"It is a creative form of resistance," said Camille
Bennett, the businesswoman who founded Project Say Something.
Activists protest Confederate monuments with virtual Black history
memorials
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Esther Schrader Read the full piece here
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Friend,
When Juneteenth revelers walk through the county courthouse plaza in
Florence, Alabama, this year, they will be able, for the first time,
to see something other than the 20-foot-tall Confederate monument that
has dominated the public square since the height of Jim Crow.
The marble statue dedicated in 1903 as an ode to white supremacy will
still be there, impervious to years of efforts by local activists
first to contextualize it, then to have it removed. But in an act that
is part protest, part education, anyone will be able to hold their
cellphone up to the statue and, by activating a cutting-edge augmented
reality app, see instead a monument come to life of one of several
figures essential to the Black historical experience.
The experience will be unveiled in Florence on June 17 as part of
Juneteenth celebrations organized by Project Say Something
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, a social justice nonprofit founded in the town in 2014. It is a
partnership between the organization, which has built a track record
of shaping policy statewide on issues from the right to protest to the
rights of childcare providers, and the New York-based tech nonprofit
Kinfolk
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.
The augmented reality app developed by the tech nonprofit, also called
Kinfolk, allows people to use their smartphone's camera to place
a monument wherever they wish, then see and walk around it. The app,
which gives viewers the sensation of experiencing virtual monuments in
three-dimensional space, includes histories, interviews about the
historical figures, even music related to them.
"It is a creative form of resistance," said Camille
Bennett, the businesswoman who founded Project Say Something after the
police shooting of Michael Brown
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in Ferguson, Missouri. Over the past seven years, the group has, as
part of a broad campaign of reclaiming Black history and promoting
social and economic justice, advocated
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through legal means for the removal of the Confederate statue. In
response, the group has endured threats of violence, racist online
messages and, in 2017, an appearance by hooded members of the Ku Klux
Klan at an event where Bennett was speaking.
Read More
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