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Richmond, Virginia, is dear to my heart.

I live here.

It's a place of beauty, history, and community.

But one place casts a dark shadow on the city that I love-- Monument Avenue, a street so named for the Confederate statues and memorials that are adonic.

In the wake of the brutal killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, many parts of the country are attempting to reconcile with their past, and Richmond is no different.

For many African Americans, these symbols are a constant reminder of the oppression, pain, and suffering that was inflicted on their ancestors and the racism they still experience every day.

For certain white Americans, it's a symbol of pride and heritage in their family history.

And for many, it's just another city landmark.

The willingness to ignore, sweep under the rug or glorify its troubled history is waning.

The statues are coming down.

But this is not where the story of racial reconciliation ends, it's where it begins.

[music playing] Lead them up, put them in a museum, take them down, tear them down.

How do we acknowledge the horrific reality of our history without glorifying or distorting it?

It's a small step in a much larger journey towards racial justice.

But getting it right is important.

Early on during the wave of social unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd, I went to the center of the protests in Richmond, the Robert E Lee statue on Monument Avenue.

I was accompanied by some gracious friends of mine to discuss their perspective on the situation as African Americans.

My friends Ace and Zane are both entrepreneurs here in Richmond, and I valued their perspective on the statues and race in general in the city.

What we experienced when we got there changed the tenor and depth of our conversation.

It seems like you're going to have a hard time cleaning that up.

Oh, well, nobody else is helping me.

Started doing damn thing.

Cleaning a second place trophy right now.

What's the end game?

There is no end game.

There is an end game.

What?

Equality for people of all races frankly.

Does it matter?

It does matter.

It does not matter.

Now, what you're going to do is create havoc like what these rioters did over the past week or so.

You're paying attention now, aren't you?

I wasn't paying attention back during the Martin Luther King riots.

You remember that?

Because right now you're telling me we don't need to take statues down.

It seems like you're not paying attention.

You don't.

Do we have statues in Nazi, Germany?

We don't have any of those up because we don't glorify the fact that the war was lost, man.

Those are treasonous individuals on American soil.

You're a Virginian, I tell you.

You're not proud of your state-- We are proud of our state.

We're not-- --by taking this down.

We're not proud of this part of our city-- is what we're not proud of.

Why don't you call people and come out here.

We don't want it cleaned up.

I'm good.

You're missing it.

You're right, you're a moron.

This adds an appropriate context.

Virginia-- This is historical context --do look like this.

This man's position is indicative of the broader controversy surrounding the statue.

What does it mean to stand up for a painful history?

This confrontation gave way to a conversation about the current moment, though, not with him.

We've protested, we've marched, we've kneeled.

We've had conversations.

We've broken bread with police officers.

At what point do you just start burning-- I mean, at what point does that wake people up?

It seems like it has finally.

It's represented actually in all the graffiti, the decades and decades of frustration and hurt.

Yeah, I mean, I'd rather not have a collection of second place trophies through the middle of our city.

Yeah.

Where else do you see that happen in the world?

And a lot of people are saying the foundation's crafty of our country.

And I would argue that it is firmly intact.

Our foundation was never designed for people who look like us to win, to be successful.

What I don't want to do is be placated by the fact that we're taking a monument down, or we've announced that we're taking a monument down.

As soon as I see that monument down, I believe that we took the monument down.

It's progress, and we can celebrate that.

I think we run into this in the startup world a lot right now you hit a major milestone this momentous occasion, then there's more work to be done.

The Black Lives Matter movement should establish for us the bottom, the baseline, for what we're willing to accept as a society.

And we should build from there.

It should not just be that justice is just enough.

We should all be helping each other to reach our full potential as a country.

And that's good for everyone.

Innovation comes from disruption.

We have disruption.

People from all across the spectrum have come together to say this is not the system that we want.

We're not doing anything different than we might have done a 100 years ago.

Let's take the next 100 years to do some things that are really different, and actually innovate in the space of equity.

Statistically, African Americans are more likely to catch and die from COVID, and then to have the George Floyd killing.

But it seems like there's a bit of an assault right now.

With respect to COVID, I hope our memories are long that minority communities are disproportionately affected, that the low wage income jobs are the ones that actually keep our country turning.

I hope that we remember that Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and Ahmaud Aubrey, and, and, and, and-- died at the hands of the cops.

And the cops teargassed and beat the living hell out of people for being upset about it.

I hope our memories are long that all of those things that happened and led to this, and that as soon as a monument comes down, it's like OK you got what you wanted.

I think that's a representation that we're getting somewhere.

But we want to be seen as humans.

And that's not unreasonable to ask for.

That's the real work that we've got to focus on.

If it's just this, we have missed the mark.

Protests takes many forms.

And only a few blocks from Monument Avenue and sitting on the doorstep of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is one of the most striking responses to oppression I've ever seen-- Kehinde Wiley's Rumors of War.

We spoke with Valerie Cassel Oliver, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the much loved museum.

For so long Monument Avenue has really been a gravitational pull for this city.

And to have a sculpture that in many ways is in conversation or dialogue with Monument Avenue is appropriate for our times.

But it's also appropriate for the museum to begin shifting that dialogue in that gravitational pull.

It's not without controversy.

No.

Well, aesthetics in and of itself is about evoking emotion.

But if it's about provocation, that's a very different kind of sensibility.

And you try to stay away from provocation?

No, contemporary art isn't about staying away from provocation.

If you have a dominant narrative that's consistent, you might want to shake that up.

And artists have an uncanny ability to do that.

And they could do it in ways that are subtle, and they can do it in ways that are bold, and this does it in a way that's supremely bold.

Can you talk a little bit about Kehinde?

Sure.

So Kehinde comes to the larger art seen probably in the early 2000s.

He's someone that grew up in Los Angeles, and his mother took him to the Huntington He got hooked on these tropes of power and grantor.

And that's the sort of thing that motivated him, to see these amazing portraits tours.

And he's in a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

And he's walking down the street, and he sees this mug shot of a young African American man.

And he thinks instead of having ourselves represented in this manner, what if we fixed ourselves within that trope of grandeur, of iconography, of being icons?

And that really propelled this whole way of working where he takes iconic images from the 17th century, 18th century, and he fixes the black body inside of those.

Kehinde first came to Richmond in 2016 during a retrospective of his work at the VMFA.

Valerie described his reaction when he first saw Monument Avenue during a driving tour of the city.

To see not only these men on horseback but these Confederate memorials, and the fact that they're 20 feet in the air in the case of Lee, almost 60 feet in the air, I mean, these are grand statements.

Right, yeah.

And he is absolutely blown away by it.

But he's also-- it fills him with a sense of dread.

So what does it mean to have symbols of power in 1907, which in the case of JEB Stuart Monument, which this one is patterned after.

How exactly is it in terms of dementia?

Oh, 1 to 1 ratio.

Wow.

Yeah.

I didn't realize.

Yeah, that seed was planted to do the sculpture back in 2016.

He told us, I'm working on something.

It was inspired by Richmond and it belongs in Richmond.

And we're, like, who?

Oh, do tale.

And when we saw, we were like, well, this is a game changer.

The dialogue has really been about, do you keep them up?

Do you take them down?

Here we are.

And Kehinde just came through from the side door and said, we don't have to have this binary.

There's room, there's room for more monument.

Leave them.

Let's be in conversation with them.

That's the way you contextualize a monument, not with a plaque.

Who stops their car and reads a plaque that contextualizes a monument?

No one.

Right, just doesn't happen.

It doesn't happen.

Monuments deserve a monumental response and that's what we offer.

We sat down with Valerie at the museum cafe to dig deeper into the power of Kehinde's work.

Part of the allure of it I think for many is that they see themselves reflected in that monument.

And those people who feel that they are reflected in the monument are people who have been oppressed.

The character itself, is it based on anybody?

Kehinde talks about really who gets memorialized.

It is the everyday person that one never sees memorialized.

I mean, now we see these makeshift memorials when people are murdered at the hands of, in this case, of police.

It's a poignant piece based on what's going on now.

Do you guys feel like you have a responsibility to help the rest of the community understand this point in time or what we could be?

This museum is the people's museum, and our role is to really be reflective of the community.

History is constantly unfolding.

And artists speak to that.

Artists are not the romanticized notion of being hermetically sealed, working and endeavoring in a vacuum.

Artists are citizens of this country.

They are always in conversation.

It's my job to bring those conversations to the museum.

We live in a society where we are in a state of constant amnesia.

