[Mayor Levar Stoney] As you know, Richmond has many monuments, and you know how I feel about those
but moments from now I can assure you this will be my favorite monument in the city of Richmond.
[Sarah Driggs] It was exciting, it was an honor, and it was also a challenge.
It was an interesting project because we started out thinking it was going to be so simple,
and nothing like this is ever simple.
[William J. Martin] How do we do that work of memorializing?
We have this existing inventory of monuments; what is missing?
What stories are missing? What parts of our history are missing?
[Ajena Rogers] Maggie L. Walker has a story that allows us to look at a time
that often times has been overlooked.
[Faithe Norell] Maggie Walker was the daughter of a freed slave.
[William J. Martin] She grows up in this very interesting period after the Civil War where there is a sense of a future,
and then suddenly the environment around her changes.
You have the first monuments going up on Monument Avenue,
and then by 1902 Virginia passes a new constitution which essentially
disenfranchises all of Virginia's African-American voters.
[Toby Mendez] She is the first African-American woman to start a bank, and then
she became a publisher and she became an entrepreneur and then a business person.
[Sarah Driggs] She spent her life trying to make sure that people were educated
about finances, and knew how to make a living
and what they would need to know to succeed in life.
[Toby Mendez] I think of her as a civil rights leader.
The things that she was doing nonviolently in the late 19th century,
early 20th century, predated Gandhi.
[Sarah Driggs] She was just an amazing person and an amazing leader and we were so lucky to have her here.
Although she became a national figure, too.
[News Anchor] Top story tonight, emotions running high
as the public weighs in on plans to honor civil rights pioneer Maggie Walker.
A memorial for Walker is planned here at Brook Road and Broad,
but some are worried the statue and Walker's memory would sit in shadows from an oak tree at the site.
[News Anchor 2] That monument is expected to be completed sometime this fall.
Down the street where the tree currently stands, a group of protestors rally to save the live oak tree.
Protesters believe the tree should stand and the monument should be put inside an underdeveloped park
elsewhere in the city.
[Ellyn Parker] Any time there is a project in the public realm
you will have a whole bunch of different groups, and every group is going to have a different opinion
and especially with art.
So, it's always a delicate balance,
but I think that the amount of community outpouring and input that we had into this
was actually really, really amazing.
[Melvin Jones] It's just a passion for me.
And I was always taught in school, when I was in Maggie Walker,
if you going to do something stick with it, and that has always been my motto.
[Sarah Driggs] The community helped so much; their passion made it so exciting
and really communicated how important she is, but they also helped us
figure out where it should be and what it should look like.
[Faithe Norell] We invited the community to come out and tell us,
What do you want first as public art?
Do you want something as literate as a statue or something as poetic as a waterfall?
[Sarah Driggs] We could have done a more modern sculpture, but
we heard from the community, no,
that they wanted her to get the same kind of monument that other leaders of Richmond have gotten,
and that made a lot of sense.
[Ellyn Parker at meeting] Number two younger than shown, before she started the bank....
[Toby Mendez] In my conversations with the city, one of the questions I would ask
is why, why this site?
That is where Maggie made her mark. Broad Street was the division of that city; it was the mark of segregation.
[Faithe Norell] All of the community organizations, The Maggie Walker Alumni Society,
the family, really felt that Broad Street was the place: for visibility, the fact that she
had a department store on that street, that the white establishment did not want to be there,
that it's a place that is the gateway to Jackson Ward
which is where her home was and most of her businesses were.
[Community Member] But I do not feel very comfortable with one of our sheroes,
whether she is of whatever descent you wish to make her,
being overshadowed by a negative connotation,
which a tree is in our history, that would constantly remind our children that something --
Now that may sound silly to a lot of you, but open your minds.
We have, we have engrained in society a lot of negative issues that are not easily erased.
I love trees, but if the tree is going to bring more pain than it brings joy, then the tree must go.
[Toby Mendez] You know, I was trying to figure out how to best keep the monument going forward
and so I would consider the tree or not the tree,
and the symbolism of the tree, linking it to lynching and so forth, I hadn't considered.
