History, Healing, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia: Going into the City with the Black Docents Collective

Abstract

During the COVID-19 lockdown of summer 2020, docents at the African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP) decided that if the museum could not open, they would move their educational practices into the city and online, organizing tours and talks, and producing digital resources, working collaboratively under the name of the ‘Black Docents Collective’ (BDC). Based on qualitative interviews with docents, this article makes sense of the BDC’s work, specifically in relation to their mission statement to heal the Philadelphia African American community. In particular we aim to understand the urban imaginaries of healing evoked by docents: what kind of city and communities do the BDC hope to create? What kind of public sphere is necessary for healing to take place? We suggest that docents’ urban imaginaries of healing go beyond cultural recognition and envisage healing as necessitating a redistribution of resources historically denied to Black Philadelphians. In addition, BDC claim the right for healing to take place within a Black “counterpublic”, of which AAMP already performs a constitutive role. The article contributes to academic debates concerned with the African American museum as well as literature on the topic of wounded cities.