“I started thinking about listening sessions with the Black community after I had written Justified Anger and we had written the Our Madison Plan,” Gee said. “And I asked Black people what it would take to create a sense of belonging. People said they needed to meet each other. We needed mentoring. We need to be inspired. We need a place that feels like our photo is on grandma’s mantle as well. We don’t want to be the only grandkids who aren’t featured on her mantle. We need a place to proliferate and celebrate our culture and not the negative enslavement part, but the grit and the resilience and the faith and the colorful culture. And that morphed into this. And those discussions began around 2018 or 2019.”

And then what really crystallized the vision for the Center was a trip to African that Gee took in 2018.

“I went to Ghana with the Washington, D.C. branch of the NAACP,” Gee recalled. “I felt a deep connection to Pan-Africanism and the strength and beauty of how Africa has shaped the world. And I came back from that trip a few months before the pandemic kicked off. This was August 2019 and I said we are going to build a Center that pays homage to the grit and the culture and the strength and resilience of Black people. And so in 2019, it was framed up. We selected the name then because it was more African American and Black did not have that Pan-African piece. And my sister Lilada kept saying that it needed to be broader than African American. We needed to use the word Black. And I would say probably in late 2019 is when the specificity of what we have today started taking shape in late 2019.”

And then the COVID pandemic hit in March 2020 and the pandemic took the wind out of the sails of the effort to build the Center.

“The pandemic buried the plans,” Gee said. “I couldn’t believe the timing. We were having meaningful discussions and then the whole world changed. March Madness was canceled. Wall Street closed down. I felt like the world was coming to an end. And I just thought, ‘This is not meant to be.’ And so it halted, meetings, discussions and everyone went to circle the wagons. My focus was making sure that Fountain of Life and Nehemiah could survive. And one of my advisors and mentors Rick Phelps, former Dane County Executive, called me up and said, ‘With the pandemic and George Floyd murder, to the untrained eye, this is not the time to stop planning what you have been dreaming. I think it’s the perfect time. And I think people want to believe in something that is real and can make a difference. I think we need to put the band back together.’  And that call from Rick Phelps got things going. In the quarantined reality of our lives, we jumped on Zoom and started talking and planning to bring the crew back to the table. And I actually started having meetings regularly. And in the beginning of 2021, I actually started having fundraising meetings on Zoom.”

It was the brutality of COVID and the health and criminal justice disparities that Black people face that made many people appreciate the hardships in the Black community perhaps because of the pandemic shut down, they felt vulnerable too.

“I was blown away,” Gee said about the interest. “People were acutely aware of how disparities were impacting Black health because the COVID numbers kept showing what we had been trying to tell people, that stress of living marginalized lives makes you more prone to other diseases. And they could see it. The empirical data was there being reported. People actually believed when George Floyd was murdered, Breonna Taylor was murdered and it was like someone was rubbing the reality of our history and our existence in the face of non-Black people. And they didn’t need fancy, shiny power points. They saw it and responded with the attitude of, ‘What can we do? What can we possibly do?’ There was a window of time where everyone was trying to get supplies and food to people, which we needed to do. We saved lives. This is when we took care of those sundry needs. However, at the time, I was still the CEO of Nehemiah. And I said, ‘It was pre-COVID, COVID and post-COVID eras. It’s now the reality that we’ve been talking about for 30 years in Nehemiah’s history of it not going away. But when COVID leaves, we are still going to be dealing with disparities. It’s just not going to be blatant and more glaring.”

Just as important were the things in Black culture that allowed Black people to survive and in some cases succeed.

“And I said 100 years ago during the Harlem Renaissance and the Northern Migration, there was culture and togetherness in our stories to keep us healthy during the Spanish flu and during this great Northern Migration,” Gee said. “Let’s take a page out of Black America’s playbook and let’s hear about the role of what our culture did for our community. Art was how we coped with the pain. Pain fueled our artistic expression. We converted the pain into an energy that fueled our singing and dancing and our swag and our storytelling. We survived coming north to shape northern cities and northern America. We supposed that the same thing could happen during the midst of all of the disparities and what was happening in our world if we would pause and find a way to to allow the energy of our pain become the fanfare of our story. And people were willing to give that a try.”

The concept of the Center started to morph into how the Center could become a reality.

“Susan Pierce Jacobsen worked for AmFam for a number of years,” Gee said. “She was a community investment manager for American Family. We had become friends and she introduced me to people at AmFam. But she also introduced me to a friend Joe Lee. ‘Joe is from Madison. He grew up here and went to La Follette. He has an architectural firm. Maybe he can work with you with this idea that you have for your project.’ She introduced us at the Starbucks in Monona. Joe’s office is next to The Tasting Room in Monona. They designed that whole complex and the hotel. That’s JLA. Joe and I had coffee. I said that we needed to take some culpability in seeing to society’s healing. I asked him if he would consider working with me and he said yes. We sat down in a meeting together and Jim Bower who became my project manager used to work for the city. Ironically, he was the project manager for The Villager. He worked closely with Tim Bruer on that. Jim asked Joe if he would work pro bono on the project. Jim talked further about the idea and his role. And in that meeting, Joe said, ‘Yeah I could do it pro bono until you can raise dollars.’ But Joe took the risk that if we did not get any development dollars, he would not be paid. To this day, Joe is a hero of mine.”

They say that timing is everything and a key actor was about to make his appearance.

“At our first full meeting, this Black guy walked in,” Gee recalled. “He was tall in a great suit. I was wondering why he was there. I had no idea.”