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- [00:00]
Christy Coleman
Why are we still having this conversation about whether or not this is a valid story or not? You know, why are we still, you know, and I guess we'll keep doing it until we get it right and people understand that it's not threatening at all, that it is actually an empowering thing to be able to cleanly look at something and heal from it.
- [00:23]
Jay Frost
Welcome to the PM Podcast brought to you by Donor Search, the show that takes you inside the lives of thought leaders, innovators and change makers in fundraising, philanthropy, and civil society. I'm your host, Jay Frost. Kristi Coleman is the executive director of the Jamestown Yorktown foundation, where she leads institutional efforts to reinterpret early American history and engage the public in complex national narratives. A nationally recognized museum leader, she was raised within the historically significant community of Williamsburg, Virginia and played a significant role at the Colonial Williamsburg foundation before taking on the role of president and CEO of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. There she led a five year, $43 million legacy campaign and oversaw development of the core exhibition and Still We Our Journey Through African American History and Culture. She later became CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, where she directed the merger of the Museum of the Confederacy and the American Civil War center and co led the Monument Avenue Commission examining Confederate memorials. Named by time magazine as one of 31 people changing the south, she has become a leading voice in transforming how history is interpreted and discussed in public life. In this episode, we explore her personal and professional journey and to leadership across pivotal cultural institutions, how she has navigated controversy with purpose, and her belief in history as a catalyst for understanding and change.
- [02:01]
Interviewer
I know you're from Florida originally.
- [02:04]
Christy Coleman
I was born in Florida, yes. But I predominantly was raised right here in Williamsburg, Virginia.
- [02:09]
Interviewer
Yes. When did your family move there?
- [02:13]
Christy Coleman
They moved here when I was nine. Okay. And we came here because my dad had been chosen as the sous chef for the Williamsburg Inn. And so we moved here after a brief stop in Washington. So. Yeah, since I was nine years old. And so all of this history and culture is all around me. But you know, honestly, my experiences with museums is, you know, my mom and dad always dragged us to museums, Right. And I can't even say drag. Cause we used to love to do it. And especially when we lived in Washington. I mean, I remember quite vividly like going through the Natural History Museum and the American History Museum. And Air and Space wasn't around at that time, but you know, really just having free run of the place for lack of a better. Because it was all free, you know, so we would go to all of those amazing places when I was a kid. And so when we moved here, this was very different than the gallery experiences that I'd had. Right? And so with this, all this living history and hands on stuff, and the added advantage, too, was a lot of the people who worked, particularly in the historic trades were members of our church community or our neighborhood. And so when me and my best friend from school, we would ride our bikes through the historic area, we could always stop at the silversmith shop, which, you know, Mr. Curtis was the master of that shop. We could go to see Mr. Parker, who was the master of the printmaking shop. And these are African American men who were masters of these trades at Colonial Williamsburg. Right? And so it was. So we got to see and do things and hear about things that the general public, I'm not entirely sure did get see him do. I mean, you know, I got to go in the backyard and help, you know, dissolve and smash rags that that were making up that would make up the paper, right? The way that they were dissolving them and smashing them and. And stirring them down to create paper and the lie that was used, I mean, I got to do stuff like that. And he would talk about why it was important and what was the chemical reaction. And I mean, it was just a very cool thing. So history was never something that was static to me until actually in a classroom. And then when you add to it, my parents being the 60s people that they were, they're the civil rights generation, right? And so when I was in school, at every opportunity, my parents were encouraging me and my sisters to, like, if we had a project in English class and we were talking about poets, well, our parents would introduce us to black poets, and that's what we would write our reports on. And when we were talking about the battle of Bunker Hill or some such, did you know there were black people there? And so we were often educating our teachers as much as we were ourselves in that process. And it was an extraordinary thing to me. And I know that part of what has driven me over the years is how powerful that was to me. Because I understood again, really early that America's story was my story. I understood it, that I had equal right to the legacies of the United States, despite the historical truths of the degradation or disenfranchisement or whatever it was stories of resilience to me and challenging the nation to be better through the experiences and the way that they treated black and other peoples of color. So Yeah, I was a little different, I guess, in that way. And it was because of our parents. Active, especially my mother, just active. Active engagement to expand our minds and expand the narrative.
- [06:33]
Interviewer
When you were going to school, though, because now it wasn't like D.C. although D.C. then, maybe is not like D.C. today. But the schools you attended, I think you went to. Is it Magruder? So it was a school named for, you know.
- [06:48]
Christy Coleman
Yeah, I didn't know it was named for a computer until I was an adult.
- [06:52]
Interviewer
Right. So. But. But if you came armed with this kind of knowledge, and it sounds like agency from a young age, even if you didn't know that particular fact, attending that school when you were, as you say, kind of educating the teachers as much as. As being educated, how were. How was that received in Williamsburg at that time?
- [07:11]
Christy Coleman
Well, I will say that. So we moved here when I was in the third grade, and my third grade teacher actually accused me of cheating because I already knew long division. My mom had taught me long division. She thought I was cheating when I showed her that I could do it on a blackboard, like it was some kind of little monkey trick. She wasn't a very nice person, and she had been a teacher in York county for a long time. And actually, you know, I mean, pre integration, she. She was there. And so she was. She was a challenge. But my fourth grade teacher was a younger woman, Mrs. Beckley. I will never forget her because I stayed in touch with her, quite frankly, into my 50s, and Mrs. Beckley was the complete opposite. She gave me every opportunity to reach beyond and reach out and explore a whole variety of things. And then my fifth grade teacher was another person who was challenging in terms of her whole, you know, she just wasn't a very. She was a younger woman, but she was just really problematic when I think back on it. And even then, I kind of challenged her on some things, and she didn't have very nice things to say about me as a child. I mean, I was like you. I would never say the kind of things that this lady said to me, to a child. And then sixth grade, I had amazing teachers, again, who nurtured talent and let me do my thing and actually cast me in the sixth grade play as Santa Claus, which was fantastic. And so that was very great. And then by the time I got to middle school, people pretty much understood who my parents were and what their. The high expectations that they had for all of us. And. And I basically prospered from there on out. I mean, it was. I did well academically. I Did well socially. I was an athlete on top of that, theater nerd on top of that. So I was in like all of these realms. I was talking to my daughter, who's a college sophomore, about it. For some strange reason, she was asking me about high school for me again and, you know, how vastly different our, our situations were and, you know, and because she's more of an introvert than I was. And you know, she, she's just tickled, you know, by far, not shy, but definitely an introvert. Right. And she's, she's like, mom, I can't. Did. When. How could you. When did you have time to do all that stuff? And, and I said we just made time. And there was the expectation that we were going to be involved in extracurricular. And yeah, I was a cheerleader and I was in the drama club and I was, you know, a gymnast. And then I, you know, like I said the theater thing, and then I became class president two years in a row. And I, you know, I just took advantage of and had a great time. And then when I got to college, I discovered more of the activist side of my personality when I was in college. And that didn't end well financially. But what's really funny about it is as much as I loved the school, it wasn't the place for me when it was all said and done in terms of, you know, I was just really struck by that. There were more closed minds that I ran into in college than there were the place that I thought was going to be of open mind and open expression and trying to figure out who we are and exploring all kinds of things with abandon. Right. That wasn't the case. And so I didn't do badly there, but politically I had become a force very quickly and, and was on the verge of suspension for political activity.
- [11:39]
Interviewer
What kind of political activity? What were you doing?
- [11:41]
Christy Coleman
We were so. I'm definitely aging myself now. Right. So we were. This was mid-80s and we were vehemently protesting for divestiture from South Africa in the Krugerrand and out of South Africa because of apartheid.
- [12:09]
Interviewer
And the university you were at was.
- [12:11]
Christy Coleman
Was William Mary College of William and Mary. And they were heavily invested. And so I was these, this was the days when you could get literally round trip air tickets to New York or Boston for $49, from Richmond for round trip tickets. And so a bunch of us would just get on the planes and coordinate and commiserate with our friends and other students that were being successful at Harvard and Yale, to be honest. And I would Go up there and just like, hey, what are you all doing? How'd you work it? And the distinctions between sort of the public side of the university and the private alumni association and not really having a voice there. And then, okay, so how do we get to the alumni and how do we get them to understand this is a thing and some of y' all are going to be alumni next year, so you're going to have the power to get in here as your alumni. We were just. And so we staged a lot of sit ins at the president's house. We did basically noise torture.
- [13:16]
Interviewer
What is that?
- [13:18]
Christy Coleman
You know, it's in front of the president's house on an open lawn. And we would sit out there, hundreds deep, playing loud music, dancing, singing, chanting until the wee hours of the morning, just making noise, you know, kazoos and bullhorns. And it was quite a thing.
- [13:39]
Interviewer
And.
- [13:41]
Christy Coleman
It was never, you know, there's never any violence. It was just loudness. And, and they would let us do it back then. You know, free speech was, was not something you had to worry about on a college campus back then. But yeah, I organized those for like six weekends in a row and it was annoying. And so, yeah, that's kind of how, how things happened.
- [14:13]
Interviewer
Now. You were still involved in, in theater at that point?
- [14:18]
Christy Coleman
Yes, I, I was when I was, you know, because I started, I actually started working at Colonial Williamsburg when I was 17 over the summer. And that's always a great story, which you've probably read about, but I was still in high school when I auditioned to be a part of their theater living history program, their character actors, and they had open auditions for actors. So I went not knowing that they traditionally only had college students. Their youngest people doing it were college students. And so I auditioned and I got a role. And it was only after I was granted the role and assigned the historian who would work with me and, you know, the, the train, the, the hands on training that I had to learn for my character and all of that, that they just, you know, they were like, okay, so our start date's going to be, you know, Memorial Day weekend. And I was like, I have school. So where the college kids were, you know, a month out, you know, they were, they had a lot more time because they were out by the first or second week of May, but I still had a month to go. But they ended up working with me and I had an amazing time and it just turned into something else. Now it was about personal stories and human connection on an emotional level that the theater Brought to it. So, yeah, all of that. All of that.
