Ambassador Okandeh Mawunde Free Yannoh Bangura wasn’t having it.

During a 2012 community conversation at the Valentine about the future of the Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground, the moderator and others kept referring to enslaved Africans as “slaves” instead of recognizing that enslavement was their condition, not who they were.

“Stop calling my ancestors slaves,” Bangura blurted out. It was a contentious moment.

At the close of the event, a white man in a suit approached Bangura and said, “What is your name? We need to be friends.”

The man was William J. “Bill” Martin, the longtime director of the Valentine. Before long, Bangura was whisked away on a behind the scenes tour of the city’s museum.

In the Valentine’s archive, Martin gave Bangura an old pair of leather boots and told her to slap them, as it was time to move forward. Then he handed her a walking cane and asked her to stamp it on the ground three times, which she did.

Walking away from the artifacts, Martin remarked, “You know, those boots were Robert E. Lee’s, and so was that walking cane.” To Bangura, the episode felt like an incantation to walk away from these objects’ toxic history.

The story is one of many that typify Martin’s personal commitment to helping Richmond overcome its racially fraught past.

On Dec. 27 of last year, a driver turning a car left onto East Broad Street from North 10th Street struck Martin while he was in the crosswalk at approximately 12:03 p.m. Martin died from his injuries the following day. He was 71.

Referred to by some as “Richmond’s unelected mayor” or a variation thereof, Martin was a beloved, constant presence in the city. Seemingly perpetually dressed in a suit and tie, Martin was friendly, intelligent and impishly funny.

In his three decades at the helm of the Valentine, Martin not only brought the museum back from the brink of insolvency but transformed it into an institution that’s helping to shape Richmond’s post-Confederate identity.

While Martin never shied away from our city’s racially conflicted past, perhaps no one did more to bring Richmonders together to chart a path forward.

“A provocateur at his core”

Growing up in Brandy Station, a tiny unincorporated community in Culpeper County, Martin didn’t have to go far to interact with history; gardening in his childhood backyard inevitably meant running into Minié balls and other artifacts from the Civil War.

Martin earned a bachelor’s in urban studies and a master’s in public administration from Virginia Tech. In 1975, Martin successfully sued for the right to organize Virginia Tech’s Gay Student Union.

After college, Martin worked for the Salvation Army in Richmond and Portsmouth before being hired by Okefenokee Heritage Center and Southern Forest World in Waycross, Georgia. Following a brief stint as the director of Florida’s Jacksonville Arts and Sciences Museum, Martin became director of Petersburg’s museums and tourism. He was recruited by the Valentine to be its director of marketing and public affairs in 1994.

Martin arrived at the Valentine just as it opened an extension of the museum, Valentine Riverside, at the old Tredegar Iron Works. Expensive and unpopular, the extension closed just 16 months after it opened. The Valentine had to substantially tighten its belt and consolidate operations at its Court End headquarters. Martin was named director.

“Talk about being in the worst possible position,” said Christy Coleman, executive director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, in a 2024 profile of Martin for Style. “Bill just worked it. He saved the Valentine.”

Martin began the long process to slowly right the ship. He also began the effort to rework how the city understood its own history.

Coleman recounts a circa 2010 meeting of leaders from Richmond’s historic organizations on how to commemorate the upcoming 150th anniversary of the Civil War. At the time, Coleman was president and CEO of the American Civil War Center and had the distinction of being the first Black woman to lead an institution dedicated to that conflict.

Martin wasn’t about to start whistling Dixie.

“Frankly, I’ve been sick of it, especially the way we’ve been telling it,” Coleman recalls Martin saying of how Richmond had commemorated the conflict up until then. “We’ve got to help the city not be stuck [in time].”

Under Martin’s direction, the Valentine hosted community conversations about the city’s charged history and its hopes for future, commissioned a survey of the city’s Confederate monuments, launched an exhibition about the history of the monuments in partnership with VCUarts and Storefront for Community Design, and hosted an exhibition that asked architects and urban planners to reimagine what Monument Avenue could look like. It also created “Sculpting History at the Valentine Studio,” a groundbreaking exhibit in the Valentine Studio that unpacks the insidious nature of Lost Cause ideology.

