Hi, everybody.
I’m Alice Kamps.
I’m one of the curators who worked on the Records of Rights exhibit that’s opening
next week.
We’re standing in the entryway and directly behind me is the Magna Carta, the 1297 Magna
Carta, which is on loan to us from David M. Rubenstein.
It’s a feature of the entryway of the gallery because it is a document, even though it’s
not a federal document, it’s a document that informed the Founders’ ideas about
rights in this country.
So we have it featured here in a beautiful new case and on either side of it there is
a computer-interactive and people can use that to really get up close and really zoom
in and get a great look at the document itself and read a transcript and learn about the
times that it was written in.
When I bought the Magna Carta at the time I said that I was going to put it permanent
loan to the National Archives as a way to make a down payment on the obligation I had
to give back to my country and I feel as strongly today as I did when I made that statement.
I also worked on the interactive table which we’re really excited about.
As you can see it’s a beautiful 17 foot-long multitouch interactive.
And this table allows us to show visitors over 300 records from the National Archives
having to do with rights.
And it allows visitors to pursue their own kind of line–of-inquiry.
If they’re interested in a particular topic they can search by key word to find documents
or they can explore via a timeline.
They can also share the documents that they’re looking at.
If they get excited about them or if they’re moved by them, they can tag these documents
with emotions.
And then they can submit the documents to the center of the table, which sends a message
to each of the other people working at the table and also puts the document up on the
monitor screens on the walls.
Surrounding the interactive table there are four cases, which will hold the changing original
documents that we will feature in the exhibit.
Hi, I’m Bruce Bustard and I’m a curator in the exhibit staff here in Washington, D.C.
I’d like to take you on a little tour of my section of the Records of Rights exhibit
which is called Yearning to Breathe Free.
And it is the section of the exhibit that deals with immigration in American life.
The first thing that you’ll notice is that there are two reproductions of documents that
we’re calling the key documents to the sections.
Then as you begin to walk around the gallery you’ll notice that there are framed facsimiles
and that they are mounted on a series of fences.
And those fences have been designed to replicate the fences that immigrants would have seen
as they walked through the process of immigration at Ellis Island.
The first part of the immigration section is called Leaving Home, which describes why
different immigrant groups left their homelands and came to America.
The second section is called Arriving In America, which describes not only the process of getting
into the United States but also the process of Americanization and to a certain extent,
assimilation.
Then there is also a section that’s called Regulating Immigration, which gets into the
nitty-gritty of the early laws and regulations and different kinds of restrictions that immigrants
faced.
And then finally there is a section that’s called Defending Communities.
Two of the most important documents in the Yearning to Breathe Free section are the 1884
Deed of Gift for the Statue of Liberty and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
And what we try to do by displaying reproductions of these documents is to get at the idea that
there has always been a kind of ambiguity or even polarity about attitudes of Americans
toward immigrants.
Hello, my name is Jennifer Johnson.
I’m a curator in Washington, D.C.
And I was the curator for Remembering The Ladies, a theme in the new Records of Rights
exhibit that highlights stories of women’s history.
And the documents span a wide range of dates, from as early as 1804 all the way up until
President Obama signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009.
So one of the themes in Remembering The Ladies is the story of women’s suffrage.
The theme is called Winning The Vote.
This street lamp along with the others are a clue that you are in an outside street scene
reminiscent of what the suffrages who were protesting outside the White House would have
been standing in front of when they were protesting for the right to vote in the 19 teens.
So for Remembering the Ladies the two key documents are the 19th Amendment, which was
effective in 1920.
The 19th Amendment was the culmination of a decade’s long struggle for suffrage for
women and the Equal Rights Amendment, which was proposed just three years after suffrage
was granted in 1923 had an also decade’s long story to it, and in 1982 with just three
states short of the required number of votes to ratify it.
So it was never passed.
Not only was there the ERA battle, but as you move along you see other pieces of legislation
that were highly influential for women, one being the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
other being Title 9, which guaranteed equal opportunity in education for women.
And one result of that was that women participating in sports almost quadrupled after the passage
of that.
So one theme in Remembering The Ladies is exploring women in the work place.
Behind me is a mural of women working in a factory during World War Two.
But also there are things like this pamphlet that the War Department created, because of
the World Wars droves of women entered the work force like never before, and this pamphlet
was written to instruct supervisors on how to talk with, deal with, and understand women
who they were going to be employing.
Hi, my name is Michael Hussey and I was the curator for the Bending Towards Justice section
of the Records of Rights exhibit, which documents the efforts and the struggles of African-Americans
to achieve full civil rights within the United States.
And we’re standing now in the section called Slavery in a Democracy.
In the Declaration of Independence life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was considered
an unalienable right for all people.
It did not include enslaved African-Americans, some of whom actually helped to build the
Capitol and the White House.
Actually most of the labor for both of those buildings was provided by enslaved Americans.
The second section is referred to as Paths To Freedom.
There were many paths that African Americans took to establish their freedom, their right
under the law to be considered human beings.
And one of them was to serve in the military during the Civil War.
The third section is called Separate and Unequal.
And it’s about Jim Crow laws that were instituted in the early 20th Century.
We created an environment for this section of the exhibit.
You can see the brick work, the galvanized steel roof.
It was reminiscent of images that we were seeing in photographs of bus stations and
train stations and other segregated public facilities in the United States.
The fourth section of this part of the exhibit is called Injustice and Resistance.
And it deals with the 20th Century Civil Rights Movement, which culminated in the Voting Rights
Act, in the Civil Rights Act.
And we’re seeing here some great photographs from the March on Washington from August of
1963.
This part of the exhibit includes this digitally-restored footage of the March on Washington from 1963.
It gives you a real sense of what it would have been like to have been there.
This section has two key documents.
And in this case it’s the Congressional Resolution for the 15th Amendment which gave
all African-American men, regardless whether they had been slaves or not, the right to
vote.
And 95 years later, in 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act; an act which had said
was to enforce the 15th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
These three struggles, the struggles of African Americans, the struggles of women, the struggles
of immigrants to get the rights that were promised in the Declaration of Independence
and promised in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is what this is about behind
me.
So I’m very proud to be able to be supportive of this and I think more Americans will be
able to understand better the struggles that so many people have gone through to get the
rights that were promised in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the
Constitution.
And that’s what this exhibition is really about, making sure people realize that if
we don’t have these rights automatically we have to fight to get them, and once we
get them we have to preserve them.
So I want to thank David, I want to thank Jim, I want to thank A’Lelia, I want to
thank Chris and the entire team for putting this together, and thank you all for being
here as well.
Thank you.
(Applause)