- [15:52]
Interviewer
And that wasn't just any role.
- [15:54]
Christy Coleman
Yeah, no, it was a young enslaved girl that I did.
- [15:58]
Interviewer
Okay, so I have to ask you a couple things about that. So first of all, that's. No matter what your knowledge is, and it sound like you were steeped in very much awareness of who you were. Not everybody's that way at 17, but you were. But also, your parents were very obviously devoted to you and your education. And how did they feel about your taking on that kind of role? Like when you were talking about running around as a kid and seeing other African Americans portraying these different roles? I don't know if they were portraying characters who were enslaved and doing those things, but it sounds like some of them were.
- [16:35]
Christy Coleman
No, no, they weren't. I mean, they were modern men who were, again, had mastered these historic trades. They weren't in character at all, but they did not like that they were black character actors. Because the concern was that the visitors would be confused because we were all in historical clothing. And so they were concerned that visitors. That I'm the master of the shop, and you're asking me if I'm a slave, and that is not going to make somebody feel good. We had to work out the dynamics of how that worked. But how did my parents feel about it? They were very proud of me. They encouraged me, given how much money I was making doing it. My friends were making minimum wage, and we were paid not quite double, but, you know. And that's when minimum wage actually did something for you. So, yeah, I was coming home with some pretty decent checks, you know, and, you know, it was good. So, yeah, they were. You know, they came out and saw it. I did have friends of mine from high school who were taken aback and sometimes said things that were kind of, you know, how'd the class president end up being a slave? You know, I would hear stuff like that. The person that I was dating when I was 17, and he was. He was. He. I distinctly remember him saying things to me like, you know, you're embarrassing me doing this. You know, why are you even doing this? You could be doing anything. Why would you do this? And, you know, that relationship obviously didn't last long. I mean, it was high school, but so it didn't. I wasn't trying to be forever anyway. But it was, you know, they were hurtful, but they weren't deterrence because I knew better, you know, and I knew that these. I was giving voice to something.
- [18:40]
Interviewer
Yes. So what. What did you think? You Were giving voice to. And did you have sort of like the rest of what we've talked about so far? Did you feel like you had the control over that portrayal? I know it's different to be an actor from. It is to be. I don't know anybody else and just living in this world. But you were portraying this thing. Was it your portrayal or was it.
- [19:00]
Christy Coleman
Yes, absolutely. So the way that it worked is we weren't given scripts. We had to. Like I said, we were all assigned a historian to work with who was a specialist in our particular thing. And I was assigned to this amazing historian named Barney Barnes, and then later to a historian from uva, Reginald Butler. And so they had given me all of the. All of the records of this historical person, her age. So they found. Ended up finding someone that was age appropriate for me and the backstory. And it was up to me to come up with what her strategic purpose was in working with our leadership. So each character had a strategic purpose. There was the broader thing of visitors need to understand that every other face you saw if you walked in colonial Williamsburg at the time would have been black. Most visitors did not know that 52% of the population of Williamsburg on the eve of the revolution were black people. That was number one, and then number two, giving voice to each of these characters. My first character, Rebecca, and the strategic purpose of her was to talk about how enslaved children were often, especially if they were reared to be maid servants, would be separated from their parents at an early age, like 3 or 4, to be raised beside a similar aged white child to be that person's handmaid. And so in this particular instance. So there was that part of the story to be told. And then it was her concern about, you know, the. She's visiting the apothecary on behalf of the family because Ann Blair's father, the woman that she's the maid servant to, is dying with no heirs, and there is concern about his debt and whether she's going to be sold off permanently or. So there was this whole sort of. Those were sort of the key strategic things to talk about this fragile thing. And the reason I think that they chose that sort of direction for that character is to kind of chip away at the myths that persisted even into the 1960s and later where, you know, white people would say, oh, our mammy was just, you know, part of our family, and da, da, da, da, da. And we just loved her, and she.
- [21:43]
Interviewer
Loved us like the Gone with the Wind.
- [21:46]
Christy Coleman
Correct? Right, right. And this character was showing something different. Yes, there's proximity. Yes, there's a certain emotional intimacy, but at the end of the day, you're still property. At the end of the day, someone else is going to decide your fate. And even more so with my character, Rebecca. She was also literate and having been educated at the Brace School. So then we can talk about the fact that this idea of not teaching slaves to read or write is a later phenomenon. It is not happening. Any person learned to read or write if their job required it or their station required it. Those were her three big strategic purposes. How I got there was entirely up to me as the actor. And that really got my creative juices going. And I was able to sort of write out her monologue, for lack of a better term. I wrote her monologue that was on me. To write it, I had to perform these 10 minute segments. And so as I built out her story, as I built out her reality. Also learned those hand skills to match her. Like I had to learn how to cross stitch. I learned needle points. I learned some basics about apothecary and various herbs. Because once I was done with the spiel, for lack of a better term, I had to be available to answer any questions that visitors had. Initially, we would break character. The black actors were allowed to finally break character to answer questions of the visitor. In time, those of us who got really skilled at it could still answer those questions, but still maintain the character and still maintain the sense of realism in that space. I was a big advocate for that approach. Part of me felt like it was a cop out, that as we got more skilled, we could in fact answer any of those questions that visitors put to us. And so that's kind of. That's, that's my beginning. I absolutely loved.
- [24:08]
Interviewer
Sounds like it's very fresh for you still. I mean, maybe it's just the way you remember things.
- [24:12]
Christy Coleman
No, it is, it is. You know, it's an extraordinary thing.
- [24:17]
Interviewer
I'm just wondering what it was like for the 17 year old Christy Coleman. Because I mean, it sounds always amazing.
- [24:23]
Christy Coleman
I mean, I loved it. I was 17. Getting paid to act and to perform.
- [24:28]
Interviewer
That is a lot of responsibility though, because that's a very emotional role. It is not just, you know, but.
- [24:32]
Christy Coleman
It was, it was never. I never viewed it as a burden. I don't, honestly. The one time that it was extremely problematic was when I ran upon a racist who said some pretty racist things to me and I was livid about it. And I immediately left my post and went to see my boss who sat me down in my period of rage and says, this happens and everybody can't do this work. And you have to decide if the work is important, if their stories are important to you and that you can handle it. And if you can just take a breather because you're going to run into people like that. Question is, how do you respond to people like that? And showed me a couple ways of how to address it if it ever came up again, which it did, inevitably. It's amazing what the public will do even 40 years ago, what they think they can say and do to a character actor. And there were some pretty outrageous things. Fortunately, that wasn't the norm, or it might have been a different story. Most people were very respectful and polite and curious about this. Others tried to make a joke about it and not realizing how insensitive what they were saying was. And on the very rare occasion you had the blatant racist who said something or the blatant sexist remarks that were made, that was the most interesting one, I think. I mean, I, the, the insinuations and the, and the. I mean, I. I literally had a man ask me. And of course, the other visitors who were around when he said it were aghast, right? But actually asked if, if his master, if he asked my master, could he take me home? Right? But it wasn't. It wasn't take you home to make you free. It was, you know what I'm saying? And that was like, you know, and then, and then by that point, you know, I had learned what the law said and was able to, in character, say to that man, you know, sir, there are laws against molesting another man's property. And I. And absolutely granted the word molest meant something else. It simply meant to bother. But the tone of how I presented that back to him, you could see these sighs of relief and smiles on some of the women's faces. To respond to him that way, to get that little weirdo fetish or whatever he was imagining in his head, out of his head. But again, nine times out of 10, the experiences were so positive that I continued doing it. And then, and then, you know, when I dropped out of college to, I, you know, because I had fallen in love with the process so much. I was a theater minor at William Mary, so I had learned writing in addition to my acting and a little bit of directing. But I was really into the playwriting and the screenwriting and creating these things and learning about narrative arc and the importance of character build and all these other kinds of things. But I decided that I really wanted to pursue acting full time. And so my parents, though disappointed that I was dropping out of school, gave me a wonderful option. And they said, okay, we'll give you three semesters to figure out what you want to do. So go follow that dream. And if you don't go back, if you go back to school after three semesters, we'll continue to pay for your education. If you stay out past that time, then your education is on you. It's on your dime. And I stayed out of school for six semesters.
- [29:00]
Interviewer
So you tried to make a go of it as an actor, a director?
- [29:04]
Christy Coleman
Yeah, as an actor. As an actor. And I didn't do badly. I did a lot of voice work. I did some tv. There was like, a soap opera that used to be filmed down in Virginia Beach. So I would get, you know, little commercials, local commercials and things. But it was enough to support myself because I was still doing evening work for Colonial Williamsburg, evening performances for them. So I had that steady kind of backup. But I really wanted to hit New York.
- [29:34]
Interviewer
Why were you staying at Colonial Williamsburg? Was that just still because you had a job there, or did you? Did you. Was it something else?
