Despite the cool air and a steady drizzle that mists his glasses, slicks his dark hair and drips down the collar of his navy blue trench coat, Bill Martin’s eyes are gleaming with excitement.
On this glum chilly morning, Martin, the director of The Valentine, is engaged in one of his favorite pursuits: narrating a historic tour. Dapper as always in a suit and tie, Martin walks a slow circle around an urn-topped memorial, pointing out the engraved names of the 72 people who died on this spot in 1811 when the Richmond Theatre went up in flames.
He mentions some of the notables buried in the crypt below — a governor, a former U.S. senator — but today those are not the names that draw him. He focuses instead on the six enslaved people interred alongside the city’s white elite.
“One of the things that is very interesting here is that it is an interracial burial,” Martin says.
After the theater fire, he explains, Richmond’s leaders confronted a problem both simple and profound: The bodies of those who perished were unrecognizable as white or Black. The differences that seemed so stark to everyone at the time — and to so many in the centuries before and the centuries to come — had been erased by the flames.
And so, Martin recounts with obvious pleasure, “they’re buried in the crypt here together.”
To be clear, these citizens of Richmond were not treated equally by the monument’s designers: The names of the six Black dead are engraved beneath those of the whites. This was Old Virginia, after all; even in death one was expected to keep one’s place.
Life and death. Race and remembrance. Justice and oppression. The tangled threads of myth and history and memory.
‘A Sense of Wonder’
As the longtime leader of The Valentine, Richmond’s city museum, Martin thinks and talks often about such things. In conversation, he delights in jumping from one historical detail to another, sometimes making clear connections, other times seeming to wander for the sheer joy of it through the encyclopedic storehouse of Richmond history in his mind. He’ll start discussing a 19th-century African American church in downtown Richmond, and a few sentences later, he’s describing how he learned about Italian immigrants who settled in Highland Park in the 1960s. It’s as if he has incorporated the museum into himself.
At age 67, Martin says he’s come to accept that his life is intertwined with the museum he has overseen for 27 years. “So much of what I do, so much of what I think about is this place,” he says.
Over the past 2 1/2 decades, Martin has become something of an institution himself. “Bill has been around forever,” notes Adele Johnson, executive director of the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia. “I respect him as a leader who is not afraid to step out and tell his story.”
His peers say he’s esteemed in museum circles around the country. Endlessly affable, Martin has applied his winning combination of self-effacing modesty and generous encouragement of others to build a network of support across the city and beyond. For many, he has become an ambassador for the idea that new and exciting possibilities may be discovered inside the musty world of city history museums.
“He brings a sense of magic to the history business — and a sense of wonder,” says Christina Vida, who joined The Valentine in mid-2019 as its Elise H. Wright curator of general collections. “I have never worked with anyone who has maintained that sense of enthusiasm for what he’s doing, as long as his career has been.”
Along with leading the museum and overseeing its $3 million annual budget, Martin serves on the board of directors of the Richmond Business Council and Leadership Metro Richmond. He chairs the Richmond Region Museum Directors group and is a member of the Richmond Mayor’s Tourism Commission. He is particularly proud of his role helping to create a downtown heritage walking trail, the Richmond Liberty Trail, which joins the Richmond Slave Trail.
“I feel like he knows everyone, and everyone knows him,” says Jamie Bosket, president and CEO of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.
Bosket met Martin four years ago, within days of arriving in Richmond to lead the state’s history museum after a decade at Mount Vernon. “He may have been the very first person to call me,” Bosket says, adding that Martin treated him as a colleague from the start. “He welcomed me with open arms.”
It was like being welcomed by the history of the city itself, in a way. “The Valentine and Bill,” Bosket muses. “The two are sort of inseparable now, aren’t they?”
Bill Martin leads a tour of The Valentine’s permanent exhibition, “This Is Richmond, Virginia.” (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
A Rocky Start
Ask Bill Martin for his life story, and you’ll get a brisk summary. He’s not one to talk about himself in detail. “As public as he is, he’s also exceptionally private,” observes Christy S. Coleman, former president and CEO of the American Civil War Museum, today executive director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, who has known Martin since 1994. While Martin loves to talk and meet people, she adds, “there are times when I think that at his core, he’s really an introvert.”
An only child from Culpeper County, Martin attended Virginia Tech, earning degrees in urban studies and public administration. An oh-why-not application for a job at the Okefenokee Heritage Center/Southeastern Forest World in Waycross, Georgia, inspired his love of museum work.
That post led to a disappointing and brief tenure as executive director of the Jacksonville Museum of Arts & Sciences in Florida, whence he escaped back to Virginia and a comfortable gig as director of tourism and museums for the city of Petersburg.
In 1993, Martin was recruited by The Valentine’s innovative, mercurial and energetic director Frank Jewell to be its marketing director. With Jewell, Martin embarked — enthusiastically, he says — on a roller-coaster journey to bring to life Valentine Riverside, Jewell’s vision of a high-tech, truthful telling of Richmond history.