There's always the new-- the next thing, the next thing.

People don't even know their histories.

To make plain what your history is and to always have new narratives to emerge allows that history just to be what it is-- history.

When you look at the Robert E. Lee Monument now, I see it as beautiful.

Actually-- It's gorgeous.

Hashtag fixed-- they fixed it.

There's so many different beautiful pieces that people have come and painted.

It's the people's monument.

You know that mark-making?

Yeah.

Everyone has had a mark.

A lot of the tags and the graffiti started very angry, and I completely understand it.

It did evolve over time.

But it's now because it's a memorial too.

I was just thinking, as you walk around, you're learning about all of the people who we failed as a society.

So when you walk around and you're reading about Tamir Rice, and you're reading about Sandra Bland, and you're reading about Michael Brown, you are creating a place of peace for them.

So maybe that's why that mark-making became less angry, and more about love, and more about memories, and a persistence, and a resistance-- a resistance to being a race and forgotten.

That's why there's the hashtag say their names.

When you say someone's name, you keep them alive.

And Monument Avenue looks so powerful to me now.

It is something about the vacancy of those pedestals.

There's something really powerful about that.

And oftentimes I feel like in today's society it's whose side are you on, everything's binary-- which party it is, where do you identify.

Art helps you to contextualize a complex world.

Oh, you realize that nothing is monolithic.

There's no monolithic response.

But we are all united.

I mean, we're all part of the human family.

So it really behooves us to really get it right for everybody.

And that's why I think these protests are so powerful.

So if we're not out on the streets saying this is wrong, we're invoking John Lewis.

My God, I love that man.

And when you see something wrong, you have to say something.

So it's just the whole way that we think in this country needs to be challenged.

And I think that's what's happening.

And hopefully we'll go through all the messiness to come out on the other side a lot better.

We left the VMFA, blown away by Valerie's insights and perspectives on art, history, and basically everything.

The white experience in Richmond has been the dominant narrative from the beginning, and minority voices and histories have suffered.

Dontrese, Dean, and David are trying to change that.

They are the creators of Hidden in Plain Site, an educational initiative using technology, specifically augmented reality to resurrect the past.

They're creating interactive experiences at locations around the city that are historically and culturally significant to the black experience in Richmond.

Dontrese Brown is not new to cultural change.

He helped spearhead the petition that transformed the Boulevard and Richmond into Arthur Ashe Boulevard, named for the famous African American tennis player who called Richmond home.

We spoke with him at the Hippodrome, one of the many sites they hope to preserve.

This is big time for us from a Black American culture.

This is the center of everything for us here in Richmond.

What was it?

It was originally a theater.

A lot of entertainers came here.

There was a stop on the Chitlin' Circuit-- Like famous Black X?

Yeah, yeah.

Give me some names.

John Coltrane, BB King, Louie Armstrong, Miles Davis.

This was the happening spot.

This is is the big type stuff.

Yeah, yeah, and this area, Jackson Ward, was considered the Harlem of the South.

Also the Jackson Ward neighborhood back in the day was open.

It was an affluent area, it was a safe area for Black Americans.

It was entertainment.

It was food, it was culture.

And just the energy within this area was just phenomenal.

While we spoke, David and Dean prepped the gear that they would need for a preliminary 360 video capture of the space.

So how does it make a difference in the world?

Richmonders walk by these things all the time and not knowing the context and the history behind them.

We feel that it's imperative to continue to tell the true narrative of the black experience here in Richmond, and how it has actually built our country.

How many locations?

What's the project?

So right now we're looking at 10 to 12 locations initially, and then we're going to expand that.

So you'll see Hidden in Plain Site Richmond then there could be a Hidden in Plain Site Jamestown.

But what we want to do is scale it here first as much as we can and then expand it.

Roll it out.

So who's Dontrese?

What do your kids think of you?

Are you a community activist, or are you just a guy with crazy ideas?

Well, I'll tell you that last one is probably right.

My son is 12 and my daughter is 14.

And after the George Floyd incident happened, we're watching all the news things and trying to cover, and trying to educate them on what's going on and my son says, so why didn't he just get up off his neck?

And then he asked me had I been involved in things like this, I said of course I have.

And then he looks at me with these old big innocent eyes and says but you did Arthur Ashe Avenue, what are you going to do now?

