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Deloris Guttman, director of the Obama Hawaiian Africana Museum, said she’d rather not give her age, but did provide her best time — three hours and 38 minutes — in the Honolulu Marathon.
“I don’t like my age, because I’m all about young people,” the fit-looking Guttman said, her gold earrings swinging beneath her close-cropped grey hair as she walked through the Honolulu Hale Municipal Gallery, where selections from the museum’s collection can be viewed through Saturday in honor of Black History Month.
“Our mission is teaching Hawaii schoolchildren in pre-K to 12th grade about diversity and the history of people of African descent in Hawaii,” she said.
The idea, she added, stemmed from diversity workshops she conducted in Oahu schools in the 1990s, after learning of an African American fourth-grader who was bullied because of her race.
>> PHOTOS: Barack Obama exhibit on display at Honolulu Hale
Guttman, who served on the committee that in 2014 submitted a proposal for a Barack Obama presidential library in Honolulu, is now seeking a permanent home for her nonprofit museum, originally founded as the African American Diversity Cultural Center Hawaii in 1997.
She changed the name in 2018 to honor the former president because, although Obama was born here, attended Noelani Elementary School, graduated from Punahou School and lived in several homes around Honolulu, “there (was) nothing bearing his name, not even a stone,” Guttman said.
By contrast, Chicago, the city that won the bid for an Obama Presidential Center, boasts an “Obama kissing rock” where in 2012 a plaque was affixed to commemorate Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date.
Guttman has submitted a proposal to the state Legislature seeking a $1 million grant-in-aid for capital funding to procure a bigger space for the museum, currently housed in cramped, rented headquarters at 1311 Kapiolani Blvd., near Ala Moana Mall.
“We have only 900 square feet for our archives, myself and our student interns, who are volunteers, like me.” There are also life-size, cardboard cutouts of Obama and Oprah Winfrey (a part-time Maui resident), which, she said, tourists stop by and take selfies with.
Some of the collection, she added, is also on display in Campbell and Radford High Schools and Moanalua Middle School.
For a possible permanent site, “We’re looking at places where Obama lived,” Guttman said, adding that another temporary option might be to find donated space in Kakaako near the Obama mural at the corner of Kapiolani and Ward Avenue.
Guttman said she keeps in touch with Maya Soetoro-Ng, the president’s younger sister, who teaches at the Spark M. Matsunaga Institute for Peace at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, and consults with the Obama Foundation’s Leaders Program.
“I have been supportive of Ms. Guttman’s efforts, (and) my brother is aware of the effort,” Soetoro-Ng wrote in an email, “although (we) have not had the chance to see any of her work or exhibits, and can only applaud and mahalo her kind intentions.”
The exhibit on view at Honolulu Hale is rich with photos of Obama and his family members, but it also profiles many other accomplished African Americans in Hawaii.
Included are jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, who served in the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor during World War II, photographed playing at an Oahu officers’ club, and Anthony D. Allen, an escaped slave who sailed to Hawaii in 1810 as a ship’s steward out of Boston and became an adviser to King Kamehameha I.
Washington Middle School now stands on Allen’s former property; in 2015, the National Park Service deemed the site as “(meeting) the requirements for inclusion in the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.”
That, Guttman said, captures students’ imaginations. “They ask, how can the Underground Railroad go under the ocean?”
She smiled at a group of preschoolers who filed through the exhibit with their teachers, and pointed out an African drum, its wooden base carved with elegant figures, that she bought in a village in Ghana.
“Drums connect us across all cultures,” she said, “and we can be a resource for telling the world how to live in harmony and peace,” she added of Hawaii’s multicultural people.
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