Educator, author and activist Hallie Q. Brown is the focus of an upcoming “Museum in a Box” event at the library for ages 7–12. (Submitted photo)
Celebrate Greene County History Month with ‘Museum in a Box’
- Published: April 7, 2025
April marks the observation of Greene County History Month, and a number of area organizations — including the Yellow Springs branch of the Greene County Public Library — are celebrating the month with a range of programming.
On Tuesday, April 8, the local library will host a program for ages 7–12, presented by the National Afro American Museum and Cultural Center, on the life of Hallie Quinn Brown.
A well-known Black educator, author and activist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Brown moved to Ohio in 1870, and studied at Wilberforce University, later becoming the first woman to earn a Master of Science degree from the institution. Her career was long and varied; she served as principal of the Tuskegee Institute under Booker T. Washington, and in the Miami Valley, taught both in Dayton public schools and at Wilberforce. Brown was an internationally known speaker and lecturer who often spoke on issues facing Black Americans, and Black women in particular. She was a founder of the National Association of Colored Women, and served for four years as its president in the 1920s.
The News spoke this week with Kevin Lydy, education specialist for the National Afro American Museum and Cultural Center and Ohio History Connection. He said the upcoming event at the YS library is part of the museum’s burgeoning “Museum in a Box” program.
“The impetus behind the whole program was that, with bus driver shortages and field trip costs and everything, if we can’t get [kids] to the museum, how can we bring the museum to them?” Lydy said.
The program on Hallie Q. Brown is the first iteration of the “Museum in a Box” program, and Lydy has presented it in a number of schools around the state; thanks to a grant from the Dayton Foundation, the NAAMCC has thus far been able to offer the program to schools at no charge.
Lydy — a longtime Miami Valley educator who taught social studies at McKinney Middle and YS High schools for seven years — said the NAAMCC chose Brown as the subject of the first “Museum in a Box” based on his own fascination with her life and work.
“I had known about her, but once I started diving into the [museum’s archival] collection, as a former classroom teacher, I just started salivating at all the things we had,” Lydy said.
The “Museum in a Box” program on Brown includes reproductions of some artifacts from the NAAMCC’s collection, including her personal letters and postcards, as well as conference agendas and newspaper and magazine clippings reporting on Brown’s lectures — including one advertising her appearance at a chautauqua at Antioch College.
Lydy said the program’s lesson plans typically allow for about an hour of instruction, but include enough content for up to two hours of programming, depending on each school’s needs. The program can be modified to suit students from kindergarten through 12th grade, using the same artifacts to highlight a range of grade-appropriate facets of Brown’s history. Younger students might learn what Brown’s career encompassed by studying news sources of the 19th century, and older ones might discuss the idea of credibility within historical records based on conflicting information in those same sources.
“I’ve given the same postcards, for example, to kindergarten students and high school students — it’s just a matter of what kinds of questions you ask and what you’re having them look for,” he said.
Presenting the program at the YS library will require Lydy to tailor its lessons to a wide age range, as students ages 7–12 are invited to attend on April 8. He said the local presentation will likely include elements from a number of “Museum in a Box” lesson plans for different grade levels.
“It’s just a matter of feeling things out and seeing where the kids are,” Lydy said.
Looking ahead, Lydy said the NAAMCC aims to produce more “Museum in a Box” programs on different historical figures and events once he’s learned all he can about the implementation of the current lessons focusing on Brown.
“We’ll understand what we might need to change or keep or augment with future iterations, which might focus on Alex Haley, the author of ‘Roots,’ because we have pretty significant things in our archives focused on him,” Lydy said. “We might also do one on [poet] Paul Laurence Dunbar or the Dayton Flood — it just depends on what the archives are telling us.”
Students ages 7–12 are welcome and encouraged to attend the “Museum in a Box” event Tuesday, April 8, 2:45–3:45 p.m. — right after school — in the library’s Virginia Hamilton Meeting Room. No registration is required.
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