THE LAST WORD

Izetta Autumn Mobley

Museum Educator

Native Washingtonian Izetta Autumn Mobley is a Museum Educator with the Office of Historic Alexandria (OHA) where she tells the complex stories of the past in order to help people address the issues of today.

What led you to pursue a career in history?

My doctorate is in American Studies which is an interdisciplinary field. While I work in history, I also do work in art history, visual and material culture and disability studies. I think of myself as an educator first – whether that’s working to ensure that low-income students have access to college, addressing inequity or working in museums or with cultural institutions. I think understanding [historical] context can be a useful tool in problem-solving and innovation.

What is your favorite aspect of your job with the OHA?

There are many things I enjoy about working with OHA, but I particularly enjoy working with students and children who come to the museums. I love hearing how they perceive history, how they are processing information, their excitement (or even sometimes resistance) to learning about history. I like the challenge of making history relevant to young people.

Since beginning to work at Freedom House at 1315 Duke Street – the site of Franklin & Armfield, the most prolific traffickers in enslaved people in the nineteenth century – I recognize even more fully that I have a commitment and passion for making history relevant to people. I think museums have a dynamic potential to be sites of lifelong learning and engagement – spaces for us to grapple with and explore history and ourselves.

What is OHA doing to preserve and share the full story of Alexandria's past?

We want to provide visitors with rich and full histories of Alexandria. OHA works across more than a dozen sites – that’s a lot of history! With Franklin & Armfield, I think we’re really striving to tell a story about Alexandria that has always been present but may have been submerged.

How is learning about the past important in the ongoing fight for racial justice in America?

We need accurate, nuanced, complex, engaging and relevant ways to grapple with and attend to our nation’s past. A past without nuance or accuracy, a past that invents, or one that obscures difficult realities including racial injustice - fails to make vital connections between the present and the past, [and] does a disservice to us as a society. When we engage with the realities of racial injustice in the United States – when we attend to the histories that make us quake, or feel angry, or feel ashamed, or sad, or reveal that things are not actually as we thought, or that we struggle with – we are building something that can take the pressure of what it means to truly live out democracy together. History, accurately and ethically told, is a form of justice.

THREE PEOPLE (PAST OR PRESENT) THAT INSPIRE ME MOST:

Ida Barnett Wells, Pauli Murray and Octavia Butler.

FAVORITE SPOT IN ALEXANDRIA:

For reflection, I find the Freedmen’s Cemetery a powerful place to visit, sit and think. Runners up: Fibre Space and seeing Alexandria from the Water Taxi.

FAVORITE PODCAST:

The Moth and RedHanded. If I had a podcast it would be all about books!

CURRENT READ ON MY NIGHTSTAND:

As an academic and museum educator, I am never reading just one book! Currently, I’m working my way through four books - Dr. Marcia Chatelain’s “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America,” “Song in a Weary Throat” the autobiography of Pauli Murray, Stephanie Jones-Rogers book “They Were Her Property: White Women Slave Owners in the American South,” and “Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century” edited by Alice Wong.

IF I COULD TRAVEL ANYWHERE, I WOULD GO TO:

A tour along the east coast of Africa, stopping in Zanzibar, and continuing to Ethiopia, and Egypt.

SOMETHING SURPRISING ABOUT ME:

Though I work in fields that require me to give public talks and engage a great deal with people, I’m an introvert.

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