Everyday Heroes Shine in Santosh Dhamat for Howard+Revis Design
Civil Rights Museum Makeover by Adam Roberts It took eight years, but flocks of new visitors agree the wait was worth it. On April 5, 2014, the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn., reopened to the public following a $27.5 million renovation led by museum design firm Howard+Revis Design Services and its cofounder, Jeff Howard ’73. This monumental makeover involved the museum’s entire exhibit infrastructure, taking visitors on a journey from the bowels of a slave ship to the balcony of Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spent his final hours. Howard and his team helped adapt the space into a 21st-century museum—more than 40 new films, oral histories, and interactive media were added to the museum’s already impressive collection of artifacts.
of its Memphis neighborhood. For Howard, the project represented the culmination of a lifetime of civil rights engagement that began in childhood.
Up Segregated: | Growing “Polite Jim Crow” in Northwest DC Although Howard was raised in a solidly upper middle class neighborhood in northwest Washington, D.C., his childhood included a keen awareness of the District’s segregation and troubling, often confusing encounters with what he calls “polite Jim Crow.” He first noticed the contrast of worlds when he was out with Rosa Chester, his family’s African American nanny. Whether it was sitting separately from Rosa at a screening of West Side Story or the realization that his family members were the only white guests at her wedding, Howard’s exposure to inequality began at an early age.
The grand reopening attracted national This education continued as he attention, resulting in a spike in the tagged along to protests, includmuseum’s attendance and a revitalization ing a Black Panther rally, with his 1989 • | | Phillipian editors print a mock issue of The Exonian that shocks the campus with overtly racist, sexist, classist, and homophobic themes.
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1990 • | | The first LGBTQ alumni gathering in NYC is attended by 65 alumni from across the U.S.
best friend (whose father headed the Washington Post editorial page). Howard remembers soldiers guarding stores when riots descended on DC, and white business owners consulting with their black employees on how to avoid being looted. Andover appealed to Howard because it provided an environment where students could begin to bridge these gaps. “I liked that people weren’t cookiecutter. They had long hair. They were white and black, from privilege and from inner cities.” Forty years later, the mission of the National Civil Rights Museum project resonated. “The fact that America’s foremost advocate of equity and inclusion, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated a mere year before I started my PA career—and at the Lorraine Motel, the site of this museum project— lent a definite poignancy to this assignment,” Howard says. “It was five years 1990 • | | Andover modifies its nondiscrimination policy to include sexual orientation.