- [29:41]
Christy Coleman
Well, I think it was mostly just because I'm even. I think there's always been a part of me that, like, craves a certain level of stability and, you know. But, you know, and at the time here in Virginia, there were three studios that operated in Virginia at the time that were turning out a lot of work. So I didn't have to. I could. The thought was I could build sort of the baseline of my career here because they were doing national things. And then when the time came, maybe I'd get a big movie role or maybe I. But then I quickly learned that outside of the theater or outside of voice work and some of the small parts that I was getting, that the roles that were being offered to me were. I can't say throwaway roles, but they were. You know, there was. There was an aesthetic for black women at that time. And my aesthetic was not Leading woman. The aesthetic was Halle Berry. You know, the aesthetic was women who looked like that, not women who looked like me or Viola Davis or. We weren't getting. You know, we would get the maids, the slaves, the crack addict. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I got sent on auditions for that. And it just became a point of just rage and actually the last at that cycle. And my agent, she's just like, I know, hang in there. Hang in there. You gotta kind of make the most out of these roles until you can break through. And I was like, breakthrough to what they're not. You know, there's. There's. You know, so. And I thought, okay, well, then I'll just go to New York and hang out with my friends in New York and just do theater. Because at least in theater, I can do all of these parts without the same thing about what happens on the. On the big screen. But I. I had a voice job. I had gotten a voice job for a major national bank. It was going to be a national campaign. There was multiple. I was so excited about this gig, right? I was going to get residuals off of it from the. I mean, it was just. It was a perfect thing. And so I go into the studio with the other actor, and we're doing the voice work, having a great time with the director. Things are going great. And the ad company called to listen to our takes and to listen to the tapes and to see how they were going. And the ad agents, this woman remarked that I. She's like, oh, they're so good. They have a good energy, but she just doesn't sound black enough.
- [32:41]
Interviewer
Was that okay? We were talking about other stuff before. Is that the first time you heard a comment like that?
- [32:47]
Christy Coleman
No, but I was shocked to hear it in a professional setting, right? I mean, I. I certainly have walked into spaces where people may have interviewed me on the phone or whatever and then go, oh, I had no idea. You know, and you get that look of, oh, they didn't know. Well, yeah, I am. That's right. I am sis. You know, but, you know, but, you know, but that one was insulting. And I was like, these commercials are about banking, right? I mean, we're talking about mortgages and, oh, we got to open up our check and go, honey, did you, you know, do you checkbook. Did you. Do they have a new atm? You know what, An AT automatic teller machine, you know, whatever the hell it was. I don't. I don't remember all the. Like I said, because it was multiple ones that we had recorded. And she said, can you try it again? And so I did it again, and I leaned into my Virginia accents, right? No, no, no, not Southern black. And I was like, well, I am black, and I am from the south. And so I'm not sure. And most black people are in the South. What are you talking about? And she kind of. She was like, I just don't know how I can explain this to you, but you just. I mean, maybe more urban is what we're after, you know. And so at that point, I am super annoyed, and my scene partner is. Can't keep a straight face. He's about to bust. And so I try it again. And I said, when you say urban, are you talking, like, D.C. new York? What are you after? Well, I mean, just black. And I said, I'm sorry, can I ask what your ethnicity is? And she said, what do you mean? I said, well, I assume you're white, but I mean, is you. Do you have another, like, ethnicity attached to you? Because your name is. And I don't even remember the woman's name, but it was Jewish sounding, right? And she says, I don't know what you mean. I said, are you Jewish? And she said, what does that have to do anything? And I said, because you don't sound like a Jew to me. I actually said it to her. And all of a sudden, everything went dead quiet. She says to the director, could you please take us off speaker? And I got fired because she needed to understand just how ridiculous what she was saying to me was, yeah, I got fired from that. From that gig. And it was always interesting when I heard those commercials. It was insulting. It was so insulting.
- [35:34]
Interviewer
It sounds like she got what she wanted in the end.
- [35:37]
Christy Coleman
She got what she wanted, but it wasn't going to be from me. So at that, that was. And what's interesting is that was an amazing turning point for me, because at that moment, I made up in my mind, not only was I going to act, but I was going to write and I was going to direct and I was going to control all elements of this piece. And that's when I also decided, because I was working in Baltimore, which I had moved to Baltimore to work at a museum up there again, to have some stability. And same thing up there. I was getting work up there. And. But after that experience, I said, I'm going back to school. I got to figure this out. I'm going back to school.
- [36:28]
Interviewer
And did you. Did you have a sense already that you wanted to go back and study history? Or had any of this experience kind of fed into what you ended up deciding to pursue?
- [36:36]
Christy Coleman
Absolutely, because that was the thing. It's like, okay, do I go back to William Mary? Because they have a fabulous theater program and they have a fabulous history program. But I wasn't happy. Lifelong friends I made there, but academically, I wasn't happy there. And so a few other things happened, and I ended up coming back to Williamsburg and just kind of stewing like, oh, I've screwed up everything, you know, what am I going to do? How am I going to make this work? Trying to figure it out and where connections matter, right? So good friends of my parents, he was the provost at Hampton University, and he said, come to Hampton. Why don't you just come to Hampton? And I had several cousins that graduated from Hampton and loved their experiences at Hampton. And I would hang out on Hampton campus with my cousins. And, you know, and I was like, well, I know y' all have a history department and I know you have like mass comm program and theater, but I've already added, I already have all of these courses. While I was in Baltimore, I was also squeezing in classes where I could so that I could kind of keep up, as it were. And he said, here's the beautiful thing about Hampton. He said, we actually have an interdisciplinary program where you can design your degree. What is it that you're trying to do? I said, well, first of all, I want to go back in the museum world and I want to write and I want to direct, but I need to understand the business side. And so we literally crafted a degree program that gave me. That took all of those history credits that I had, my theater credits added to that, and I started taking business classes. So my undergraduate degree was specifically designed for museum work. And then I kept going and got my master's degree in museum studies specifically.
- [38:33]
Interviewer
There will be people who listen, who don't know anything about Hampton, and they also might ask, well, wasn't Hampton also invested in South Africa? So a couple things that happened. Three years had passed. But some context here is probably important because as you said, William and Mary, great institution. They probably taught history through a certain lens, at least in some of the classes. That may be also true of Hampton. How would you describe Hampton to those who don't know it?
- [39:00]
Christy Coleman
Hampton University is a historically black college and university founded in 1868. It has always been ranked as one of the top universities, particularly HBCUs, but top regional universities in the country. It has, its roster of alumni is some of the most illustrious people in our nation. And Hampton University is the place that that nurtures not only the academic, but nurtures the soul of a student. That's something that HBCUs traditionally do that predominantly white colleges and universities do not. They are not as invested in the holistic view of the student. And black schools always had to do that to care and nurture, because for a lot of the students that go through, they were first generation college students. So they didn't necessarily have all of the tools in their toolbox and Hampton made sure by the time you were out of there, you could wrestle with the best. Hampton has had one of the nation's leading debate teams, their science teams and robotics teams are among the best in the nation. I mean it's an extraordinary environment. And so. And so at Hampton, I felt supported in every possible way. When I was coming up short. I mean I. When I went back to school for the undergraduate, I was working three part time jobs.
- [40:35]
Interviewer
Oh wow.
- [40:36]
Christy Coleman
While I was going to school to try to pay my tuition, which was twice what the tuition was at William and Mary because it's a private college and Hampton being considered one of the elite HBCUs, you know, we weren't a part of the United Negro College Fund. Oh yeah, yeah. And so there wasn't a lot of scholarship money.
- [41:05]
Interviewer
It sounds like your parents had held their promise that if you.
- [41:08]
Christy Coleman
My parents held their promise. What they did do though is they allowed me to stay at home. I moved back into my parents house while I was working on my undergraduate degree. So they covered that cost. I distinctly remember my final year at Hampton. My tuition was $13,000 and I earned $14,873 that year through those part time jobs.
- [41:38]
Interviewer
Yeah. Did you have a sense about what you do coming out of that? Because when you were studying theater you wanted to go and act, but it's not always so clear in an academic world.