And, you know, as soon as it was said it was obvious to me that that symbolism had to go.
It had to be the community to make that decision.
It had to come from Richmond and not from me.
And so as much as I could I stepped back and waited for that decision to be made.
[Faithe Norell] It kind of turned into an old Richmond black/white, Confederate, Reconstruction argument again.
It kind of brought those demons, if you will, back out, so then we really got empowered.
[Ellyn Parker] We sat down and had conversations with church members
and with members of women's groups and members of her family.
You know, I've always looked at community engagement as a really, you've got to be boots on the ground,
you have to go where people are. You can't expect them to just show up at one meeting;
you throw a meeting and everybody comes. That's not enough.
[Toby Mendez] So it was really about kind of almost like a collaborative feel
with those stakeholders so that they understood that they did have a valued
part of the design.
[Ajena Rogers] By having the community be a part of it, and I mean all parts of our community being a part of it,
Other parts of that history are brought out, such as
Brook Road being significant, which I had never even thought about,
how it was a way to transport through Richmond out to the farther parts of the county.
Well, I later learned that when my ancestor was enslaved
and had been kept in the slave jails down in Richmond, and he was forced to go back
to where he was enslaved in Hanover, most likely that's the route that he took by.
So to sit and think there
in that -- I can go to that spot and interpret that part of history,
that brought many things out that we may have overlooked.
So without the public comment, and the public commentary,
we may have missed some of those stories.
[Melvin Jones] Even business owners, people who had businesses on Broad Street,
so they were at the table too. So there wasn't anybody left out.
[Ellyn Parker] Question of the hour that a lot of people have opinions about, so we are asking the question and ...
How would you rank the importance of keeping the existing live oak tree?
Number one, being the tree detracts from the space and must go; in the middle, or somewhere in that range,
the tree has no effect on the space; and number ten being the tree makes the space and must stay.
[Ajena Rogers] By using the technology that we had,
you had the questions and then you could see the answers right there in front of you.
That made everyone see what the group idea was.
So it wasn't just someone standing up and being the loudest person in the room that got the most attention.
[Toby Mendez] The other thing is that one of the comments that was made from the community
is that she deserved her own place.
She deserved a space where she didn't have to share it with other elements that were distracting.
You know, as soon as I heard that, I mean it was clear to me that it had to be about Maggie,
she had to be the central focus.
The beauty of that site is her backdrop is Jackson Ward; it's the architecture of Jackson Ward,
and it becomes about Maggie and Jackson Ward.
[Sarah Driggs] Most people really understood that we wanted to do the memorial the right way,
and the right way involved completely redesigning the space.
[Melvin Jones] It's just been...I just...You know, it's just been something that's been a long time coming.
You know, sometimes it brings tears to my eyes but right now I'm, you know, I'm real excited about Saturday.
[Unveiling Observer] Celebrating the physical representation of social equality and progress
in my country, in my city. That's why I'm here.
[Mayor Levar Stoney] Ready to countdown? 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
[cheers]
[Ellyn Parker] Public art is not just something that you drive by and it's pretty.
I think the process of going through and building it as a community is really important.
[Sarah Driggs] Public art is something that really tells you so much about a community.
It helps you identify a community so much, and it can heal a community.
[William J. Martin] In many ways monuments are not about the past, you know.
Monuments are things that mark this moment.
I think having that conversation is really more about making sure we understand what we're marking.
So in a hundred years from now, you'll actually see that for this moment, Maggie is about
some of the things she was dealing with, but on a more personal level,
are things we are dealing with today.
[Toby Mendez] In Richmond, the story has been told of one demographic, and this,
it's not that it's balancing it out, it is telling the rest of the story.
It's giving the rest of the ingredients on what is Richmond's history.
[Faithe Norrell] She has a foot out into the future.
She has her eyes cast out looking forward.
Her hand is pointed toward her cross, because religion and her spirituality was very important to her,
but yet she's holding a ledger from the bank, demonstrating
that with God in your life, and a plan, it can be accomplished.
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