Former actor turned organizational consultant E.B. Smith was recently hired as the new executive director of the Harrison Museum of African American Culture in Roanoke.
The appointment comes at a time of remarkable transition for the museum as it prepares to move from its longtime home in Center in the Square in downtown Roanoke to Melrose Plaza, a multipurpose facility being built by Goodwill Industries of the Valleys in the historically Black community of Northwest Roanoke.
The museum board and former executive director Charles Price brought in Smith early in 2024 to conduct strategic planning. The 42-year-old Ohio native was already familiar with Roanoke, having taught at Hollins University and recently marrying a Roanoke woman.
“If I do say so myself, we put a pretty cool plan together by around November,” said Smith, “and when we presented it at the board meeting they kind of looked at me and said, ‘That sounds great. It’s a lot of work. When do you start?’”
Smith sat down with Cardinal News for a wide-ranging discussion that touched on everything from the original sin of slavery in the United States and the ongoing struggle to atone for that sin, to how his theater background informs his work today, and the museum’s vital role in preserving and presenting Black history. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
On the struggle to preserve African American history:
Knowing where we come from is one of the biggest challenges that African American communities face.
I recognize it in my own family. My father was born in 1940 in Shreveport, Louisiana, and he didn’t really know much about his family. And he did a lot of genealogical research over the course of his life, and he managed to sort of pull at the threads here and there. But you know when your ancestry is full of transactions, and your relatives were bought and sold, records weren’t kept, when you weren’t actually thought of as a family, but as livestock, the humanity is drained from your history. A big part of the work that we have to do now is to sort of reclaim that and start to figure out exactly how we contextualize that for ourselves — not in a traumatic way, but in the sense of pride and legacy that family carries with it … knowing who we really are and what it all means.
If your ancestors were educated people, and they produced documents, letters and bills of sale and deeds to homes and carriages and horses and all kinds of other things that have their handwriting on them, you can figure out where they were and what they were doing. But if you were forbidden from reading and writing, you don’t leave that paper trail. And so … it’s critical to remember what the legacies of education are and the importance of education to the development and maturity of a culture over time.
And so I think organizations like the Harrison Museum are vital to making sure that Black folks know where they come from, what they’ve accomplished, and what they can imagine they will accomplish, but also so that this country can remember that the history is often much more complicated and nuanced and beautiful than what we imagine it is from our our general schooling and imagination.
On slavery as America’s original sin:
African American history for this country is challenging, and that’s no surprise. What happened to enslaved Africans for the first 300 years of this country’s growth and maturity is our original sin as Americans. As we think about what that’s wrought, it causes a lot of consternation, right? Because inevitably, when you start thinking about the legacy of slavery, you start thinking about what the accountability needs to look like today.
Practices ranging from Jim Crow to redlining have stripped wealth from the community that was already struggling to rise. But it’s a complicated conversation, because it’s not so simple as saying white privilege is the problem, or white supremacy is the problem, or any of these other terms. It requires that we get curious and really examine not just where we are, but where we’ve been. And so I think part of loving something is paying attention to it — looking at the good, the bad and the ugly — looking at the power of transformation, as people under difficult circumstances learn how to innovate and make good on their legacy.
Burrell Memorial Hospital [once the only hospital for Black Virginians in the region] is a great example. It was grown out of a need because there was nowhere to serve Black folks in this region medically and so they built a hospital, right? And that’s an extraordinary accomplishment, but that accomplishment was only achieved because there was such extreme disparity in the region. So all this delicate balance of understanding necessity versus triumph is something that we can all relate to on some level, but it does require that we take a breath and celebrate everybody so that white folks can own Black history, immigrants can own Black history. It becomes something aspirational for all of us, and not something that feels like an indictment.
On his theater background:
My professional life started in the arts. Initially, I trained as an actor, and I performed in regional theater across the country. But my father started a consulting business in the 1980s … and he was very interested in creating opportunities in corporations and nonprofits for people of color and women. And so the dinner table conversation was for a long time about increasing representation and figuring out how to help underserved and underrepresented populations be more competitive in the marketplace, and eradicating the kind of biases that have led to disparate impact. I’ve always been mindful of it over the course of my life, it’s part of the conversation. And after a long career in acting, I did some consulting in the family business on the side, but after I left the stage behind, I did a master’s degree in arts administration, and I’m working on a Ph.D. in organizational development.
