Newsmaker of the Year: Christy Coleman

By Julie Campbell

Christy Coleman, executive director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, is Virginia Professional Communicators’ 2020 Newsmaker of the Year. In addition to her many years of leadership in the museum field, she is a pathbreaker and an advocate when it comes to two under-represented groups in the fields of history and museum administration: people of color and women. VPC will honor her at our rescheduled 2020 conference, date and place to be determined.

In 2019, she made headlines in Virginia and around the nation as the CEO of the new American Civil War Museum (ACWM) in Richmond, which opened that spring. The ACWM merged two existing institutions — the Museum of the Confederacy and the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar, which she led as president and CEO. The acclaimed ACWM tells an inclusive story of the Civil War that encompasses women, men, blacks, whites, civilians and soldiers.

As Kevin Levin, historian and author, told the Washington Post: “To have someone, a woman, who’s African American, at one of the most important museums in the former capital of the Confederacy — you can’t underestimate how important that is.”

In January 2020, after 12 years at those two museums, Coleman took over the directorship of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, which comprises two living history museums that are agencies of the commonwealth of Virginia. The foundation promotes awareness and understanding of the early history, settlement, and development of the United States through the convergence of American Indian, European, and African cultures and the enduring legacies bequeathed to the nation.

In 2018, Time magazine named her one of “31 People Who Are Changing the South.” Another Virginian on that list was our 2018 Newsmaker of the Year, Delegate Danica Roem.

Coleman also served as the co-chair of Richmond’s Monument Avenue Commission, which Mayor Levar Stoney created to study the controversial issue of Confederate monuments.

While she was most recently in the news about her new post at the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, Coleman first made headlines in Virginia in 1994. That October she staged a controversial re-enactment of a slave auction at Colonial Williamsburg, where she directed African American historical interpretation.

In addition to her vital work in the historical field, Coleman serves as a matter-of-fact advocate for mental health awareness when she speaks of how she has coped with agoraphobia.

Coleman also boasts a lively Twitter presence, @HistoryGonWrong, billing herself as “a museum CEO tackling American history & culture w/scholarship, passion, humor, a little irreverence & maybe a bourbon!” You can read more about her at www.christyscoleman.com.

Coleman holds a B.A. and an M.A. from Hampton University. Before coming to the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar in 2008, she served as vice president, Arts Consulting Group Inc.; as president and CEO, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, in Detroit; and as director of several interpretative programs at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.