- [41:49]
Christy Coleman
I realized, and I'll tell you, I had an inspiration in a woman named Dr. Bernice Reagan. She was a curator at the Smithsonian and she was this amazing performer who had created the group Sweet Honey and the Rock, this Grammy Award winning folk singing history based on musicians. And Bernice was just this amazing, she was just an inspiration. And I said, here's someone who has leveraged their art and their love of museums in a remarkable way. So I'm going to do that with theater. I'm going to leverage my talents in this space to create something new and interesting and different. And so one of those part time jobs was I managed to get a part time job back at Colonial Williamsburg. And the leadership of the foundation at that time was really loved experimentation. They were not risk averse and enabled us to do some pretty remarkable things. And so I came up with the first script that I wrote for them and I did some editing on other scripts that had been produced like 10, 15 years before. But I was like, guys, we need some fresh material. Why are we still doing stuff that Rex and Dialing and not just being disrespectful? Because they were Great scripts, but there are so many other stories to tell. And my director at the time, he says, well, we don't have any really great writers. I haven't been impressed with what others have tried to write. And I said, okay, I got some ideas, and I sat down, and when I got in a zone, I got into a zone. And so when I. When I graduated, like I said, number one, I graduated top of my class at Hampton, and that was pretty amazing. And then I. In working with Williamsburg, I started writing these historic dramas. I wasn't just doing characters anymore. I wanted to create these historic dramas to address other areas of this peculiar institution in this extraordinary time and in this extraordinary place. And the first piece that I wrote was called affairs of the Heart. And in my department, African American programs, you know, my director was like, oh, this is so good, but I don't know if they're gonna let us do it. And I said, well, the only way to do it is to just do it. And I said, so can I at least put together a cast to. To work on it? And we'll get it ready, and you take it up to the higher ups who may or may not have an issue with what I'm writing. And affairs of the Heart was based on. Because I saw you getting ready to ask me, what was it? Affairs of the Heart was based on the diaries and the historical record of Daniel Parke Custis. Daniel Park Custis was Martha Washington's father. And Daniel Park Custis had fathered a young boy with one of his enslaved women that he. Apparently, it was sort of a Jefferson Hemming situation. Similar. The difference is that Custis provided for this child in his will, promised to free him. It was a lot of stuff. And left him property. And the family. The Custis family was outraged by what he was doing and tried desperately to change that will. We had a similar story with George with where the show was being done. So the. The show was being done in situo, and we could take 90 guests at a time, and we would break them into groups of three, and depending on which scene they started with, kind of was how they're. They. Yeah, in the round, for lack of a better term. Right. And so depending on where they started was kind of where their sympathies lie. And then we brought everybody together for the final scene. And so it was this story of. And it looked at the dynamics of this wealthy. You know, this wealthy young man who is on the eve of his marriage to a wealthy young woman. But there are secrets at this place. So in one scene, the household slaves are talking about how he was as a child and growing up around him. And. And the. And they insinuate heavily about the problem of Rachel, which is the enslaved woman. And. And she was stupid to let her heart. Let herself allow her heart to be attached to this man, knowing that eventually he'd take a wife and eventually all this would happen, and she was stupid further still by having a child with him, like openly having this child and naming the little boy Billy. Right. So then there's another scene where it is the bride to be who has been brought to town. She's with her maid servant, who. They're thick as thieves. So that was kind of a throwback to my Rebecca days, right, when I was portraying that character. And in this particular instance, Rebecca, that character. Oh, it was Anne. And, oh, what was her name? I can't remember my character's name now. But anyway, she is thrilled, helping her young mistress get ready for the wedding and everything. And the mistress is saying, oh, we're going to bring this and that. And so the enslaved woman says, well, what about my husband? You're going to need a coachman, and he'll make a fine coachman. And she said, well, I don't need a coachman. So it's this idea of prepping for her own wedding, yet denying the marital bonds of this enslaved couple. And so to hurt her, the enslaved woman strongly insinuates when. When. When Ann says, oh, and, you know, please make sure that I want them all to like me so that my household runs smoothly. And please make sure that all of William's people get some little treat. And particularly that little boy that brought in, you know, that cute little mulatto boy that brought in my tea. And at that point, her maidservant gives the very strong innuendo. He does look mighty familiar, doesn't he, kind of thing. And then the third scene that we see is William with Rachel, the mother of his child. And the child himself comes down into the room, and you see their interaction is very strained, and she is begging him to send her and her son away, or at least give her son the freedom he promised right when he was born. You promised to free him, so free him now and send us away from here. Because when she finds out my life is going to be hell, and he's absolutely, emphatically is not going to do it. I need you here. I need you to be. And she's like, no, you don't. You got a wife now. That's what you chose to do. And he has these professions of affection towards her without ever saying the word I love you, which she's very cognizant of. And it gets very tense between them. And he leaves outraged. And so the final scene that all the visitors encounter is William encounters his bride to be, who asks, where has he been? And begins this interaction of. I believed you to be an honorable man. How could you do this? Is it true that you have. You know, all of this kind of stuff is going on? And then he exerts his power to her. You are my wife. We will be married. And you will never talk to me like that, and you will never ask me those questions. And what I do in my house, in my domain, is what I choose to do. So you see all of these power dynamics. Anyway, my boss was afraid that there was no way Colonial Williamsburg was going to let this play happen. But he did let us cast it. And I cast. Got great actors for it. And then we did a preview. The vice president and the president said, okay, we got to see this thing. When they saw it, you know, we were. All of us were just like, oh, you know, what's going to happen? What's going to happen? What's going to happen? Are they even going to. And they said, this is important. And, yes, we're going to let you do it, but this is what we're going to require that this show must have a warning. Basically a PG13 warning in the visitor's guide for this program. And so we did. This program is intended for mature audiences and deals with issues of interracial sexual and power relationships, is how we did it. And we did that show for four years. And every single show, every single week, sold out for four years. It was a blockbuster.
- [52:06]
Interviewer
What kind of reactions did you hear from people? And did you hear different reactions from different sorts of folks in the audience?
- [52:12]
Christy Coleman
Everybody loved it. I mean, people were just. They. And the questions. Because we always Provided at least 30 minutes of Q and A after a show like that. And people didn't want to leave. You know, they were, can I get a ticket to the next show? I want to go on the next. On the other route. You know, I started with the enslaved people in the kitchen. I want to start over here and see. You know, it was. It was a. It was a hit. And I had quickly made a name for myself for what I had done with that show. And then, you know, with the new. The new grad school starting out, I went to my boss and I said, so I want to just go on and keep going through school. I mean, I graduated in May. I want to go to school in September. August, September. To work on my master's degree, because I definitely want to lead museums. And he said, okay, let's see what we can do. And so he talked to his boss, the vice president, and Colonial Williamsburg paid for my master's, paid my tuition for me to get my master's degree.
- [53:17]
Interviewer
When was this? Because I know that there's. There's another play you're going to tell us about.
- [53:20]
Christy Coleman
1992.
- [53:22]
Interviewer
So this was 92. This is. And you must have felt pretty. Pretty good.
- [53:27]
Christy Coleman
I mean, I was feeling great, and I was just bubbling with all kinds of stories and ideas.
- [53:33]
Interviewer
Right.
- [53:34]
Christy Coleman
Of what more we could do. And so, yeah, I would end up writing a lot for Williamsburg, but not just writing. Once I finished my undergraduate. I mean, I'm sorry, Once I finished my graduate degree, you know, and I was taking every opportunity that I could to learn different parts of the foundation in my graduate program. It was required that I do an internship. And they would not allow me to do the internship in my home department. So I went to development to learn how to fundraise and how this monster of a machine that Colonial Williamsburg had, how they actually did it. It. So I interned there for a semester. Best decision. I'm so glad my advisor was like, no, I'm not going to let you do what you always do. No, go learn another part of the museum. And that was, again, the best thing that could have ever been done. So when I finished, when I graduated in May, my director had announced to everyone that he was going to leave that role and move into research. And he was actually going to go back to Hampton because he was an academic, and he was going to be. Going to Hampton to be a professor there, which is what he loved to do. And so the search was on, and I threw my hat in the ring, and I got the job.
- [55:06]
Interviewer
I guess. An interpretive role, Is that right?
- [55:08]
Christy Coleman
Yeah, I was the director of African American programs for Colonial. Their youngest director ever at 29.
- [55:18]
Interviewer
And the first woman, I think, in that role as well, right?
- [55:21]
Christy Coleman
Yes. The first woman in that role. Yeah. Yeah. Not the first woman director, for sure, but the first woman in that role. And then we got to work. We were shaking the tree, as they say. And again, it was an extraordinary experience, and I was very happy. And by the second year, because of the successes that we had had and what they thought was a lot of innovation coming from me, I got a promotion. They reorganized the historic area, and so Then I became the director of Midtown operations. So now was responsible not just for African American programs, but the women's history program, the religious studies program, several of the historic trades in the midtown section of the historic area, and the character actor programs. And they wanted me to sort of. Oh, to create sort of this whole new kind of experience focused on sort of the middling sort and the experiences of all these peoples. So I did that for two years. So I'm four years in now as a director. And then they reorganized again, and they said, christy, we want you to be the director of public history at Colonial Williamsburg. And I said, well, what does that mean? He said, you're going to now be responsible for every tour, every house tour, every program that we do. You will have oversight over our creative content. And that was a huge thing. That was a huge deal. And I was, you know, could put together my own team. But my concern was that there were forces who, among, you know, some of the peers that weren't exactly excited by what I was doing. They liked their traditional stuff.
- [57:26]
Interviewer
And before you get into that, I just have to ask what it was like for somebody who was probably running around when they were 10 or 11 years old in that place, making friends, you know, watching people learning stuff as a kid and then being there in.
- [57:40]
Christy Coleman
That, being their boss.
- [57:41]
Interviewer
What was that like?
- [57:43]
Christy Coleman
Yeah, it was. That was pretty funny, actually. Mr. Curtis and Mr. Mr. Parker both reported to me.
- [57:51]
Interviewer
Oh, really?
- [57:52]
Christy Coleman
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was pretty wild. But I was always very respectful of the tradesmen, and they all knew that because of that kid. So I talked to them about what they thought that they really wanted to accomplish in the space. If they were going to do something different, what would it look like? Walk like, talk like. And we negotiated it rather than me being like, no, you're going to do this. And so that actually worked out really well. But it was nerve wracking because the difference now was where I had a team of over 100 people. My team was now 12 creative content people.
- [58:32]
Interviewer
Oh, I see. Yeah.
- [58:33]
Christy Coleman
And so leading sort of the creative content. And while intellectually I understood what a tremendous gift I had been given to really shape what Williamsburg was going to be, I also felt a little exposed because all it took was one or two directors to not provide the people that I needed to make things happen or to not give the training time that was necessary to make this transition.
- [59:04]
Interviewer
That sounds pretty passive aggressive, I guess.
- [59:06]
Christy Coleman
Yeah. In fact, there were individuals who were quite good at that, at stalling things, and so. And it became a Real challenge. But so into that transition is when I got the call from a recruiter about the Charles Wright.
- [59:27]
Interviewer
You had done, though, something that I know was pretty, pretty important historically at that time. You did this big auction, a slave auction. I think that was at that time, wasn't it?
- [59:40]
Christy Coleman
It was, it was.
- [59:42]
Interviewer
Talk about enacting a piece of history. Must have made. Made some people pretty uncomfortable.
- [59:46]
Christy Coleman
Oh, man, that. So, yeah, this. It was called the estate sale, actually, because it was cloning. Williamsburg used to have this thing where for all of the major holidays there was sort of a historical component that was attached to it. So Memorial Day became market day, where there would be a lot of, you know, the first, you know, influx of product off the ships coming back from England and produce and all this kind of stuff. Right. The latest wares showed up in town in the spring, but in the fall, we had this program called the King's Ascension Weekend. Now, mind you, for years we had been doing programs focused on African Americans who we. We had programs that was addressing this idea of families being separated from each other due to sale and debt. Because when the House of Burgesses met business, annual business was conducted in the city, estates were settled if someone was in debt or, you know, because that's when the courts met. The courts met in April and they met in October. And so it was a town full of activity, you know, basically doubling, tripling in size during that time. And so historically. And so, like I said, we'd always done these sort of the black programs at 7 o' clock and you could go and watch this thing, but we never. And, and that. We had always had an estate sale, but we never had the estate sale. And these two programs overlap. And so that first, I mean, I hadn't been. I hadn't been the black programs director for a month. And I said, wouldn't it be something if we actually did an estate sale? Instead of them saying. And. Mr. So and so has a lot of slaves.
