By Olivier Maene
It was a sunny Tuesday afternoon and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard was packed with trucks, buses and cars. As I was waiting in front of the side entrance of Savannah’s Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum to meet up with the museum manager, Troy D. Lance, I observed the building in which this landmark museum was housed. It’s an old bank, later converted into an insurance company and now fully restored and fitted to its current purpose as a museum—though a whole different story lies behind these neatly decorated yellow brick walls.
Dr. John W. “Billy” Jamerson III, current chairman of the board of directors of the museum, explained to me the complex and long history of the civil rights movement.
“Savannah’s civil rights history goes back far beyond the 1950s and the 1960s, in fact even 100 years back before Martin Luther King,” he said. Jamerson went on to tell how General William Tescumseh marched towards the coast in 1864 with a following of more than 15,000 newly liberated slaves.
“Savannah has a long legacy of civil rights,” Jamerson explained. “Almost a hundred years before the Civil War, blacks were building monuments such as the First African Baptist Church on Montgomery Street, because they were trying to become self-determined as to what would be best for them.”
As a result, Savannah has an unbelievably rich civil rights history and the museum that houses this important part of the city’s history should be well maintained in order to protect the many artifacts and documentation that lies within.
After Lance opened up the entrance door and introduced himself, he led me to the first room where he immediately pointed out the brown water stains on the ceiling. The next room was a huge open space called “the annex,” which the museum rents out for special occasions. A few buckets were scattered in one of the corners.
“Nobody filled these,” Mr. Lance remarked, as I realized these were placed there to keep the floor from being damaged by the many leakages. When we reached the small chapel on the mezzanine floor he drew my attention to a few wooden benches that used to be at the First African Baptist Church.
“All these benches are in perfect condition, but these two have suffered water damage,” he added.
Struck by Lance’s tour, it became apparent that this museum was in desperate need of some first-class repairs to protect these treasures. This is when EPOX-Z, a manufacturer of epoxy-based coatings used as energy-saving roof protection, helped out. The Boston, Mass.-based company offered to donate the material to the museum while Chatham County offered to cover the labor costs needed to install the coating.
The way EPOX-Z’s cool roof works is very simple: a layer of resin is coated on top of the roof—almost any surface works for EPOX-Z’s cool roof coating and only needs a minimum of preparation—and after that the rest is up to the coating itself. After it’s dried, the layer is completely settled, without cracks or wrinkles due to its formula, and the roof can start reducing your energy bills.
But how, exactly, does it work? EPOX-Z’s cool roof has two characteristics: it reflects 60-75 percent of the incoming sunlight, compared to only 5-25 percent from any other roof covering, while the rest is absorbed.
The second process set in motion is that most of that absorbed heat is released back into the air. This means the actual net absorbed heat is almost nothing, so the building itself is protected from overheating, drastically reducing air conditioning costs.
Dr. Jamerson noted that “it is extremely urgent that we do everything we can to preserve these important artifacts,” and also added that “the addition of a new cool roof, for example, is consistent with our long-term goal to reduce our energy footprint as well.”
Future plans for the museum include energy-efficient window treatments to better insulate the building and a hot-water-on-demand system.
Currently, the museum is still waiting for the weather the heat up to a dry 48 hours of 40 degrees or more in order to install the coating.
