The creators of “Memory Wars,” the 2024-25 selection in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Common Book program, urged students and the broader community on Wednesday to “sit in the uncomfortability” of the past in order to define a better future.
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Michael Paul Williams of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and Richmond-based journalist Mallory Noe-Payne delivered their evening keynote address in VCU’s W.E. Singleton Center for the Performing Arts, and they visited with VCU students earlier in the day.
“Memory Wars,” a six-part podcast series that explore how societies confront their difficult histories, is the first podcast selected as the Common Book. Hosted by the Office of the Provost and University College, the program introduces VCU students to complex social issues through a shared text.
“Memory Wars” examines how Germany confronted the Holocaust and Nazi fascism through educational programs and reparations for victims. Williams and Noe-Payne then examine parallels to how Richmond, as well as Virginia and the U.S. in general, have or haven’t dealt with the history and legacy of slavery.
“In America and in Virginia, we don’t want people to sit in discomfort. We’ve been taught that guilt is a bad thing, that guilt is a negative thing,” Williams said in the keynote. “But you need guilt to acknowledge a wrong. We as a society don’t want to feel guilt and acknowledge fault. It is difficult to learn [and remember] without feeling uncomfortable or sad.”
University College’s Department of Focused Inquiry teaches the Common Book in its UNIV 111 and 112 sections as a required text. Williams and Noe-Payne visited two Focused Inquiry classes earlier Wednesday as guest speakers and encouraged students to embrace difficult and honest conversations during and after their college years.
“We have to be willing to learn about the past and then to sit with it, to sit in the uncomfortability of it, and to let ourselves be moved and touched by it and use that to guide our conscience,” Noe-Payne said.
In their keynote, the creators discussed the local protests in 2020 that were sparked by the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing removal of Confederate statues that lined Richmond’s Monument Avenue for more than a century.
“When we took the monuments down, it was a beginning, not an end,” Williams said. “We have to stop thinking about this as something that has an end. There is not a finish line.”
He and Noe-Payne discussed initiatives Germany took in the aftermath of the Holocaust and contrasted that with how the U.S. has less fully used memorial and education to acknowledge, or atone for, its history of slavery and Jim Crow repression.
Throughout their keynote address, the creators played clips of the final episode of “Memory Wars,” in which a German man was interviewed about a public art memorial: A stone worker created cobbles, to be placed on city streets, bearing the names of Holocaust victims.
In that vein, Williams and Noe-Payne emphasized that every person can create an impact and help society atone for past sins.
“You do know what is right and wrong,” Noe-Payne said, “and you do have the ability to judge if you open yourself up to that possibility.”
For more about the Common Book and other events around “Memory Wars,” visit commonbook.vcu.edu.