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. May the earth rest lightly upon your soul, Bill. ----- 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 o...