- [61:55]
Interviewer
Right.
- [61:55]
Christy Coleman
For sale. What if people actually saw them? Right. What if we actually saw people and that became, that became such a thing. And the point was we were doing it on the very steps where they were having conversations about liberty and freedom and sending delegates to the Constitutional Convention. And all of this was literally happening in the same space. And that's where I thought it had more power when people understood it. So unfortunately, it was, you know, it was picked up by the media, you know, this one little line, you know, lands, goods, services and slaves to be sold at public auction was the way it was Advertised and folks lost their minds. And every rumor known to man. As a matter of fact, just recently for the Atlantic, an article was written in the Atlantic where they were recounting what happened, and it is all wrong. Nothing in that article is accurate, and I am so, so angry about it that he didn't even call to ask. Oh, just going off of rumor and innuendo about what happened. That has no bearing for the truth.
- [63:13]
Interviewer
But you're right there. They could have just. I don't understand why they didn't pick.
- [63:16]
Christy Coleman
Up the phone and do it. I mean, this is a nationally prominent journalist, and I was just really, really upset by. By what they say. So, anyway, I digress. So we, you know, we had protesters, we had supporters. But I grew up in Williamsburg. People knew me, the local chapter of naacp. I went and talked to them. I said, hey, this is what we're getting ready to do. It's kind of making a little noise, but I just wanted y' all to know this is how it's going to be done. This is what it looks like. Despite any rumors that you may have heard, the public will not be involved. We will have actors scattered through the crowd. We will give them instructions about what is going to happen, and we will have Q and A after the show. So, you know, so we had, you know, the young communists from William and Mary say no to racist shows. We had the state chapter of NAACP and the state representative from SNCC and others that came to protest what we were doing. The colonial Williamsburg. The appropriate place to do this kind of work, you know, is the Disneyland for history and all this really horrific stuff. No idea what we were actually doing and the work that had been going on. So, yeah, In October of 94, we put on this, and I was one of the four individuals who were offered for sale. And we had very clear scripting. And we had the nar Not. We didn't have a script. We had the narrative arc that we had built out. And the other actors who were in the crowd knew their parts and what they were going to do. So we had, you know, and again, the coldness of it was deliberate. So we had. The first person that comes on is a house, you know, a valet is offered for sale. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. So and so's ballot. Many of you know him as a. You know. But unfortunately, bad fortunes fell upon his family and this verified. You know, he is. He can read, he can write, he can keep your accounts. He can. This. He, you know, and he's dressed and comes with his Livery. Right. Sold right away. Right. The next person comes up is a carpenter and his tools. That's right, folks, his tools come with him. You know, a strong man of perhaps 35 years old is available to you to build and about. And then next up in his wife, Suki, you know, and. And the. The. The. The actor who was playing the. The carpenter, he says to the person who's just acquired him, sir, if you buy my wife, I will promise you I will train others at your place and how to do this work, you know. And so immediately, he's bought, she's bought. And then I was the last one. And we wanted to talk about families being separated in a very profound way. But we absolutely knew, I absolutely knew that I was not going to have our juvenile actors participating. I could not put our child actors through this. And so instead I put on a pregnancy suit. Very, very pregnant. And. And there was a. Actually, let me back up. I'm sorry. Yeah. Because actually thinking about the carpenter actually was her husband. The character that I played, the maid servant, went with someone else, the other maid servant. And so there I am, full belly, husband's been sold off. Clearly a child is on the way. Auctioneer is like, all right, gentlemen, have a fine young. She's a cook, she's a this, she's a that. And as you can see, she is great with child. So you about to get two for one. I mean, it was that and the white actors with the black actors. We all. Before we did this, we, like, gave each other the biggest hugs, and we only worked with people that we deeply trusted for this, who had done stuff with us in the past, and they knew how this was supposed to flow. And we were just bawling our eyes out before it all started, just getting ready and prepping ourselves. And we were under a lot of pressure. There was international scrutiny at that point, and we did it. And the critics, the most vocal of the critics, which we have on tape, he said, I was wrong. Paine had a face. I learned something, because when it was all over, then we took Q and A from the audience and people were cheering and all the rancor and potential violence at the beginning of this, it all just went away and people were forever changed. I got hundreds and hundreds of letters after that from colleagues all around the country, random folks, folks saying thank you. I mean, 9.5 out of 10 of the letters were thank you. This was important. And then, more importantly, colleagues at, like, Mount Vernon and Monticello and others. Monticello had already started this, getting word project, but they really weren't. You know, they were kind of running from the Sally Hemings thing still at that point in the. In 94. And they all said, if y' all can do that, we, at a minimum, should be talking about the enslaved populations and doing the research on our sites. So it changed the game for the field, and I am very proud of that. The. The emotional cost of it was significant, because the big question after that was, when are you doing it again? And I couldn't. The. The emotional strain was extraordinary.
- [69:28]
Interviewer
What did it do?
- [69:32]
Christy Coleman
Well, I had people calling my house, because back then, you know, you could call information and get a phone number. You know, I had national talk show host calling me at the middle of night, trying to get me to come onto their shows. I had. I had a couple of threats. You know, I had colleagues who were like, why are y' all doing this? Just stop it. Just cancel it. Including some board members. But I had a president at the time, Bob Wilburn, who said, this is important. We can't keep doing what we're doing and not show the paradox of slavery and freedom in the age of revolution. And nothing shows it better than what you all have chosen to do. And this was something that black team produced. We did that because we thought it was important. We thought after 15 years of doing black programs at colonial Williamsburg, we had reached the place where we could actually do this. That was our arrogance and others. The other thing that it did to me, to be honest with you, because I knew I had been briefed on the security protocols in case things did get ugly. I had been briefed on the security protocols, and it made me extremely nervous. And I eventually developed a form of agoraphobia, a fear of crowds. Debilitating fear of crowds. It was. It was debilitating. And it was. It. It was kind of slow and steady. But within two months, I could not be in enclosed or crowded spaces without severe panic attacks. Attacks. Severe panic attacks, because I just couldn't do it. And in my line of work, you got to be able to talk to people. It was really bad. And I kept that. The only person who knew about it, who really knew about it were my parents, and I was a newlywed.
- [71:35]
Interviewer
Oh.
- [71:35]
Christy Coleman
I got married a couple of months right after that event. And. And he was. Because the worst of my panic attacks at that had, you know, was beginning to kind of escalate. But it hit during our honeymoon. I had a complete panic attack, meltdown. He didn't know what the hell's wrong with me. And so when we came back, I got into therapy about it and was able to develop some tools to address it to help me in that space. But it took me, honestly, it took at least a year before I could even go into space like that. But I had tools. I was still anxious, but I wasn't having like a full blown attack. I was still terribly anxious whenever I had to give a speech or anything. And I still do this to a certain degree where I would stand at the back of the room against the wall and watch as people came in. Just watching them and trying to get a sense of their energy and their vibe before I was comfortable enough to go on stage, to give a talk or whatever. Because needless to say, after that happened, I was in high demand to travel the country to talk about this thing or to consult or, you know, and it was, it was. It was tough.
- [73:06]
Interviewer
Well, especially when it's. When it is literally living history. I mean, that's what you're describing now, to take that into the present for a second. One of the things we talk about these days is as important as the subject matter is, whatever it is, especially when we're bringing it to people who might never have encountered it or never in this way. And that's certainly what you did here with. And with this kind of impact. But it is placing a tremendous amount of responsibility on the shoulders of the people who did it, especially yourself. And I'm wondering, when you look at that in retrospect, I imagine you wouldn't have changed that because of the impact it had. But I wonder about how you feel about the pressure that we place on people who represent stories that haven't been told.
- [74:00]
Christy Coleman
Yeah, I would say, generally speaking, I think that in some spaces the burden is no longer just ours to carry, which is a really lovely thing that we actually have true allies in the work. And that has been demonstrated time and time again. There are still sites that struggle with it because of maybe where they're located or whatever, but. And I would dare say that I think some of the political backlash that we're dealing with 30 years later is related to that idea that the whole world opened up in the 90s and early 2000s around our combined historical narrative and being willing to talk about these darker chapters of American history. And it opened up a world of study and a world of creativity that I think that traditionalists immediately started the backlash against it. And so we now find ourselves in a space where it was too much for them. We just want to go back to where everybody loved America and the Truth is, there really never was that time. It was a mythology that we created for ourselves. And in some cases, we lied to ourselves about certain things because they were unpleasant. We created a story of George Washington having wooden teeth, even though we knew he didn't, because the historical record as well as the actual two of his sets of false teeth are in museum collections, and they're made of ivory, and they're made out of the teeth of his enslaved people. So you can't. And so that. That kind of realism and knowing is. Is tough for some folks. Right? And it doesn't mean that you hate your country. It means that you've turned a lens, you've pulled back that veil, and seen something pretty ugly and you don't like it. And some of us are like, hey, there's something ugly. Let's clean that up. Let's understand it so we don't do that mess again. And there's other folks who are like, we got to cover that back up. And so in the museum world, we've had these culture touch points a couple of times in my career. I remember in the 90s where folks were losing their minds because the Smithsonian was doing an exhibition on the Enola Gay and talking about the impact of the bombing, the dropping of the bomb had on the people on the ground that innocence and collateral. How do you call human beings collateral, that are literally being bombed. These are not soldiers. These were homes and communities and children eviscerated. The Smithsonian did this exhibition about the Enola Gay, celebrating this decisive moment, but also the destruction that it caused. You know, it's like watching, even though I love Chris. I love Chris Nolan as a writer, director, but, you know, doing Oppenheimer and talking about the creative elements of creating this horrific weapon and not talking about the people who were getting sick from radiation poisoning as they were testing this stuff.
