A project is planned to explore how low income youth of color experience their employment in the highly segregated neighborhoods of museums and where people of color are in museums as visitors and employees. The researcher will use personal experiences with young people of color directed to the institutions through foundationally and federally subsidized service learning and employment training programs and experience museums first and most thoroughly as service workers, more often using museums to gain employment skills than to explore art, science, or other products of culture. Black employees at one museum regularly refer to it as the "plantation," since few of them work on the research and exhibit development floors; most are not vertically mobile. At another museum, youth speak of blatant and covert racism. The project will gather testimonies of participants in youth programs. Questions have four foci: inclusion/exclusion, social reproduction, representation, and youth. The literature provides an overview of museum history and professional culture; role of power and privilege in institutions; few historical preservation efforts as they relate to the history of African Americans; and marginalized groups of youth as creators of cultural products that are valuable aesthetically and as documents of nondominant group experiences. Methods will include field research, observation, interviews, interpretation of site documents, and collection of historical and demographic information. (Contains 16 references) (YLB)