And, after protesters pulled the city’s statue of Jefferson Davis off its pedestal in June 2020, the museum acquired the sculpture and put it on display as it appeared after it was toppled: overthrown, broken, and covered in pink and yellow paint. The statue is now on loan as part of “Monuments,” an art exhibition co-organized and co-presented by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Brick.

“Bill was thinking about how the monuments on Monument Avenue might make a great majority of our citizenry feel long before they came down,” says Lisa Sims, president and CEO of Venture Richmond Inc., a nonprofit that works to improve downtown Richmond. “He understood that Monument Avenue, as much as it was beloved by a large portion of the population, was sort of a terrifying spectacle to another group of people. That was not a popular thing to say when he began talking about it.”

Martin was able to say such potentially incendiary things because of his positioning as a Southerner, contends Frazier Millner Armstrong.

It’s “the ‘Bless your heart,’ the ‘Honey isn’t that wonderful,’ when everyone in the room knows it isn’t. It is a way that Southerners have, and he was a master at it,” explains the vice chair of the Virginia Commission for the Arts. “He was a provocateur at his core, but he knew the territory.”

Still, Martin’s prominence in the monument discussions sometimes elicited hate mail and death threats. His response? To reach out to those who wished ill of him and invite them to lunch.

“Bill embraced developing relationships with those critics, not necessarily to change anyone’s opinion, but to say that we’re both humans, we can talk together, we can civilly disagree,” says Meg Hughes, acting director of the Valentine.

Kelly O’Keefe, managing partner at marketing consulting firm Brand Federation and former head of creative brand management at the VCU Brandcenter, says it’s a mistake to believe that someone who cares deeply about the history of a place like Richmond is mired in the past.

“What Bill demonstrated every day is that you could be absolutely committed to [our past] and just as committed to the progress of the city,” he says.

Martin worked to open the Valentine’s doors to Richmond’s Black community, aided in the creation of the Afrikana Film Festival and provided crucial support for The JXN Project, a nonprofit that aims to highlight the history of Jackson Ward.

“He let us, Blacks, in this very complicated city, to have the receipts, to be able to look at the truth, to say our names, to make sure that we were at the galas,” says Kelli Lemon, a media personality and entrepreneur who co-hosted the Valentine’s Controversy/History podcast series with Martin. “He did it so well for a lot of different parts of the city.”

Part of Martin’s magic, Coleman says, was his “extraordinary capacity for empathy.”

“He was at the heart of intersectionality for Richmond,” she says. “There wasn’t a space where Bill wasn’t welcomed, not because he put himself there — because he was invited there.”

On June 1, 2020, Richmond police tear-gassed peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters at the Robert E. Lee monument. That evening, police used tear gas again to disperse protesters near City Hall. Coming across roughly a dozen people hiding from the police near the Valentine’s parking lot — including Style Weekly photographer Scott Elmquist — Martin invited them into the Valentine.

To prepare for walking tours that he led throughout downtown, Martin would spend hours pouring over old city directories to learn the city’s secrets.

“Richmond was the great love of his life,” Sims says. “He didn’t just want to preserve its history. He wanted to move it forward.”

Before he died, Martin could take credit for overseeing the Valentine accomplish many long term goals, including a renovation of the Valentine’s galleries, expanding its collections space, building the organization’s endowment, and inventorying the Valentine’s roughly 1.6 million objects.

“Bill really left us in a good place,” says Hughes, who has been with the Valentine for more than two decades. “We have a good strategic plan. We have a new capital campaign that’s about ready to launch. It’s very clear what priorities he had and what things he wanted to see accomplished.”

The Museum Dean

Those close to Martin say he was as funny as he was humble.

When Martin was named Style Weekly’s Richmonder of the Year, Jayme Swain, president & CEO of VPM — which owns Style — and the Virginia Foundation for Public Media, called him to break the news.

“Oh, f–k off,” he responded.

“That was Bill,” Swain says. “He was humble, but he loved it all the same.”

A social introvert, Martin could make an acquaintance instantly feel like a lifelong friend.

“Bill has this uncanny ability, within a moment, to make you feel like the most important person he knows,” Coleman says. “Just warmth and humor, and he had a wicked sense of humor. There are some stories I can’t even tell you.”

