Author: Ben Hitchcock

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Dems do battle: Charlottesville heads to the polls for Democratic primary on Super Tuesday

The Virginia democratic primary will likely narrow a still-crowded field.

Mike Bloomberg’s Charlottesville campaign office is cavernous—and, on a Wednesday afternoon with the Virginia primary less than two weeks away, totally empty. The ninth-richest man in the world set up shop across the street from Friendship Court, one of Charlottesville’s largest low-income housing neighborhoods, but it doesn’t seem to have led to any foot traffic. Bloomberg’s website says there’s a canvass scheduled, but the office is locked and dark. 

Bloomberg is the only presidential candidate so far to establish a permanent physical location in Charlottesville ahead of March 3—Super Tuesday—when Virginians will head to the polls to cast their votes in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. (The Virginia Republican Party voted to cancel its primary, one of a handful of states to do so.) 

A late entrant, Bloomberg has poured resources into Super Tuesday states like Virginia. But the race here is pivotal for any candidate hoping to stay in a field that will soon narrow. Virginia’s 99 delegates make it the fourth most valuable state out of the 18 to vote on March 3 or before. 

Bekah Saxon, the co-chair of the Charlottesville Democratic Party, says Virginia’s mix of demographics makes the state especially useful as a tool for determining who might have nationwide success. “Virginia is a cross section of the country,” Saxon says. “We have urban areas, we have large numbers of recent immigrants who are now citizens, we have lots of young voters from all of the colleges we have, we have rural areas. It can be a real litmus test as to how the rest of the country is thinking.”

Four years ago, Hillary Clinton rolled through the Democratic primary in Virginia, taking the state with 65 percent of the vote to Bernie Sanders’ 35 percent. This time, though, polling suggests a much closer race. A mid-February poll from highly rated pollster Monmouth University showed Sanders taking 22 percent, Bloomberg 22 percent, and Joe Biden 18 percent of Virginia’s votes, with the rest of the field trailing far behind. The polling also suggests that many people in Virginia remain undecided about their choice in the Democratic field.

In 2016, despite Clinton’s strength statewide, Charlottesville asserted itself as one of Virginia’s most progressive enclaves—in the city, Sanders earned 4,483 votes to Clinton’s 3,889. With Sanders now considered a frontrunner by many, there’s nothing to suggest the senator from Vermont won’t turn in another strong performance in town.

Saxon says Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Sanders have held the most events in Virginia, and seem the most organized in Charlottesville, despite none of them splurging on an office like Bloomberg. 

The dynamic is similar over on UVA’s campus. “Warren, Buttigieg, and Sanders seem to be the most institutionalized on Grounds,” says Kiera Goddu, president of the University Democrats. “All three have student groups just for that candidate.”

Some Charlottesville-area donors have been particularly active in the primary so far. The Virginia Public Access Project records individual donations made directly to campaigns. Progressive power-donor Sonjia Smith has cut $5,600 checks for both Buttigieg and Warren. Parke Capshaw, wife of real estate mogul Coran Capshaw, has given around $1,600 to Buttigieg and $3,400 to Sanders. