flexibility, allowing time to build their own free homes and engage in household production to sustain their families and to sell at market.⁴⁷ Docents transformed Glymph’s research into a question about skills and power. Gunter asked: “Are you worth ten cents for ten sets of sheets?” She also pointed out the recipes to demonstrate skill sets and asked, “How skillful do you have to be” to work in the Wilson home? Volunteer Cyndy Storm approached the subject from the perspective of employers, drawing on older, wealthier white southerners who remembered maids and cooks in their households that went home to their own families at the end of each day. She asked visitors to consider whether they would hire a sixteen-year-old girl or a more experienced older cook and what skills their budget afforded.⁴⁸ Choosing residency, commuting from home, or living on the second floor of the kitchen was another example of the considerations the script and exhibit offered to docents to convey the agency of African Americans and choices made possible by citizenship. The fire map became a popular panel image for docents to discuss workers’ exercising autonomy in their choice of accommodations.⁴⁹ A revision of the script placed formerly supplemental statements about freedwomen, “rarely allowed to attend to their own families under slavery,” into the required narration. The combined script, panels, and docent questions illustrated well the power that Black women wielded to negotiate wages and make financial choices with their families about sharecropping, part-time work in the home, and domestic work.⁵⁰ Starting in the pantries and culminating with a panel in the adjacent, family-centric dining room, docents were able to contrast the similar domestic work many Black Americans had performed while enslaved, such as taking care of white children, with their groundbreaking ability and attempts to reunite Black families and develop and keep their households intact for the first time.⁵¹

During training and on their own tours, a handful of volunteer docents gravitated to the Downton Abbey effect, which informed their opposition to early tour drafts that emphasized the household’s racial divisions. The interpretive team worked to convey clearly that workers entered and used spaces differently than residents and guests. This opened a conversation between the team and docents about segregated architecture. From the beginning the script insisted that the Wilsons built a home that “reflected prevailing Page 137 →trends in domestic architecture that separated people according to their roles.” The panel, however, acknowledged that while the middle and upper classes hired servants, in the South “domestic service usually intertwined with race relations.”⁵² Still, volunteer Jean Morgan interpreted early script versions as political because of their insistence that workspaces were segregated. For her and other likeminded volunteers, race only mattered in that the South relied heavily on Black workers because of demographics and the legacy of slavery. Segregated workspaces and staircases were “segregat[ed] by role,” whether in the South, other parts of the US, Great Britain, or on television. Volunteer docent Pam Redfield noted that dishwashers and servers today often enter workplaces through a back door. Her great grandmother, a German immigrant and launderer, brought wealthy families’ laundry out the back door.⁵³ As with the negative connotations surrounding the word privilege, semantics was the issue. Cook suggested that the pantry portion of the script should “talk about segregated architecture without using the word segregated.” Volunteer docents favored a class-centered lens over one focused on race. They insisted the script acknowledge that, while architecture did separate southerners racially, it demonstrated the “segregated nature” of domestic labor both “before and after emancipation, regardless of region.”⁵⁴ The MoRE docents who emphasized social and class segregation reflected trends in interpreting domestic workers at HHMs across the nation. Institutions in the southern Atlantic states, which had high Irish and Black servant populations, tended to rate discussing racial prejudice of high significance. But many HHMs privileged class prejudice more. Sites disclosed the race or ethnicity of domestic workers without contextualizing their status as immigrants or how their heritage and experience might have shaped the region or nation.⁵⁵

