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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, 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.
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 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 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.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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