By Rebecca Beit-Aharon

This past June, I jumped into the deep end of twentieth-century labor history with my graduate internship at the Lynn Museum. Lynn, Massachusetts has been an industrial town for well over a century, with a radical labor voice exemplified by IUE-CWA Local 201, the labor union at Lynn’s General Electric complex. For my internship, I have been building an exhibit about Local 201—building a research library, listening to the oral histories conducted by UMass Boston’s Labor Resource Center, finding digital and physical assets, building an interpretive plan, designing an exhibit script and panels, and working with community stakeholders. It’s been an amazing ride.

In Spring 2023, I worked again with Professor Becker in a practicum course to design an interpretive plan for a hypothetical reworking of Faneuil Hall’s Great Hall. While our work was purely hypothetical (and therefore unrestricted by timelines and budget), it was an excellent exercise in developing the shape of an exhibit.

Going in, I knew my weak spots for this project were my lack of a labor history background and my inexperience with designing a real, physical exhibit. However, I knew I had great mentors in my internship supervisor Doneeca Thurston, Executive Director of the Lynn Museum, and Professor Nick Juravich, who teaches labor studies and history.

Getting Started

Luckily for me, the LRC and Professor Juravich had done a lot of work on the Local 201 history project before I came on board in June. The LRC has conducted over fifty oral histories of Local 201 members as of this August. Professor Juravich had compiled a number of sources by and about union members, and in my early research I found even more—newspaper articles, academic articles, and videos, to name a few.

In early June, I met with stakeholders from the Local to help determine the main themes of the exhibit. Unlike other projects I’ve worked on, this exhibit is inextricably tied to a vibrant, passionate organization. Knowing their desires for the exhibit was crucial to building an interpretive plan and the exhibit script itself, their feedback has been vital.

Interpretive Plan, Exhibit Script, and Panels

I developed an interpretive plan based on the key themes from that first meeting using the template from Professor Becker’s Spring 2023 practicum, which includes historical themes and topics, the “big idea,” material evidence, audience and goals, and presentation. For a big idea, or overarching interpretive message, I came up with the following:

The IUE Local 201 union at GE Lynn has enabled members to engage in community, work to improve their working conditions, and exert their rights through a democratic structure and militant activism throughout their ninety-year history.

Key words for the exhibit, to carry us through, were militant, democratic, activism, labor, and community. Key themes include working at GE (i.e. what does the work entail); union independence, democracy, and leadership; the Women’s Committee; fighting racism; health and safety; and surviving in the new economy (i.e. neoliberalism, globalism, and supplier migration).

These key themes mapped nicely into a semi-chronological exhibit script, starting with defining key terms (what exactly is a union? good question!), early union history, and working at GE, then moving through the various committees that were founded in the 1970s, and ending with more recent history like NAFTA, supplier migration, and current community engagement. I am very grateful for Professor Juravich’s help with the early panels in particular—thanks to his background in labor history, his introduction to the exhibit is engaging and succinct.

Finding arresting assets (photos, videos, and material objects) was one of the major challenges of this project. While the Local has an enormous archive, it’s mostly paper records, which aren’t best suited to engaging visitors. However, they prepared a selection of materials for my perusal, from which I was able to find some fascinating assets that showcase the communal, activist spirit of Local 201: photos of floats at rallies; shirts for various campaigns and strikes; buttons for elections, events, strikes, campaigns, and more. Beyond that, the Lynn Museum has some gripping photos, and they just discovered a 1920s-era toolbox from a GE employee as well.

Moving onto the physical side of the exhibit, I drafted exhibit panels using Canva (protip: nonprofits get access to Canva’s premium service for free with a simple application). I was grateful here for Beverly Serrell’s Exhibit Labels, which helped me figure out font size and word counts for my panels. Because a large part of our audience—union retirees—are older, I went with larger text to ensure they’d have an easy time reading, not least of all because some of our panels will be over a piano!

Professor Juravich and I both spoke to concerned union members, and together with Doneeca, we drafted a plan for moving forward. I spoke with one stakeholder over the phone, to whom I said, “If you’re not comfortable, we’re not comfortable!”

Getting over the sting of critique and focusing on the important partnership was key to rebuilding accord with our stakeholders. I’m excited to move forward with the project knowing that everyone is more comfortable with it! Our goal is to tell varied stories, not just one, and it’s stakeholder feedback that pushed us further in that multivocal direction. With our new plan, we’ve got key steps for moving forward to highlight Lynners, broaden the types of voices and stories being told, and create an exhibit everyone can be proud of.