Jewell convinced the museum’s board and investors to fund a dramatic expansion of The Valentine into the former Tredegar Iron Works, including projections, laser light shows, video screens and an honest recounting of the miseries of slavery.
The expansion was groundbreaking, technologically advanced and daring. It also was an expensive, resounding flop. Despite nationwide publicity, audiences did not show up in large enough numbers to support the debt The Valentine had taken on to create it. Six months after Martin had signed on, following a few desperate attempts to salvage the idea — including an ice rink and river rafting — Jewell was ousted.
Unlike many of his colleagues, Martin did not leave when Jewell did. Instead, he got the job of trying to nurse back to life what was left of The Valentine, which was $10 million in debt and teetering on bankruptcy.
“It was a damned mess, is what it was,” says Henry Valentine II, the former longtime chairman of Davenport & Co., who with Martin struggled to save the museum his family had founded.
Martin scrimped, cut budgets and scrambled for funding. Even he was uncertain of The Valentine’s future; he didn’t sell his home in Petersburg for years. (He now lives in Church Hill in a house built in 1809.)
In time, with care and caution, the foundering museum was righted. “If it wasn’t for Bill,” says Valentine, now 94, “I can tell you, I don’t think there’d even be a museum at all.”
Complicated Present, Uncertain Future
About 15 years back, Martin had a bout with cancer that he feared would end his life. He’s been well for a while now, but he says that the experience pushed him to confront his mortality and consider what he could accomplish. And the support of museum board members during his most difficult times changed how he thought of his relationship to The Valentine. In his telling, he decided to embrace the museum as his life’s work — not as a tool or a toy for elite Richmond, but as a sort of prism to shape and focus and sharpen the way the city sees itself.
These days, Richmond, Bill Martin and The Valentine, together and separately, are far more financially secure than they were in the doldrums of the late 20th century. But the city, the man and the museum are confronting a complicated present and an uncertain future. The worldwide pandemic forced institutions to shut down and rethink their approaches. Social unrest and concerns about injustice have inspired unprecedented reflection over the city’s racial history. All along Monument Avenue, heroically posed statues have been dismantled.
Buildings are being renamed, streets rechristened, old legends reexamined.
That reexamination goes on in the city’s museum as well. In many ways, this is a perfect moment for The Valentine. With The Valentine, Martin “has shown Richmond some parts of itself as an urban center that it didn’t always know or didn’t want to see ... and he’s done it in some very clever ways,” says Coleman. “And he’s had to convince some pretty powerful people to support those ideas who ordinarily might not.”
That includes wrestling with issues of race and class — topics associates say are close to Martin’s heart. “He can suffer fools,” Coleman observes of Martin, “but he does not suffer them lightly. And he really does not suffer bigotry. Nothing will set him off more.”
Recently, Martin has helped lead The Valentine through a period of soul-searching that traces back to its founding in the late 1800s. Like the tangled ivy that grows up its brick walls, the museum and the myth of the Confederacy are entwined.
“The Valentine, like most institutions established during that time period, expressed its biased nature through subjective exhibitions and slanted views,” says Johnson, the Black History Museum’s executive director. But, she adds, “I believe that Bill led and continues to lead the museum through a time of much-needed change, and his leadership has influenced others to do the same.”
Bill Martin leads discussion during a Controversy/History event on education at The Valentine in 2019. (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
Redefining History
Just after the Civil War, Richmonder Mann S. Valentine II, having failed at a literary career, earned a fortune by selling a “health tonic” of questionable efficacy called Valentine’s Meat Juice. Valentine’s sudden wealth allowed him and his family to embark on the then-fashionable hobby of collecting cultural artifacts in the fields of archaeology, anthropology and the arts.
In 1898, the family bequeathed that collection and the Wickham mansion in which they lived to become the foundation of the museum that bears their name. Mann Valentine’s brother, a sculptor named Edward Virginius Valentine who is best known for his statues of Confederate leaders, briefly was its director. (More on him later.)
Over the ensuing decades, The Valentine expanded into surrounding buildings, refined its collections to focus on the city’s history, and began presenting events and history tours that gave thousands of Richmonders a way to think of the city and themselves. Schoolchildren were welcomed — Black and white alike. The Valentine taught Richmond history to everyone.
What was that version of history? In its earlier years, as Martin acknowledges, The Valentine focused on the white elites who ruled the city from its founding through the Civil War and after.
Martin and his team have been looking closely at the Valentine family papers. It seems the Valentines were fairly typical white Richmonders in the years after the war — the era that birthed the Lost Cause. “To be honest, we kind of hoped they’d be atypical,” Martin says ruefully. “But ...”
Any discussion of Richmond history inevitably winds its way to the Lost Cause, the poisonous myth that the slaveholding Confederacy was a utopia of tranquility where genteel, aristocratic whites ruled over cheerful, servile Blacks. It is a myth, of course. In truth, the city of Richmond was founded on tobacco but grew wealthy on the slave trade.
