On Tuesday night in Richmond, Va., a group of organizers projected a hologram of George Floyd over a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as part of an effort to confront America’s long history of systemic racism.
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CBS News reports that this was the inaugural event for the George Floyd Hologram Memorial Project, a joint effort between the George Floyd Foundation and Change.org. The goal of the organization is to “transform spaces that were formerly occupied by racist symbols of America’s dark Confederate past into a message of hope, solidarity and forward-thinking change,” according to a news release. The hologram, designed by Kaleida Hologram Co., is made up of a series of lights that project a 3D image of Floyd’s face alongside his name.
The event attracted a large crowd, which included members of Floyd’s family. “My older brother, George Floyd. Wonderful man. Beautiful human being, kind spirit, loving. If he could see this in the physical form with us, I promise he would give all of y’all hugs,” Rodney Floyd said Tuesday, CBS News notes.
The hologram will be displayed across the sites of where Confederate statues formerly stood in places such as North Carolina and Georgia to mirror the 1961 Freedom Rides, where civil rights activists took interstate buses to segregated parts of the United States to protest the continued practice of segregated buses, despite it being ruled unconstitutional.
“We going to put our foot on the pedal and we’re going to take care of business because if we stop now we’ll never get finished,” Floyd’s brother, Philonise Floyd, said Tuesday.
The hologram follows a month of controversy surrounding the monument to Lee. In June, Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam attempted to remove the monument but was stymied by a temporary injunction that cited a land deed from 1890 that says the state must “affectionately protect” the statue.
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