It really motivated me when I'm sitting across from Dean and Dean says, how can I help you?

And then my thought was my son's voice saying, dad what are you going to do now?

And so this is part of that what are you going to do now.

I love him, man.

What's your son's name?

Quincy.

I'm going to call it the Quincy question.

What are you going to do now?

What are you going to do now.

What are you going to do about it now.

That's it.

Yeah, and that's awesome.

The Hippodrome is a beacon to Black culture, and it may be undervalued and underappreciated, but at least it still exists.

Many of the most important and oftentimes most painful historical sites highlighted by Hidden in Plain Site have been literally erased from history.

People and traffic rerouted around them or through them, paved over into parking lot or simply demolished.

And this is true all over the country, not just in Richmond.

This is a site of Lumpkin's Jail that was considered at the time the Devil's half acre, probably one of the worst places you wanted to be in America was in Lumpkin's Jail.

And it wasn't a jail in regards to someone who committed a crime, it was where they actually housed the slaves before they walked on a journey towards the tunnel, which we'll go through, in which they were either hanged or sold.

So they were-- so that's the two options?

Yes, those were two options.

Yeah, and majority of the ones that were hanged were because of their rebellion.

Their owners didn't appreciate some of the things that they were doing or whether they were rebelling against the system in general.

There's really no major marker here.

No-- There's really no historical hey, come check this out.

It's a parking lot.

It just continually kept weighing on me, the fact that our major struggles and our major fight is being erased, literally being erased.

I am embarrassed to tell you, but in the quarter century I've lived in Richmond, I've never actually been right here.

People don't talk about it.

Right.

Of course, the history behind it is an ugly history.

But we want to talk about that ugly history.

We want folks to understand the true pain and suffering that happened here.

But we also want to talk about how it's propelling us to do wonderful things.

And so part of the Hidden in Plain Site is not only to bring attention to the painful reality of what was, but it's also to open the window to the exciting things of what will be.

Well, and I love that.

You're using technology to actually bring it alive and not let history be erased.

Dontrese took us further into the site through a tunnel, under an overpass and surrounded by highways.

It's almost as though it was purposely tucked away.

So just imagine spending the night a day or hours in there with other slaves, coming out shackled and chained in a place which at the time was considered a marketplace, but the things that you're buying are people, are humans, are slaves.

Oh, God.

It's sacred ground.

I walk very delicately when I walk these grounds because I just feel that I need to provide so much respect for those that are maybe some remains are still buried here, maybe the echoes of my ancestors are still in this field.

It's a piece of history that should be elevated and talked about more so that when folks are walking or driving by they understand the significance of this area.

I mean, think about it probably a day like today pretty and it's market day.

Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't know how old these trees are, I don't know how old these bricks are, these stones, but I know they were here when a lot of these things happened, the voices that they've captured, the experiences and the screams and the pain that they've seen over the years, these blocks.

These are basically the blocks.

These are the office blocks, yeah.

It's painful, but that's part of what inspires me, that's part of what inspired Dean and David to be a part of this.

This drives us.

So this area is basically what's considered the town gallows during the time, but this was a concrete parking lot.

It was-- What explains the crazy light poles, the light poles just hanging out someplace.

They uprooted all that, and I guess they don't know what to do with it now.

Yeah, but hopefully, we're going to figure that out.

And we'll have folks join us.

I mean, this is something that's going to take a lot of us.

So once we get this off the ground, we'll be able to make some good partnerships, people with the same vision and really telling the true story of the Black American experience here in the city.

Richmond, like America, has a dark and difficult past, but it's encouraging to see these glimmers of hope and possibility for the people striving to make a difference in their community.

We can all be part of the change if we choose to be, and change is coming to Richmond.

There's no easy solution and it's going to be messy.

But we like the way Valerie put it.

We're all united, we're all part of the human family, it really behooves us to get it right for everyone.

There's so much more to explore and we want you to join us on The Good Road.

For more in-depth content, meet us on the internet at thegoodroad.tv.

To hear more great stories, connect to organizations and make sure you download our podcast, Philanthropology.

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Tomorrow's breakthroughs start with the determination and inspiration of today.

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And by Uncommon Giving, the generosity company.

At Plow & Hearth, we believe that the place you are could becomes the place you want to be.

Philanthropy Journal, stories about bold people changing the world.

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