The Loss of Bill Martin
It's so insane for Bill Martin to have died in a crosswalk. There's probably a metaphor there somewhere. Not that it matters. Right now, for those who knew him and worked with him, loved him as family and friend, this is just an awful, terrible thing.
Bill Martin was the first museum director to wholly support the work of the Sacred Ground Project and the preservation of the Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground and the historic landscape that the current and next generations will know as The Shockoe Project.
Bill championed my selection as a HistoryMaker for Social Justice in 2015 to corporate board members who objected because the Defenders had protested some of their company's economic practices. Yet Bill did so because to make that award in that year marked a specific, important moment of progress in the struggle for social justice through historic preservation. He tied the museum to that; You could call it an opportunism of relevance and it was helpful.
Bill, along with other groundbreakers in the last 20 years (Christy Coleman, Stacy Burrs, Jamie Bosket), understood precisely what a museum could do and pursued it relentlessly. I think it was that clarity that allowed him to bridge the contradictions that came from the need for corporate funding partners and the will to let the museum serve the community. Not to solve social justice problems but to contribute to it. By providing the resources that a museum in this era can provide - the space, the interpretive opportunities, historical facts based on authentic artifacts, dedicated, curious and generous people, I think he believed there was no gift more interesting or appropriate than giving Richmond the truth-telling platform of Richmond's actual history - with the record of it preserved and made available to help us through it, to improve and track the city as it continues creating its history. He sought to create space for good work and get out of its way.
We served together on the Future of Richmond's Past committee that coordinated five years programming for the 150th Anniversary of the American Civil War and Emancipation. I, representing the Defenders' Sacred Ground Project, was the only member of this body of 19 cultural institutions that didn't have a building or a staff! We were not a museum or library or university or city agency. And so we brought and wielded a voice not usually included. Bill supported our role and was vocal about the importance of preserving the full nine-acre historic landscape, birthplace of the city and its role in perpetuating slavery. And he quietly and strategically continued that support.
The last project I worked on with Bill was as part of the team that brainstormed the interpretation of the Edward Valentine studio from an homage to that artist to a journey through the era Valentine had served: the Lost Cause / Jim Crow cultural movement as it developed and was used to reassert and codify white supremacy in Richmond, Virginia. This was a further expression of the museum's willingness to examine its own history over that same period and our committee got to pry it open and lay it bare. If you haven't seen Art, Power, and the "Lost Cause" American Myth, do.
The bronze sculpture of Confederate President Jefferson Davis was pulled down from its Monument Avenue pedestal during the summer of 2020 by young people fed up with the sacrosanct treatment of monuments to Confederate nostalgia and malignant Jim Crow messaging in the public landscape. Masses of young people yanked it down and the decisionmakers of the city had to face a new political moment. Bill and his team knew the Valentine as the city's history museum should have that artifact and they knew it had to be preserved and displayed in the condition which authentically represented its significance to present-day Richmond history.
I'm absolutely sure I am leaving out important memories, but there are messages flowing out there this week from many of who have much to share of their memories of Bill. This is what I've got for now. There are a great many people transitioning in various ways all around us. Each one is a blow. Each one is a history wrapping up.
There were only a handful of occasions when I got to spend time with Bill "off the clock," just discussing life and the moment we were sharing, usually with his longtime, very close friend Marquette. Glasses of white wine in the garden, meeting someplace quiet and groovy in town... He was always planning the next five and thirty years. He was hopeful and present.
Bill Martin was the "walking-est" museum director I ever met. An inelegant word for a truly elegant, compassionate and thinking man, but Bill loved walking the streets of the city that told him its stories and I'm sorry I never took one of those walks with him.
Ana