- [77:22]
Interviewer
Right.
- [77:22]
Christy Coleman
I mean, it's so those of us in the museum world understand that there's always this sort of, you know, ebb and flow with this. And. But, you know, that being said, we also know that generally the majority of the public wants to understand it, and when they need to pull away from it, they know how to.
- [77:48]
Interviewer
You say they. They want to understand it, but sometimes people don't know what it is. They don't know.
- [77:53]
Christy Coleman
Correct.
- [77:54]
Interviewer
I know. I know you've spent a lot of time, because of all the different places you've. You've been and along the path you were about. About going to the right. Being recruited to do that, and a lot of amazing things. You did there, obviously, again, the American Civil War Museum, you know, bringing together two very different, as I understand it, very different visions and versions of what happened in the Civil War in Virginia having a very central place in that discussion. And now what you're doing with jyf, with Jamestown, Yorktown. But in each of these contexts, I can only imagine you must have run into lots of people who just said they didn't know anything about that at all. Whatever that thing was, when they walked in the first time, they didn't even know this existed.
- [78:41]
Christy Coleman
Yeah, I mean, that moment of discovery is always fun too. Right. I mean, because I think it's. I think it's all about balance. Because if you're, if you're only talking about, oh, this is how horribly people were treated and you're not talking about the resilience of the people in spite of that treatment, people talk about, oh, what a gut wrenching experience it is to go to the monument down there that Bryan Stevens created down there, generically called the Lynching Museum. But it's not just about that. It's about the organizations that rallied to try to put a stop to it. It, you know, the various attempts to actually have a federal anti lynching law, which by the way, we still don't have. Right. But the efforts of people like Ida B. Wells and others who were drawing attention to this horrific thing of extralegal justice. And so that's the piece, that's the missing piece. And what we try to do, or what I've always tried to do in the museum environment is talk about the resilience of people in the face of these things. There are lessons in the resilience of people. There are strategies in the resilience of people in spite of horrific loss or horrific treatment that is universal. And so, yeah, people do come to our sites and see and hear things that they may not like, but they are. They have to wrestle with that. And we try to give them space to do that. And it wasn't that vastly different when I went to the Wright Museum. Right. I mean, this is a black museum in a predominantly black city in Detroit, right? Yes, in Detroit. But at the same time, you had a component of the black elite who only wanted this to be a space of celebration of black achievement and black art, period.
- [80:54]
Interviewer
And it's important for people to hear why that's. So what was their argument for having that space?
- [81:01]
Christy Coleman
Their argument was this is the space where we need to be inspiring our communities to better. We don't need to remind people of. Everybody knows what it was like. Everybody knows how hard this was. We don't need a space to remind us of that. We need a space to encourage us to keep moving forward. So we had that argument, and then we had another argument that was, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That means nothing if you don't understand what people were overcoming and why they were creating in the spaces they were creating. Right. This makes no sense. You know, Sam Cooke's A Change Is Coming makes no sense. If you take it out of the component of the civil rights era and the music industry at the time and what they were trying to do to him and what a powerful protest in such a beautifully elegant song he created. It makes no sense. Marvin Gaye's greatest album, Greatest Song, makes no sense. If you take it out of the context of Vietnam in the civil rights era. Right. And you can, you know, you can sing, you know, baby, baby, all day long, but what that is is a song of. Of resilience and resistance, and we're still going love in the midst of the crazy. But we needed this other thing, too. And so once we found that space that enabled everyone to see the connections between that, we. We. We soared, we solved the problem, and everybody felt like it was their place again.
- [82:40]
Interviewer
How is it for you, a woman from the south forever, to be working in Detroit? Now, this is one of those things that we don't talk a lot about. I mean, maybe some people do, but not everybody does. And it's a different kind of experience up there.
- [82:55]
Christy Coleman
Yeah, it is. Listen, Detroit, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, we call that up south anyway, because most of the folks that go into those areas to go work in autos and the auto, you know, related industries were coming up from Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Arkansas. Right. So when being black in Detroit is just being black anywhere, you know, now, mind you, the biggest transition for me in Detroit was the weather, I will tell you. And I did have a slight advantage. I mean, a long time ago, I kind of said, I'll never move anywhere where I don't have family within four hours. I did have a lot of. I did have, you know, some cousins in Detroit who were native Detroiters, and. And so they kind of embraced me and made me a part of the community really quickly, you know, through the church communities and others. And. And so Detroit was actually. I love Detroit. I really love Detroit. I think it's one of the most maligned cities in America. But Detroit, yeah, I had some. I had people break in my house, and I had people breaking my car. But overall, I really loved that city and I loved the energy of that city. You talk about a resilient town, and they used to say, if America catches a cold, Detroit's got the flood flu. Because Detroit would always feel good or bad economic policy first. Right. And, you know, here was a town where pride of ownership. I mean, Detroit didn't have a lot of rental properties. Most people could work in the autos, work in the plants and have an amazing. I mean, this was. This built up an extraordinary middle class in America, not just black middle class. And then white flight in the 70s really transformed the city in an abandonment of the city and then the economic crises and so forth and so on, really devastated that city. So it's had multiple renaissances since, you know, in the last 50 years or so. But Detroit is an amazing town. And Detroit loves its art and it loves its history and it loves its. I mean, everywhere you go, I don't care what strata of society economically you are, Detroiters go to museums and they participate in cultural stuff in a way that I've never seen in any other. I don't see it in D.C. i didn't. Certainly didn't see it in Baltimore. I don't see it here in Virginia. But in Detroit, folks, regardless of their economic background, regardless of their religious or. I'm sorry, or ethnic background, they love their arts and culture and they support it at a level that is. Is hard to match. You know, maybe not at the levels of New York. They're just simply much, much bigger. But Detroiters, it's. It's a great. It's a great place. I was just there last weekend to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Wright Museum. And that would.
- [86:15]
Interviewer
That was.
- [86:17]
Christy Coleman
It was quite an event.
- [86:18]
Interviewer
And when you were there, I know you led a large campaign. It was very significant, especially at that time in the 40s, I think. Millions of dollars. How have you seen that place evolve over time in terms of its impact, the way people and the way people want to tell the story?
- [86:37]
Christy Coleman
Yeah. While I was there, I redid the core exhibition and created the and Still I Rise. And Still We Rise is the title of it. We did this panel mural show called Detroit Performs to celebrate all of the great talent that came out of Detroit. We have Contemporary Artist Gallery to stay connected with contemporary artists working and living in the city. There are live performances there, theater and dance. So a lot of the traditions that Dr. Wright were so important to Dr. Wright are being carried forward. And my contribution to that, that was really turning this extraordinary space back into a space where people felt welcome. I think. No disrespect to my predecessor, but there was some concern that in going from this 28,000 square foot museum to 120,000, the personality of the museum was lost somehow. And so part of my goal was to help bring that back and to help people understand that this is your house too. It's just a little bit bigger. And so, yeah, we, we raised the 43 million. We built an endowment for the institution because it didn't really have one. We did not. Didn't really. We didn't have one. You know, all the money was put into the bells and the whistles in the building and to some degree, the exhibits, but that was even to a small degree. And my 43 was about filling up the house and sustaining the house. So really rethinking and redoing exhibitions and building an endowment for that operation so that they would have some capacity to support themselves without being so heavily reliant on government funding. So, yeah, and I, you know, I certainly made my mistakes there because that was my first CEO spot. But I definitely had a vision for it when I walked in. And even though there were people who weren't entirely sure that vision could play out with each step, it was one of those. Prove it to them. And. And so we would do little segments at a time and they could see what was happening. And the next thing you know, here we are, you know, so. And you know, I, I loved that experience. I was with the right for six years, and I left when I was pregnant with my. My youngest child.
- [89:05]
Interviewer
What made you decide to leave? I mean, it was a.
- [89:07]
Christy Coleman
Pregnant with my youngest daughter, and it was a very, very difficult pregnancy. And I really, you know, I'd already suffered some losses prior to her, actually two between her and my son. And so I wasn't going to take that risk. And it was stressful. I mean, it was certainly a stressful job job, you know, to have the whole weight of an institution on your shoulders. I did a lot of praying in that job. I literally used to lay my hands on the building and say, lord, please help me figure this out. We don't have. I don't know if I'm gonna make payroll next month. And inevitably a check would come and we'd make payroll and we'd be able to pay a bill. And. And so, yeah, until we got that campaign done. You know, I almost got fired once because we had raised a lot of money, but it was earmarked capital money for projects, and we were running out of operating Cash. And board members were like, you just need to get on the phone and call, call the donors. And I said, no, that's the problem. In the past, you guys have used money that was earmarked for something else else, and the projects never got done or didn't get done well. And so they just. Now they just give you throwaway money instead of real money because they don't think you're going to do with it what you said you're going to do. And I refuse to do it.
- [90:34]
Interviewer
No one had told them that before.
- [90:36]
Christy Coleman
Yeah, it was a problem. It was a problem. But fortunately enough, this remarkable man, judge, Judge Damon Key, he said, this is ridiculous. He said, I'm not supposed to fundraise or do any of that because I'm a judge, federal judge, but here's what we're going to do. I'm just going to invite some people to my chamber and they never turn me down. And you're going to tell them what's going on and what you need from them. He did this in 72 hours, and his chambers were full of all of the major black businessmen in that room. And I said, I'm a million dollars short. And he looked around the room, he said, I'm going to step out the room, but when I come back, I'm pretty sure we're going to have that money. Right. And walked out. When I tell you I walked out of that room with $800,000 in cash and pledges, checks and pledges. It was astonishing.
- [91:40]
Interviewer
Wow.
