Recent visitors to Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park have probably paid more attention to the budding spring landscape than to a series of 7-foot-tall, sepia-toned panels in the main lobby of the visitors’ center.
On its face the traveling exhibit, “Free at Last,” is a static presentation of vignettes documenting slavery, the abolition movement and the march up to the Civil War. In its presentation of those epic topics, the exhibit is a straightforward recitation of fact, unassuming except for its sheer physical height.
Yet its presence at this site — where Confederate troops beat back a Union attack during its campaign to take Atlanta — is remarkable. It marks the infancy of the national park’s effort to broaden its interpretation of the war beyond military maneuvers.
The park is now exploring the root causes of the conflict, specifically slavery, and examining how the social, political and economic repercussions are felt today. In doing so, it hopes to expand its audience of tourists to include more African-Americans who typically do not visit battlefield parks in great numbers, but whose history is inextricably linked to the war’s origins.
The key will be to avoid alienating those who have come to count on the park as a repository of by-the-book battlefield stories.
“We recognize that these sites are heritage sites to some people,” said Stanley Bond, park superintendent. “We’re not saying their heritage isn’t important, but that there are other people out there for whom the battlefield is an important part of their heritage, too. We’re not taking away from anyone. We just have a bigger story to tell.”
Creating context
Last year Kennesaw had 1.5 million visitors, making it second in battlefield park attendance to Gettysburg, Bond said. Most of Kennesaw’s visitors, about 85 percent, are recreational users. The remaining 15 percent of visitors come for historical tours. Although the park does not officially track the race of its visitors, Bond said, anecdotal evidence suggests that African-Americans are a tiny fraction of those heritage tourists.
For many Americans, the study of the war is a tough sell. It can feel ancient and irrelevant. But for African-Americans, it can be an especially tough sell.
“One of the reasons it’s so difficult to get African-Americans interested in Civil War history is that the nature of much of the scholarship has been presented as blacks having no agency in gaining their own freedom,” said Hari Jones, curator of the African American Civil War Museum and Memorial in Washington, D.C. “But 10 percent of the North’s Army was African-American, [16] percent of the Navy. Almost 200,000 served. So if you’re at least a fifth-generation African-American, it’s more likely than not that you had some ancestor in that great campaign.”
Kennesaw’s push to tell that aspect of the story is rooted in a 1997 tour of more than 20 Civil War battlefields by U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. Jackson said he’d taken the tour to better understand how the conflict continues to influence national politics and race relations. What he heard, including at Kennesaw, were war stories without social context. In 2000, Jackson introduced language into the Department of the Interior’s appropriations budget mandating that national battlefield parks begin broadening their presentations to include catalysts for the war, especially slavery.
Before that, park service policy had been to steer clear of anything that could be construed as volatile, Bond said.
“It’s complex and controversial to talk about slavery since there was a broad array of reasons for secession,” Bond said. “But it’s slavery that’s usually mentioned within the second line or so of articles of secession.”
Like other parks, Kennesaw had to find a way to meet the mandate. And like other parks, it has taken several years to figure out. Any time an organization tweaks its presentation of an established historical narrative there can be friction.
Michael Allen is a community partnership specialist at Fort Sumter National Monument in South Carolina, where the war began. When he started as a ranger 30 years ago, African-American visitors were few and far between. No memorabilia reflected their specific history and exhibits didn’t deal with the role of antebellum blacks in building the Southern economy.
“Take into account all of that and then add in the surprise visitors had when they saw me,” said Allen, who is African-American. “They would ask me questions like, ‘What do you have to do with this?’ or ask what version of the story would I be telling, North or South.”
After the congressional order, historians from around the country were invited to Charleston and met with park service officials to come up with an action plan. Now Sumter’s gift shop has books about black soldiers and the role of African-Americans in the development of the low-country in addition to Confederate paraphernalia. Allen said he has noticed an uptick in the number of African-Americans attending the park. And he rarely gets questions any more about his presence.
“But this is still a work in progress,” he said.
A national model?
Bond came to Kennesaw in 2009. The park’s museum had already begun to alter its displays, adding to the collection of Confederate and Union uniforms, flags and artillery, brief mentions of human chattel and the role blacks played in the war effort.
For example, slaves were forced to construct fences used by Confederate soldiers at Kennesaw, and black soldiers built similar defenses for Union troops, Bond said. Black women served as nurses in Union hospitals and sometimes as cooks for black units. Some black Union troops were killed removing casualties after the Kennesaw assault.
None of this was bringing in more African-Americans.
So Bond worked with Hermina Glass Avery, associate director of the Center for the Study of the Civil War Era at Kennesaw State University, to sponsor focus groups that would gauge African-American attitudes about the war.
Conducted last spring and summer by Avery in conjunction with metro community groups, the results surprised neither Bond nor Avery. Most respondents said they were aware that black soldiers fought in the war and that slavery was one cause of it, but that connection felt abstract at the park. One participant said simply: “Tell our story and we will come.”
Bond presented the results this year at a gathering of battlefield park directors. David Vela, Southeast Regional Director for the park service, said the report was groundbreaking for the department. Instead of park staff researching and developing exhibits in isolation, this time it asked a target audience what it wanted to see.
“It’s a model we’re interested in engaging on a national level,” Vela said. “Will it offend somebody because we’re dealing with it? Possibly. But we have to do it. It’s about relevance. How are national parks relevant to everyone?”
At the end of the month, Kennesaw battlefield plans to bring in re-enactors of the United States Colored Troops 54th Massachusetts regiment, whose real-life members were the subject of the film “Glory.” A new park welcome video is in the works that will, in part, address the fraught legacy. As the 150th anniversary of war plays out over the next four years, Kennesaw and others will have to find ways to tell various sides of a story that still reverberates.
“This is a sensitive journey, and we’re cognizant of that,” Allen said. “But the hope is that it will prompt conversations we’ve long avoided having.”
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