Museum Concepts

Powerful Message

The Master’s House Is Still Standing
What Lorde actually argued about power—and why her most quoted line is also her most misunderstood.

Audre Lorde did not write to decorate the world. She wrote to change its weather.
That distinction—between art as ornament and art as instrument—sits at the center of her life and legacy, and it helps explain why her sentences keep reappearing whenever public language fails. In a culture that often prizes neutrality as sophistication, Lorde treated neutrality as an alibi. In movements that sometimes prefer slogans to complexity, she insisted on specificity—about race, gender, sexuality, class, illness, and the daily negotiations required to remain a person when the world keeps trying to reduce you to a category. She is routinely introduced as a poet, an essayist, an activist. Each label fits, but none contains her. Better to begin where she began: with the insistence that she would define herself, or be defined into disappearance.

Her most famous line—“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”—is now invoked across contexts from academia to corporate diversity training. The risk of ubiquity is dilution. In its original setting (a speech later collected in Sister Outsider), the argument is not a decorative paradox. It is a challenge to any liberation project that adopts the values, metrics, and exclusions of the system it claims to oppose. Lorde’s point is not that strategy is futile; it is that strategy must be congruent with the freedom it seeks. Otherwise the movement becomes a renovation crew for the very house that harms it.

Read the full story at https://www.kolumnmagazine.com/2026/02/20/the-masters-house-is-still-standing/

Wonderful Legacy

"I have engaged in almost Every Branch of work that is usual and unusual about S.I."

Written by the Smithsonian's first Black employee, these words are an effective summary of Solomon Brown's career. First hired in 1852, Brown formed a close relationship with naturalist Spencer Baird, who would become the second Secretary of the Smithsonian. Baird trusted Brown deeply and while away on frequent travel relied on Brown to be his “eyes and ears” of the Institution. Brown and Baird frequently corresponded about the operations of the Smithsonian, city events, their personal lives, and more.

Brown's impact was felt throughout D.C.'s Black community as he led scientific lecture series covering such topics as "The Social Habits of Insects," routinely published in various Black newspapers, and served on numerous educational boards.

In 2004, several trees were planted around the museum in his honor.

What a fabulous opportunity!

“I spent the summer of 2013 at MDAH immersed in Eudora Welty's collection. That summer also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Medgar Evers in Jackson, and I read Welty's "Where is the Voice Coming From?" manuscript with all her scribbled notes fifty years to the day of Evers' murder. The notes I composed as a fellow at MDAH are still an active part of the scholarship I produce on Welty, and I believe that is the most remarkable aspect of this fellowship. Every fellow will discover something new and see Welty differently.” -Ebony Lumumba, Chair of the Department of English, Foreign Languages, and Speech Communication at Jackson State University, 2013 Welty Fellow

MDAH is accepting applications for the 2023 Eudora Welty Research Fellowship. Offered in partnership with the Eudora Welty Foundation, this annual fellowship awards a $5,000 stipend to one graduate student to conduct research using the Eudora Welty Collection at MDAH for two weeks during the summer. Visit https://www.mdah.ms.gov/weltyfellowship for more information. Deadline to apply is Friday, March 3, 2023. Photo courtesy of Ebony Lumumba.