In some ways the MoRE suffered from more problems in interpreting domestic workers than most HHMs. Not only did it lack any material culture that belonged to employees, but also none of the traditional primary sources identified their names. Over 56 percent of HMMs studied in 2003 conducted research on domestic servants, most commonly with census records and city directories. Historic Columbia did the same, also perusing the local resources available in Columbia’s rich university and state archives, which can be overlooked by museums. But its research yielded only general information about domestic servitude at the time in Columbia. Although the people who worked for the Wilsons remained invisible, the butler pantry’s panel presented two pie charts based on the 1880 federal census that show visitors that 90 percent of Richland County’s washers, housekeepers, and butlers were Black and 75 percent Black women.⁵⁶ Bacon-Rogers wondered about the pair that worked for the Wilsons: “Was it a husband and wife? Page 138 →Was it two women?” She was fascinated by these individuals more than the Wilson women and was embarrassed that Historic Columbia did not know more. Historic Columbia even struggled to identify Nannie and Minnie, two Black domestic workers employed by Wilson’s older sister, Annie Wilson Howe. The dining room exhibit displays the circa 1892 Howe family portrait with both family and domestics posed on the front porch. Historic Columbia had a list of six possibilities based on city directories around the time of the photograph. Three laundry workers named Minnie, surnamed Clark, Sims, and Watts, were potential candidates. Records revealed only two women named Nannie: Chapple, a cook, and Antonio, occupation unknown.⁵⁷

Though many HHM tours incorporate at least partial narratives of domestic work, they often ignore domestic conflict. This includes both the complexity of the relationships between domestic servants and their employers as well as familial clashes.⁵⁸ The MoRE struggled to interpret conflict as well. This can be seen in the interpretation of the Howe family portrait in the dining room and in the docents’ lack of preparedness to address sexual violence against Black women, common in Reconstruction and domestic servitude. The portrait depicts Annie Howe’s nuclear family on the porch of their Columbia home, along with her brothers Tommy and Joseph Jr. and father, Joseph Sr. The image became a popular engagement point with all but a handful of docents and visitors. When visitors did not broach the subject themselves, docents asked why Nannie and Minnie were included in the photograph and how those pictured felt about the workers’ inclusion. Bacon-Rogers often experienced that one person would open the conversation by saying, “Oh, they thought of them as family,” before another countered with “They don’t look happy.’” This debate made the image “the best piece in that whole room.” By contrast Morgan left the question open-ended, because cynics saw a display of wealth and status while others saw family.⁵⁹ The disparities between these two approaches reflect the tendency of HHMs to favor narratives of friendship or closeness between employers and employees over narratives of conflict. Stories of domestics who were like family survive because, like the best objects, positive tales and relationships are preserved rather than those of workers who came and went or experienced exploitation.⁶⁰

Given that the social dynamics of the Howe household invited some interpretive division among docents, it was not surprising that the taboo subject of sexual violence in domestic spaces was ignored in the home and mostly absent from the training. This is partly fueled by the latent historiography of Reconstruction and sexual violence. Only recently have scholars explored the dynamic of sexual violence during Reconstruction. Just as the process of Reconstruction itself was not truly as radical as Americans remember, the Page 139 →MoRE is not as radical as it could be because sexual violence is not interpreted in domestic spaces or discussed as a political tool used by white men to control Black bodies and intimidate Black citizens. There is no evidence that the men in the Wilson family perpetrated sexual violence, also making the conversation difficult to initiate.

While the pervasiveness of sexual violence perpetrated against Black women and exploitation of them during slavery has been established firmly by historians and Black feminist scholars, films such as Twelve Years a Slave (dir. Steve McQueen, 2013), The Birth of a Nation (dir. Nate Parker, 2016), and Free State of Jones (dir. Gary Ross, 2016) have contributed to solidifying this historiography in mainstream popular thought and culture.⁶¹ The fact that white women also had a history of complicity in household violence is still a difficult subject for some to broach interpretively. Jealously and sexual repression inspired violence from white women. The masters’ unchecked power over enslaved women brought into the center of the household a public Page 140 →violence that demeaned the women, while white women were protected against it.⁶² Homes outside of the South were not immune to this violence. Domestics in the urban North, who MoRE volunteers insisted were no different from Black domestic workers, were also “at the mercy of lascivious masters and their teenaged son,” just as their southern sisters were.⁶³

