History alum helps tell the story of racism It’s a unique moment in history, and America’s Black Holocaust Museum is poised at its crossroads. For the past 12 years, ever since the organization lost its building in the 2008 Recession, ABHM has been a strictly virtual museum. That made it perfectly positioned to weather the coronavirus pandemic that has limited crowds and impacted other museums around Milwaukee. And, as protests have swept the nation in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville at the hands of police, ABHM saw its mission become more critical than ever. UWM alumna Mia Phifer is helping ABHM navigate it all. A 2018 graduate of UWM’s public history program with certificates in museum studies and nonprofit management, Phifer serves as the Executive Assistant to the museum’s President/CEO. She sat down to talk about her work. What is America’s Black Holocaust Museum? It all started with a man named Dr. James Cameron. When he was 16 years old, he survived a lynching attempt in August of 1930. Afterward, he became a well-known civil rights activist, educator, and self-trained historian. He came to Milwaukee and created this museum as a place for Milwaukeeans and people across the country to visit and get that unvarnished truth of our country’s racial history in order to promote racial reconciliation and forge a better nation. Unfortunately, the museum’s physical location did not survive the Great Recession of 2008. A group of people took what was in the physical museum, all of that content, and put it all online to create a virtual museum in 2012 to make sure it survived. We are currently re-opening the museum in the exact same location where it used to be on North and Vel Phillips. “Holocaust” seems like a provocative title. Dr. Cameron founded the museum after he had visited Jerusalem and the Holocaust museum there. He saw a lot of parallels between how African Americans are treated here in this country and how Jews were treated in the days leading to the Jewish Holocaust. He found that term fit what happened during slavery and Jim Crow, revealing the truth behind (history) that has been whitewashed over. How did you come to your current role? I really like bringing history outside of the classroom and producing a more honest, unvarnished history than what you normally get, especially in a high school classroom. Museums are one space to do that. 10 • IN FOCUS • July, 2020
(From left to right) Cyndey Key (ABHM employee), Mia Phifer (UWM alumna and ABHM employee), and Robert Davis (President/CEO of ABHM) stand in front of a Juneteenth flower installation outside American’s Black Holocaust Museum. Photo courtesy of Mia Phifer.
As an undergraduate at Coe College in Iowa, I began picking internships at museums. When I found out about UWM’s public history program, it was a no-brainer. During graduate school, (a UWM professor) introduced me to America’s Black Holocaust Museum. Every time I had the opportunity to use their history as part of my projects in my classes, I did. For a nonprofit management course studying nonprofit finances, I picked the museum to study. For an exhibit review of a museum, I picked their website. When the posting for an assistant to the president/CEO went up, I had literally 10 different people send it to me. I went into the interview for that job specifically, and they ended up creating a whole different position for me to utilize those skills that UWM equipped me with. They found me work more on the nonprofit management side and on the museum studies and public history side. Since then, I got a promotion in March and I am doing some of that executive assistant work for our new president and CEO, Dr. Robert Davis. He’s very conscious of the fact that I’m a public historian and he’s always having me help with different research projects that allow me to use my background that I got at UWM. What does a typical day look like for you? People with a museum studies background will recognize the phrase, ‘Around a museum, you wear many hats.’ That’s what’s always attracted me to a smaller, more grassroots museum. Even though I have a formal title, (my job) is very organic and team-oriented, especially with our team being so small. There are only four of us who are part of th core staff.