I was also very fortunate to perform titles by African playwrights who wrote in a sort of epic classical style, and August Wilson, a Black American playwright, and so and so. It allowed me to kind of contextualize the work that I had done in a much more textured ecosystem, and as I left the theater I wanted to find other ways to express the stories that I had been exposed to and the sort of revolution that it had caused in me.
I think museums are an extraordinary vehicle for storytelling. You know, the act of preservation is an act of love. And as you preserve objects, artifacts and traditions, you have to preserve the stories along with them. And so, sharing those stories in a dramatic narrative form, while you’re experiencing the conditions that the objects evoke, is super powerful. It also enables us, I think, to look into the past to see what ingenuity looks like.
I think about the collection of the Harrison Museum, and there are objects there, like a ventilator that was used by the Hunton Life Saving Crew in Gainsboro [one of the first Black rescue squads in the United States], and it’s like this arcane device with tubes and gauges and dials, and it’s enormous. And we were able to save lives with them, and they paved the way for the future. And I wonder if a lot of young folks today realize that that’s their legacy, that tradition of life-saving and medical excellence that existed in Roanoke in particular, both with the Hunton Life Saving Crew, but Burrell Memorial Hospital, these are stories that can remind us that we’re capable of extraordinary things. And so my hope is that as we move forward and evolve the programming at the museum, we can help people, more and more people, understand what they could be capable of in the future by remembering what we’ve accomplished so far.
On African Americans’ hero journey through world history:
The African American story is a diaspora in history. We often forget about the fact that we’re connected across the world to people. There’s a tendency, when we let the division eat at us, to let it shrink us, and let us think that we’re small, that we don’t have power and expansiveness and worldliness. And I think that that’s a mistake to allow ourselves to fall into those doldrums. Like when we imagine various art forms, I think about the Shakespeare I’ve done, the classical theater I’ve done, the popular imagination says that we weren’t part of those stories, but in fact, we were. There were people of the African diaspora all over those stories, and Shakespeare wrote about a few of them. There were African folks in Queen Elizabeth’s court, in King James’ court.
It’s important for us to remember that in a historical context, there was a lot of cultural transference, just like there is today. You look at American culture, and American culture is rife with influences that were cribbed from Black culture all along. The banjo is an African instrument. And so contextualizing that not only reminds people that their contributions are profound and lasting, but also that there’s a big world out there, and it’s all of ours to experience.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with Joseph Conrad, but as an artist and storyteller, he’s one of my sort of touchstones. And you know the hero’s journey is fundamentally about venturing forth, right? You have to answer the call and cross the threshold and then go down the road of trials and meet your malevolent force and defeat it. But the most important part of that story is returning home and sharing the gift. And so if these incredible stories of exposure to the world and connection to the world inspire Black folks to experience the world and share their stories with their community at home, I think we’ve done an extraordinary job of advancing the culture and helping people lift themselves.
On the potential move from Center in the Square to Melrose Plaza:
Museums are often thought of as these places where history is entombed, but it must be leveraged to tell a story and to create narratives that can inspire future growth. And so the opportunity to partner with other organizations that are doing work in the present and contextualize it with all of this rich history that informs what the present is can allow us to really leverage better outcomes.
I want to give Center in the Square their flowers. It’s been an extraordinary home for the museum for a very long time. And it also provides the museum with a level of visibility that’s really important. It’s challenging because we still live in a city that is struggling to bring those communities together effectively and organically. So hopefully we can maintain the relationship with Center in the Square and build upon it.
This is a time of extraordinary growth for the museum. It’s also a time of extraordinary uncertainty for the country. All nonprofits are facing some pretty profound questions. Engagement levels across the board across the country are not what I think we wish they were with nonprofit work, particularly in the arts and culture spaces. So I think it’s incumbent upon cultural institutions to really start to reimagine why they exist and what their purpose is in service of community.
We want to provide an opportunity for people to really feel their value and know their value and understand that they matter in ways that the world doesn’t always tell them that they do, and feel more closely connected to the people in this valley, because we’re all in this together. So the more we can build connective tissue, the more we can start to get people excited about what each other is doing and making and thinking, the more we can spur innovation. And so as an executive director, I’m sort of constantly thinking about how we construct those lattices to build those connections on.