When listening to someone he didn’t agree with, Martin performed a sort of “Jedi mind trick” that allowed the conversation to move forward without the person realizing that he didn’t agree.

Bangura says Martin would “drag people mercilessly” in private who he didn’t agree with or who he thought were behind the times.

“You know how someone can throw a brick and hide their hand? That’s what he would do,” says Bangura, who founded the African ancestry remembrance project Untold RVA, is a diplomatic ambassador for Sierra Leone’s 16 Tribes at the Council of Tribal Heads, and the first free woman to be crowned king in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s Themne tribe.

While often concerned with the macro forces shaping the city, he never lost sight of the micro. Multiple people recounted that Martin reached out when they were going through rough times, either by phone, card, or by showing up at their doorstep and zipping them away to some little-known destination in his Mini Cooper.

“There were times where if it weren’t for Bill I probably would have called it quits in Richmond a little bit sooner,” Coleman says. “He helped to remind me of my purpose and my gifts as well.”

A select few were invited to Martin’s Sunday chicken dinners, which he cooked in the basement kitchen of his old house in Church Hill. One rule of the dinners was important enough that Helayne Spivak, former director of the VCU Brandcenter, had it embroidered for him on a pillow: “PLEASE LEAVE BY NINE.”

“He was an amazing cook,” Spivak says. “He made the most incredible chicken dishes you have ever tasted.”

He loved engaging museum visitors and taking them on behind-the-scenes tours of the Valentine. As someone who spent so much time at the Smithsonian museums as a youngster that he had their exhibits memorized, Martin was passionate about school-age students visiting the Valentine. Among other things, his colleagues say they’ll miss the distinctive sound of his keys as he checked in on them each day.

“Everyone around here got used to that,” says Christina Swanson, director of PR and marketing at the Valentine.

When someone new was installed as the head of a local institution, Martin would often be one of the first to welcome them, earning him the nickname “the museum dean.”

Will Glasco was one such recipient of Martin’s guidance. After Glasco was named Preservation Virginia’s new CEO a year ago, Martin invited him to dinner. Over a two-hour meal at Can Can Brasserie, Martin laid out the complexities of navigating donors, nonprofit boards, city politics and other topics necessary for a leader of a nonprofit to know.

“He was extremely candid with me, in a good way, about what was coming,” Glasco says. “He really went out of his way to do that for me, and I knew immediately that I had a friend and ally in this guy.”

Martin loved disco, red wine and Valentine ties that featured icons of the museum’s artifacts. He was a fixture at the bar of Dutch & Company before it closed, and adored dining at Dinamo and The Roosevelt. He also loved Church Hill, which he referred to as “Richmond’s Brooklyn.”

Martin was also enthusiastic about rehabilitating Broad Street, which was once the region’s commercial hub. Swain says that Martin was an important advocate for moving VPM’s headquarters to Broad Street.

“Every day, he woke up trying to figure out a way to save Broad Street,” Sims says. “Bill walked up and down Broad Street every day of his life. He would take people on walks as often as he could to point out the history of buildings.”

It was while crossing Broad Street that Martin was fatally struck. Charges have yet to be filed against the driver; the Richmond Police Department is consulting with the Office of the Commonwealth’s Attorney to determine whether charges are appropriate.

Since Martin’s death, at least five other pedestrians in Central Virginia have been killed in crashes. In a statement posted on Jan. 5, Mayor Danny Avula said that City Hall is looking for additional ways to improve pedestrian safety.

O’Keefe notes that Martin had advocated for better pedestrian infrastructure in the city.

“It’s particularly biting that he was killed by a vehicle,” he says.

In lieu of flowers, Martin’s obituary requests that donations to the Valentine be made in his memory. His burial will be private, but the Valentine will hold an open house in Martin’s honor on Saturday, Feb. 7. More details will be shared soon.

Many interviewees remarked on Martin’s love of making an Irish goodbye. Armstrong recently experienced one of Martin’s vanishing acts at a dinner they were attending.

“I turn around, and Bill’s gone,” she says. “The chair is empty, and he did that everywhere he went.”

Armstrong sees a parallel in Martin’s death.

“It’s like one minute he was there and the next minute he wasn’t,” she says, “and it’s just heartbreaking.”