Coming Soon in 2025

Promoting history and celebrating diversity, equity, and inclusion through daily narratives, poems, and essays between Juneteenth and Independence Day

For the third season in a row, Bridge of Lament will emphatically and empathetically provide daily narratives, poems, and essays between Juneteenth and July 4th to promote history and celebrate diversity, equity, and inclusion.

I am grateful for your readership, past and present, as we seek to tell Central Virginia's racial story. Now more than ever, it's important to tell the whole story.

We are excited for this year's theme: "Education.” This will be an opportunity to lift up the great educators and institutions of the Black community in Lynchburg and beyond—and, along the way, lament education withheld during antebellum times, recognize segregation's discrimination, and remember the tight community that was lost during integration. Further, the education theme will help readers feel the challenge of today's racial disparity and wrestle with its contributing factors.

“An undated partially damaged photograph of Amelia Perry Pride and students of the last class of the Polk Street Colored School. Pride is the only visible adult and is on the right. She also founded the Dorchester Home on Pierce Street for retired elderly women who were formerly enslaved. She also opened cooking and sewing schools on Madison Street. The former Dunbar High School Home Economics Building was named in her honor.”: Courtesy of Lynchburg Museum

If you are from Central Virginia and want to help us tell this story, I encourage you to reach out to me and discuss how you can participate!

If you are not from Central Virginia but are curious how to recognize the Juneteenth-to -Independence-Day season in your own community, I also encourage you to reach out to me and discuss further how we can partner together.

And check out Civic Season - It's time to create a new kind of tradition, which also seeks to use this seasonal calendar to promote the best of America’s ideals.

- Kenton Martin

bridgeoflament@gmail.com

“Demonstrators walk along a street holding signs demanding the right to vote and equal civil rights at the March on Washington,” 1963 Unsplash: Unseen Histories

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Kenton Martin, Bridge of Lament project coordinator. Kenton is a husband, father, and project manager who seeks to know the past to better the future.

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