Since the 1980s women’s history has shown continuity between the rape and sexual coercion of the antebellum period and the late nineteenth century. In the 1990s Catherine Clinton exposed weaponized rape employed by soldiers on both sides during the Civil War, foreshadowing scholarship on its use as a political tactic to challenge Reconstruction.⁶⁴ Rape of Black women, which had no legal precedents established against it during slavery, became during Reconstruction a tool of political violence used to inflict both physical and psychological suffering. The tendency of night riders to strip women’s clothing to their waists or pull it up to their necks before beating them were actions some of these same men may have performed as overseers or slave-owners. Scholarship on Ku Klux Klan and night rider violence as well as federal records suggest that the threat of sexual abuse escalated after the Civil War, even if it was underreported in other historical accounts and texts. White supremacists attacked women for their associations with Black Union troops and Black leaders or because their husbands or fathers had violated a southern white code of behavior, such as participating in politics or landowning. Despite the assaults on their bodies and denial of their attempts to claim full citizenship, Black women demanded dignity, which included withdrawing their labor from white households to escape sexual violence. But born out of this gendered violence was the myth of the Black rapist, which became the fuel for a turn-of-the-century lynching epidemic that eclipsed the real abuse conducted at the hands of white men who raped Black women.⁶⁵ In 1898 Alex Manly, a biracial newspaper editor in Wilmington, North Carolina, highlighted this hypocrisy when the state’s Democrats weaponized the myth for their campaign. After Election Day the city erupted in white supremacist violence, ending the decaying experiment in Reconstruction with a coup d’état. The white mob killed dozens of Black residents, although the tally will never be known, and at least 1,400 permanently fled or were banished because of their economic success or political activities.⁶⁶

Scholars have produced enough work on Reconstruction-era sexual exploitation to warrant its inclusion in the MoRE training materials to prepare docents for questions from visitors who may know this history or have seen films depicting the violence. Hannah Rosen’s 2009 monograph Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South uses federal records to argue that race, as it was being negotiated post-emancipation, was a battle fought on the “terrain of gender.” Page 141 →Sexual violence and racist rhetoric complemented one another in attempts by whites to create an atmosphere of terror for Black Americans negotiating citizenship. Between 1865 and 1871, according to historical records, white men raped or sexually assaulted forty-five Black women. Many rapes were not reported, not only because of fear but also because survivors’ only options for lodging complaints were to the Freedman’s Bureau, a federal prosecutor, or a congressional hearing, which were located in cities. In the summer of 1866, African Americans testified in Memphis before congressional investigating committees on the recent three-day-long massacre in the city as well as the rapes by rioters of women associated with Black troops. Five women dared to speak out on the record, and like Black women across the South, they demanded that the federal government protect them as citizens. Black women were not viewed as citizens, and white rapists participating in the Memphis massacre justified their sexual violence with the fantasy that lewd Black women were available for sex. White men first requested sex and then used force or threat to gain compliance. They also construed free Black homes and communities as spaces for their own pleasure, entering these familial dwellings as if they were brothels and choosing women to sexually exploit. Their assailants would generally separate the women from their families and domestic spaces within the women’s sphere before raping them.⁶⁷

As with the historiography of Reconstruction itself, public history is beginning to address the subject of sexual violence and coercion in domestic spaces. In May 2016 Memphis erected a marker commemorating the massacre that resulted in an estimated forty-six deaths and widespread property destruction, including all-Black churches and schools. The marker, unveiled on the 150th anniversary of the incident, acknowledges that several women were raped as part of the violence.⁶⁸ Five blocks from the Wilson home, on the grounds of the state capitol, stands a statue honoring former Dixiecrat governor and senator Strom Thurmond. In 2004 the name of Thurmond’s biracial daughter was etched into the stone beneath the list of his four legally recognized white children previously engraved on the monument. The obvious replacement of the word four with an imperfect five chiseled on top and a less worn inscription of Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s name in comparison to her siblings serve as jarring reminders of the hidden history of sexual assault in biracial households. In 1925, when Thurmond was twenty-two, his sixteen-year-old housekeeper, Carrie Butler, gave birth to their daughter. The social and economic power Thurmond exerted over Butler suggests that at best the affair was coerced rather than consensual.⁶⁹ While there is no evidence to suggest that the Wilsons were complicit in sexual abuse, the gendered, racial, and employment dynamics of the home make it similar to other elite white homes where this abuse took place. Thus the conversation, even Page 142 →if absent from the panel portions of the exhibit, can be raised by docents on MoRE tours with adult audiences.