- [91:41]
Christy Coleman
It was astonishing. And we got through it.
- [91:46]
Interviewer
Yeah. You know, there was a lot of pressure.
- [91:48]
Christy Coleman
There were a few board members that never forgave me for that. You know, we had a situation where Ford Motor Company wanted to showcase one of their new vehicles in our rotunda, which meant taking down our doors, literally taking down these 13, 14 foot brass plated doors to move the vehicles inside and put them in the rotunda, drop drive them in, which meant fumes or pull them in or whatever. And I said, no, we can't do that. And we can't take food in this brand new gallery that I just spent $16 million on. I cannot let people take food in there. I know this is the international auto show and I know Ford has selected us as their spot, but we cannot let the international press and all these guests take their food, drink wine, whatever, into a gallery that I literally just opened, opened and spent $16 million on. And so, so there was, there were, there were those kinds of push and pulls and, and like I said, when I found out I was pregnant again and the challenges that were there, I said, you know what, I'm going to save you all the problem, you know, and what's crazy is, you know, my success there speaks for itself, not just creatively, but, you know, when I got there, we had 3, 500 members. When I left, we had over 15,000. So. And we had raised the bulk of the 43 million before I left.
- [93:27]
Interviewer
And so I guess why return to Virginia? I mean, Virginia was because of my kids.
- [93:33]
Christy Coleman
Because of my kids. I had two small kids. I was working like insane. It was insanity. And I needed to slow down to be the kind of mother I wanted to be to my kids. I had a, I had a two year old because I did, you know, kind of did the stay at home mom thing for a little, for about a year. And then I did some consulting on the side just to have some income coming in. But basically I was a stay at home mom for about two years and I really wanted to get back in the field. My kids were healthy and happy and. But I needed some help. So, you know, my parents were here in Williamsburg. My ex husband's family was in the D.C. area. And so Richmond was a great spot to have that, that familial support. And I also chose to go to a smaller museum. The right was, you know, $8 million budget, you know, several hundred thousand visitors a year. The American Civil War center, when I went, maybe 45,000 visitors, little over $2 million budget.
- [94:44]
Interviewer
Yeah, but the scale of the project, it must have been because you had to bring these things together.
- [94:49]
Christy Coleman
Well, the scale of it was very different. Right. So that's, that's where the, the sort of the creative mind thing comes. And, and I have to be honest, that was not my choice. That was not my idea to do it. It. I had a donor, a major donor and a major supporter of mine who said, hey, so there's an opportunity. You know, he's a businessman. He said, there's an opportunity here. Museum of the Confederacy is over there bleeding money with all that great stuff. And you've got this innovative thing going on here with programs. You all are pulling people in of every stripe and color, loving and thinking differently about the Civil War. What would happen if you merged? And I said, that's not gonna happen. And out of all due respect, because I said, you know, I get that the Museum of the Confederacy stopped being a museum for the Confederacy and a museum about the Confederacy back in the 90s, I get that.
- [95:46]
Interviewer
But that was the 90s. That wasn't that long.
- [95:48]
Christy Coleman
But I'm not doing this, right. I was like, I'm not doing it. And he said, but if you did, what would it look like? And I said, okay, intellectual exercise. If we did it, this is probably what we could do. And then he looked at me, he said, how much would it cost to build a new museum and do all this stuff? You just said to me, merge these teams. How much? I said, oh, at least 50 million. And he looked at me and he said, all right, I'll give you half, and I'll get another friend of mine to give you the other half. And I was like, are you serious right now? Absolutely serious. Can you make it happen? I don't trust anybody else to do this, but you make it happen. And I said, okay, let me. Let me go talk to my peer. So we all with. He and I wait. And I sat down with. With Bruce again. Bruce laid out his thoughts. Wait said the same thing. Oh, it'll never work. And I said, well, actually, wait, if we did, because I thought about it, I said, well, if we do this, this is what we'd have to do. And I kind of pull out the chalkboard and. Or the flip chart, rather, and I'm like writing stuff down. And he's nodding, and I said, and I know we have mutual donors, so we'd have to account for that. And we're going to certainly run a deficit for the first couple of years because we're going to need to adjust your team. Team's salary because your people, I don't know why they still work for you, man, because I'm paying my folks a heck of a lot more than you are for some of these roles. But, you know, if we're going to do it, this is how we could do it. And. And so the next thing I know, we're taking proposals to our boards who are intrigued. You know, we wouldn't have to do. Initially it was that we weren't going to have to raise any money. The other partner ended up backing out because one component that he, he, he liked, there was only like one real component that he was really thrilled with, and he was engaged with another institution. So he said, well, I won't give you 25, but I'll give you five. So we ended up having to raise. We ended up, you know, we ended up, out of the 68 million, I think it was, when it was all said and done, 58 or 68 million plus endowment money. We. We ended up actually having to come up with probably 30 million of that. And the biggest problem though, initially was we had a co CEO arrangement because of the politics of the situation.
- [98:29]
Interviewer
All of those things, though, like the business plan and how the economics of it are going to work and the fundraising, those are things that, you know, you had done. So I guess that's why you knew you could do it. Plus you had this donor. But. But the. But the telling of. And the co CEO part, that must have been really complicated.
- [98:45]
Jay Frost
But. But the.
- [98:47]
Interviewer
But the merging of the stories. I mean, again, you're a person who has spent a lot of time on developing a story that was truthful and impactful. And I suppose that's true of any historian. But that's also the truth that you have uncovered in the. In this. In, you know, through going through your sources and doing this diligently. And that's the narrative that you have developed. If I remember right from years ago, going down there, one of the museums was when they were separate, it really did sound like the War of Northern Aggression and the War between the States. And the language was very different. The narrative was very different. Maybe I'm not remembering, but you're remembering correctly.
- [99:29]
Christy Coleman
Yeah.
- [99:30]
Interviewer
So how did you get those two narratives to combine? How did you make a Reese's Peanut Butter cup out of two entirely different narratives?
- [99:42]
Christy Coleman
Well, first of all, we did have to address this idea of the Lost Cause narrative. Right. We had to be very intentional about what that was. And we had planned because of the gracious initial gift, we had planned for deficits because we knew we were going to lose donors. And in fact, we estimated that we would lose 40% of our donor base. Oh, wow. That the majority of that would be MOC donors. But we ended up losing some American Civil War donors because they thought the Civil War Museum donors because they thought we had been co opted by the Confederacy initially. And so, like I said, the first thing we did is we tackled the Lost Cause narrative and what that meant through a series of programs. We looked at the objects in the collection which were heavily Confederate centered, but had so much more rich stories to it, and how we could turn a lens on it. So, for example, there were flags in the collection. The United States States gave the Museum of the Confederacy in 1904 and 1905 all of its captured flags from the Civil War, all the Confederate captured flags that they had in the War Department in the United States, they gave it to the Museum of the Confederacy. So they were Confederate flags. But when you looked at the regiments that captured them and then you find that you're seeing a Confederate flag that was captured by United States Colored Troops in Petersburg in 1864. And then we could tie that to objects that we had on our side of the house and show and actually have pictures of those men and that they had the pride of capturing and defeating this Confederate regiment. That was huge. So the Confederati could still go in the museum and see the iconic pieces that they wanted. Yeah, that's my term. I created that term, the Confederate, because that's what they were, man. And like I said, we tackle lost cause head on. We designed the exhibit not strictly chronologically, but thematically about impact of this war across all of these peoples. And we made a deliberate point. Anybody walking in there immediately sees all of the faces of the people who participated in this war, not as bystanders, but as active participants. Participants. And so the faces of indigenous people and Chinese Americans and black people and women and women dressed in uniform. I mean, people were just blown away by our presentation of the fracturedness and our design. The design. You know, I made very clear to the designers that we selected. I said, I don't want to see any museum hues. We're going to go completely different. So don't bring me any reds and tans and beiges and blues. I want something different. And so we ended up letting the objects speak and putting them again in these sort of thematic. So the first area is, how do you prepare what. What is the. What is the problem? What is the conflict? And so, you know, you probably heard states rights, you've heard this, you've heard, here's what it really was, and here are the documents all laid out from you from the archives of the Museum of Confederacy, which made real clear and plain what this war is about for the south, and that this is a war for Union, for the north at the time, right? And then we say, how do. How do people prepare for war? And so that's the first section, and then it just goes on through, and we weave in timelines along the way. I am really proud of that show. I'm proud of all of my exhibits, because it's not something that I get to do very often, but for me, it's like writing a script. It's, who are the. Who are the characters? Who are the. Who are the people we should know? What do they have to tell us along the way of this journey? Who can pick up their story if they're dead? Right. Or if they're silenced? Who picks up that story? And so it served that function very well. And again, because we had had such remarkable. Such a remarkable archive, photographic collection and object collection. The story just leaps out of the space. So, yeah, I really love it a lot. And once we got past the co CEO thing, things really took off.
- [104:28]
Interviewer
Did you lose the 40% of the donors like you projected?
- [104:30]
Christy Coleman
Oh, we lost 43%.
- [104:33]
Interviewer
But the ones who stayed, did they sustain you and grow with you sued us.
- [104:37]
Christy Coleman
We grew and we grew more. And once we opened and people actually saw what it was and let go of their fears and concerns and saw this magical new thing that was exploring the war from multiple perspectives, it was a hit.
- [104:56]
Interviewer
You were there through 2020 and.
- [104:59]
Christy Coleman
Yeah, through 2019. 2019.
- [105:01]
Interviewer
Excuse me.
- [105:01]
Christy Coleman
I went there in 2008 and I left in 2019. So, yeah, I was there far longer than my intention. I had planned, actually. I had gotten an offer to leave to actually, of all places, go to Gettysburg, which is really funny. I'd gotten an offer to go to Gettysburg and I had gotten a solid, solid, amazing offer that I didn't even have to apply for. I didn't. Which was nuts. They reached out to me to come run the Abraham Lincoln Library in Illinois, and my board talked to me. My board chair specifically talked to me, and he said, you got to finish what we started here.