Standing on the manicured grounds of the Capitol, with its neoclassical pillars and grand rotunda, Martin points downhill. “Right there,” he observes, “is the site of the Richmond slave market.”
He marvels at the idea that just downhill from Thomas Jefferson’s temple to liberty stood the nation’s second-largest slave market. (New Orleans was the largest.) In the years just before the Civil War, Richmond became a worldwide center for the sale and resale of human beings. When the time came, Richmond chose to become the headquarters of the doomed war; after the war, it became a nerve center of the Lost Cause.
Between Reconstruction and the Lost Cause, though, came an almost-forgotten period that fascinates Martin today. The Readjuster Party, an unlikely alliance of former Confederates, recently arrived Northerners and the newly enfranchised Black community, briefly controlled Virginia. Martin sees these four years — 1879-83 — as a moment in which Virginia could have gone down a different road.
“Bill has been around forever. I respect him as a leader who is not afraid to step out and tell his story.” —Adele Johnson, executive director of the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia
That did not happen. The Readjusters were defeated by race-baiters in the Democratic Party. Within 20 years, a new state leadership had rewritten the Virginia constitution to make it all but impossible for Blacks and poor whites to vote.
“Just think what might have been,” Martin says as he looks at the White House of the Confederacy, that towering monument to the Lost Cause.
Statues and Stories
Martin sees museums as collections of things that tell stories. “Objects provide a unique window into ideas,” he says.
But there’s more to The Valentine than its collection. Under Martin’s leadership, the museum has embarked on a mission to connect the city’s past and present. Its annual Richmond History Makers awards for people who have made an impact on the city have been part of that effort, along with public “community conversations” on topics such as transportation, housing and inequities in health care.
Nonetheless, The Valentine has long been known as ”Richmond’s attic.” Its storage rooms are packed with tall shelves lined with 1.5 million items: furniture, clothing, miniatures. Martin dislikes this impression, says Neelan A. Markel, chair of the museum’s board of directors. “Bill does not want people to think of The Valentine like that,” she explains.
At the same time, The Valentine’s collection is missing vital elements of city history, such as objects that represent the city’s working classes and Black citizens. Its current “Ain’t Misbehavin’” exhibition of 1920s fashions even includes a note in which curators acknowledge these gaps.
Recently, Martin has encouraged the museum staff to review its collection and refocus it on telling the story of Richmond. Items that don’t meet that goal are returned to their owners, if they can be found, or properly disposed of.
This reevaluation has led to a reconsideration of a portion of the museum that has previously been something of an afterthought — the attached sculpture studio of Edward Virginius Valentine. The studio of the artist, who died in 1930 and whose career spanned 50 years, holds a collection of his works, a potpourri of spectral heads and busts stacked on shelves.
Among Valentine’s paid commissions were the statue of Thomas Jefferson that stands in The Jefferson Hotel and a recumbent figure of General Robert E. Lee that lies in the chapel beneath which Lee is buried at Washington & Lee University.
But Valentine’s most emblematic sculpture might be his bronze of Jefferson Davis from 1907. That figure stood for more than a century on Monument Avenue.
In the summer of 2020, of course, Valentine’s statue of Davis was torn down, with its face daubed black, its pedestal scrawled with graffiti and its body spattered in shocking pink paint. The statue of Davis has been hauled off to storage until its ultimate fate is determined. Even before it was toppled, Martin had determined the monument tells an important story of the city — and of 2020. Vida, the Valentine curator, remembers Martin phoning her about the Davis statue during the social unrest last summer: “Christina, we’ve got to have this!”
Martin since has told the city that he thinks the bronze figure would be a perfect fit for The Valentine’s collection — exactly the way it is. “Everything about it now tells a story,” he explains. “The graffiti, the paint, everything. It’s beautiful.”
The story of the Jefferson Davis monument is the story of Richmond during and especially after the Civil War. It is the story of the Valentine family. It had been the story of how the city portrayed itself, and more recently, it became the story of the way much of the city has rejected that portrayal.
A moment ago, Martin was talking about the museum’s collection. But now, in true Martin style, he’s on a roll about the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, often described as the world’s first law protecting the rights of citizens to worship as (or if) they wish. Written by Thomas Jefferson and passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1786, it is a precursor to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
To Martin, Jefferson’s ideals, even as the statesman’s life and society failed to live up to them, are a counterbalance to the painful truths of slavery and injustice. The truths that the Lost Cause fought to hide.
“Religious freedom, liberty, freedom of conscience,” Martin says. “Those bold, big ideas that we created to find our way — what do they look like today? What does ‘democracy’ mean today? Or ‘republic’? To reimagine the social contract, what are the things we can all agree to build on?”
Then he returns, as he always does sooner or later, to his favorite theme, the museum that has shaped much of his life. “The Valentine can hint at where we live up to those values and where we fail,” he says. “We have to look beyond the standard stories. We have to.”