The issue of sexual violence against women is part of a larger deficiency in HHMs. These institutions often address the roles women filled but not necessarily how womanhood and gender in the period affected their lives, a trend that historian and docent Jennifer Gunter feared would plague the MoRE. The Reconstruction lecture given during training touched briefly on sexual assault and rape as forms of terrorism utilized by whites during massacres in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866. Echoing the work of historians, consultant Daniella Cook also expressed to the interpretive team that the archives reveal relationships between white men and Black women, many of which were products of white violence. While the MoRE relayed stories of survival affiliated with the demise of slavery and the political unrest of Reconstruction, it stopped short of being an unapologetically radical HHM because of the interpretive challenges surrounding a discussion of rape.⁷⁰ At minimum guides should be prepared to address questions about this topic, both for communities aware of the historical violence and those who sense it was there but lack the tools to understand it fully. For example, one middle-aged white man exited the pantry and asked about the movie The Butler (dir. Lee Daniels, 2013). The visitor specifically mentioned the opening rape scene and was trying to ascertain the historical time period. He was unsure whether the setting of the cotton field was during slavery or the post-emancipation sharecropping era. This was a teaching moment that not all docents were equipped to embrace, that Black field labor and sexual violence continued from slavery into the twentieth century. Docents must be prepared to have these discussions, because visitors have questions about these difficult subjects. Additionally, by opening a discussion of sexual violence in domestic spaces, rape as a terror tactic used by the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina’s upstate and across the South during Reconstruction can be broached more effectively in the MoRE room exhibiting political terrorism, discussed in the next chapter.⁷¹

The homes Woodrow Wilson once occupied all interpret race, whiteness, and the Black experience but do so with varying levels of success in both representation and encouraging dialogue. Interpreting the labor of Black Americans for the Wilson family is the most common method linking these homes together. None are perfect as they traverse slavery, Civil War, intolerance, and political discord. In all four homes, sexual assault as a political tool and form of white terror remains a hidden topic. With the rise of popular television shows featuring domestic laborers in elite homes, the Downton Abbey effect further complicates conversations about spaces segregated along racial and class lines. But Historic Columbia’s requiring white docents who Page 143 →interpret more inclusive narratives to attend language and cultural sensitivity training gave these frontline workers the education and skills needed for the task. Docents were not monolithic in their response to training or their approach to handling the racial themes demanded by the tour. In addition docents’ varied interpretive choices, philosophies, and debates about segregated labor illuminate the challenges HHMs will likely face and provide a blueprint that can be explored and modified as more sites work toward greater inclusivity.⁷² Lastly, a conversation centered around public history between the Wilson childhood homes in Staunton, Virginia, and Augusta, Georgia, would provide continuity and generate scholarship on the Wilson family’s relationship with slavery and as beneficiaries and supporters of the institution. Likewise a dialogue between the MoRE and the president’s final home in Washington, DC, would demonstrate Wilson’s lifelong reliance on Black domestic labor and offer opportunities for conjecture on how that shaped his policies on race and segregation. Finally, knowledge of Mary and Isaac Scott’s lives under a paternalistic Wilson household would expand if the President Woodrow Wilson House incorporated records from the Wilson Presidential Library about Edith Wilson’s involvement in the founding of the site. Page 144 →