All around us, people are saving historic places. Whether they are community activists, grassroots advocates, architects, or formally trained preservationists, they each bring with them a passion for the past and a drive to protect the cultural heritage all around us. During Women’s History Month—and as part of our campaign for Where Women Made History—we are interviewing five women who illustrate the many ways we can protect historic spaces. In this interview we hear from Ujijji Davis Williams, a landscape architect committed to the preservation of Black history.

Ujijji Davis Williams is a practicing landscape architect, urban planner, and researcher, and the founding partner of JIMA studio, a landscape architectural design and planning studio based in Detroit. Williams has led landscape and design work across the country from neighborhood planning to designing greenways and streetscapes at post-industrial cities across the country. In 2019 Williams received the 2019 National ASLA Bradford Williams Medal of Excellence for her design literature, and in 2020 she received the Michigan ASLA Emerging Professional of the Year Award.

Williams is also one of the thought leaders acting as an advisor for the Sojourner Truth Project, a collaborative effort between the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, the Summit Suffrage Centennial Committee, Summit Metro Parks, and the United Way of Summit & Medina in Akron, Ohio, with support from the Knight Foundation. This project will include a statue created by noted African American artist and Akron native Woodrow Nash and will be dedicated to the esteemed abolitionist and orator on the site of her 1851 speech to the Women’s Conference in Akron.

Listen to Ujijji Davis Williams describe her work to preserve—and commemorate—Black landscapes and stories in the United States.

In Her Own Words

My name is Ujijji Davis Williams, and I am a landscape architect and urban planner based in Detroit, Michigan.

Being able to contribute to a monument space in which she would be commemorated is important to me as a Black woman, and as a Black woman continuing to advocate for inclusive spaces, as that is very much what she was looking to do at the time. So, I do see this project as a full-circle moment for myself being able to implement that just in a different method than she might have done back in her day.

As a landscape architect and urban designer, one of the biggest challenges that I'm seeing right now with preservation is the question of—for who?

I think that historically in the United States, a lot of the winners have always been able to tell the history and that has helped to populate, or decorate different places, different cities, with statues, memorials, etc.

Now that we are in a moment of reckoning, with a lot of focus or refocus, centering around what a diverse community, a diverse country looks like, and how do we elevate the different cultures that have contributed to this country. That also means telling full truths about the people that we've been honoring for years.

I think that that is a bit of a challenge in trying to balance the narrative in a way that tells a full story, that helps to commemorate people that might have not been highlighted or have intentionally been silenced from history, as well as then making sure that people who have differing relationships with history feel, a common sense of ground coming together to kind of understand the different footprints of our country.