- [105:43]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [105:44]
Christy Coleman
What do you need to make this happen? And so we negotiated some of what I needed intellectually to make that happen. And then I asked them, you know, and we still had money issues. Right? Right. But not. Not significantly. And the only reason why we were running into money issues is because the price of the building was shifting with steel tariffs and stuff during the first. During the 45 term. Right, 45's term. We were running into the steel tariffs that he had placed and bunch of other crap, and prices just escalated on us.
- [106:20]
Interviewer
Well, it was. It was that change in. In the political environments I was really alluding to with this, because between 2008 and 2020, we had a lot of things happen. But also. So the rising backlash that you hadn't really experienced with that estate. Estate sale, where I think you were saying it was voices. You didn't use the term the left, and. Which I know is loaded, but you talked about different organizations that are often associated with more progressive or leftist politics. But you didn't mention people on the right having really an issue with it at the time, at least in what you were describing before. But we've seen. Seen that rise, especially in Virginia.
- [106:56]
Christy Coleman
You talking about with the. The Civil War Museum?
- [106:58]
Interviewer
No, with the. With the estate. With the estate sale. But Very much later, it was very.
- [107:04]
Christy Coleman
Much more left leaning folks who were very angry.
- [107:09]
Interviewer
So did you see a change then with some of the pushback by the time you were going through this whole process with the American Civil War Museum?
- [107:16]
Christy Coleman
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, more conservative folks, especially, again, southern white folks who had this narrative of lost cause that they had been raised on and that we were taught in Virginia schools into the 70s were very suspicious. They could take individual stories, but reframing the nature of the war was a step too far for some. But like I said, once they got in there and they could see this sort of pivoting thing, it was. People were less afraid of it. Right.
- [107:57]
Interviewer
If you could get them in there, which I guess brings us to.
- [108:01]
Christy Coleman
Yeah, they, I mean, word of mouth and the press around it was so great about what an accomplishment this was that people were curious enough to go and sometimes they sent their spies and, you know, and we have a lot of Civil War roundtables around the country. And so they were talking about it and they were coming. And then after a while, a few of the Sons of Confederate Veterans chapters started showing up. And again, they would tend to ignore the other stuff and then they would just kind of focus in, oh, look, there's Jeb Stewart's boots. So they could still do that if that's what they needed to do, but they were certainly going to see other things in that space around them.
- [108:40]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [108:41]
Christy Coleman
So, yeah, it ended up being. It changed the game for a lot of people about how you could talk about the Civil War. And the museum continues to do. Well, from what I understand. I go over there every now and then for special lectures or something like that. But it's Rob's house now and I try to step away and let him do what he does and the team's there. But it was not only a transformation in storytelling, but, you know, I also am a big believer in our museums should represent the communities we are in and serve, you know.
- [109:19]
Interviewer
Right.
- [109:20]
Christy Coleman
And so, you know, that was the other thing that I probably equally proud of is that when I was, when I was CEO there, my staff was 30% people of color are queer and they were open loud and proud with their piercings and their gauges and their whatever was going on and you know, their dreads and their, you know, which people weren't accustomed to seeing when they walked in the door. So immediately the people that we had on the front door let people know this was someplace different. There's power in that. And unfortunately, I don't think that that's no longer the case. I think the staff now is almost 100% white again yet. So, you know, but the, the staff has, you know, those individuals that I work with have moved on and done some pretty remarkable things and are making their own way in the museum world now. So again, it's, it's an, it's been a ride in Jamestown. I feel like I'm halfway there.
- [110:28]
Interviewer
This is almost six years now, I guess.
- [110:30]
Christy Coleman
Yeah, well, yeah, it'll be six years in January. I, I, I, I can't believe it. Because it's been a lot of fun and it's been stressful at different points in time, but stressful in a different way because I'm certainly more confident and more, I think the biggest issue that I have in this space is this is the first time since Detroit that I've had to deal with sort of political issues because we are an agency of the state. State. Right. Even though we have private, not for profit, affiliates. So there's, you know, there's, that, there's not political pressure. But, you know, I have to go and ask for money from, you know, a legislature or an administration. Right. But it's such a much bigger ship that the kind of rapid change that I have been accustomed to needing to make is just a slower moving machine. The change is there. It's just that it's, it just takes a lot because folks are entrenched and there are folks who have been in the institution for 35, 40 years.
- [111:49]
Interviewer
Is any part of that because we're further away from it? Because you're dealing with a story that's longer ago and there aren't people present who can advocate in the same way for it. I don't, I don't know if that makes any sense, but.
- [112:07]
Christy Coleman
Interestingly enough, the, the foundings of the nation, the beginnings of our nation, has never been fully examined like that. You know, Williamsburg gives us the colonial period, but who's really looked at colonialism that way, you know? And, you know, when I tell people I said black people were here before the Mayflower, and it's sort of a startling moment. And I was like, yeah, right, Mayflower, 1620. The white lion and the treasurer were in 1619. Now ask yourself why you don't know the names of those ships. Right. And so it is a different, it is a different dynamic. And one of the things that we're spending more time with this idea of community ownership. So our indigenous communities are involved in the stories that we tell about Indigenous history and culture and legacy and what that means and how they want to see that portrayed. We have descendant communities. People like, yeah, my so and so, 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th great grandfather was among the settlers that came in 1611. We got a lot of people that are still around like that, that trace their lineage that way. And that's an extraordinary thing. And then when you say, imagine not being able to trace yourself that way and why, you know, so Jamestown is the birth of a nation. Jamestown is the place where we have the first general assembly. This idea of representative government on these shores, this way among European nations anyway, because our native communities, they're like the chiefs, had a system of representation as well. It's just really relearning it and then again giving space for all of that and what convergence of culture means. We are no more English as we are Spanish as we are Angolan as we are Powhatan. Right. We are this hybrid. And I don't like melting pot because that assumes something else. That assumes equal parts, you know, And I don't, you know, tapestry, maybe, but only if you flip it over and you see the ugly threads on the back. This is something else. And so really having a glorious time figuring out how to engage in those conversations and what it says about how we vision ourselves as Americans in that storytelling.
- [114:56]
Interviewer
How is it for you to going through these things that you've done, looking at these periods of history and then kind of writing a narrative to bring people into a full story each of these periods, then to go to a period that arguably has some of the least attention, but sometimes also a two dimensional focus, and you're giving it very much a three dimensional one. What is that like for you at this point in your career to have that kind of opportunity, but responsibility?
- [115:29]
Christy Coleman
I mean, it's still fun, but there's a part of me that just thinks, why the hell am I still doing this 40 years later? Right. I mean, it's like, why are we still having this conversation about whether or not this is a valid story or not? You know, why are we still, you know, And I guess we'll keep doing it until we, we get it right and people understand that it's not threatening at all, that it is actually an empowering thing to be able to cleanly look at something and heal from it. I used to give this analogy where you can still love your drunk uncle, but let's not pretend he's not an alcoholic. And then let's put into place the strategies to make sure that we don't create more of them because of the trauma he created. Right. So it's this. It's, how do we. And so I kind of lean into that idea a little bit. It, you know, no, it's not all great. It's not all horrible either, because at the heart of this is an idea that is really profound. The issue is, are we brave enough, are we noble enough to fight for the ideals that we claim? And that's the space that, that I'm more cognizant of now. There is a lack of. In some spaces, there's a lack of. And I won't even call it moral clarity. I call it just honor. I don't think people understand what real honor is. It's not some false loyalty, no matter what. Honor of character, honor of empathy. Those are the kind of things that are consistently in my head as I go about my work. Everyone deserves truth. And I know truth can be sometimes object, subjective, but it is a part of the journey. Right? And if you're not able to look at the evidence in front of you with a clear eye or, or acknowledge that evidence can shift when we learn something else new. That's. That's the thing. It's. It's not static. It's never been static to me. And I'm constantly learning from. From people all the time. There's this. There's this, this idea of creating belonging in museums now, which I think is the underlying thing that I've never been able to label before. How do you create belonging? How do you create spaces where people say not only that I belong here, but you belong here? How do you create that space? Because that's when the anger starts going away. Because everybody has. Everyone has value. Everyone's story has. Has impact, if you're willing to hear it. So that's kind of where I think all of this is going to end up. Here at Jamestown. You know, give me another five years or so and. And then I will call it quits. And God willing, I will go back to what brought me to all of this again. And that is writing and theater. I actually do want to go back to that because there are still so many stories in my head that I want to tell that don't necessarily fit into the spaces that I'm working in at the time. And that's okay. That's okay. But I get inspiration every day. I'll tell you that. And, and that's the honest to God truth. I get inspiration every day from living little things and little interactions. And I still make it a habit to go outside at least a couple times. A day and I just sit and watch visitors and listen to what they're saying and how they're interacting and what they're worried about in a moment or what they're, you know, it is, it's compelling and it keeps me doing the work. Even when I am deeply frustrated for one reason or another, I know that it matters.
- [120:07]
Jay Frost
Well, that's it for this episode of the PM Podcast. You can learn more about the Jamestown yorktown foundation@jyfmuseums.org Our thanks to our sponsor, Donor Search, the global leader in AI powered fundraising intelligence solutions for the nonprofit sector. Our producer producer is Jack Frost and our theme music is Moving Out, Moving in by Jay Taylor and is provided courtesy of Epidemic Sound. If you like what you heard, make sure to subscribe wherever you like to listen. Check out our sister shows, Front Lines of Social Good and How to Raise, and come back next weekend for another conversation with a leader in the world of social good. Until then, this is Jay Frost.
- [120:49]
Interviewer
Thanks for joining me.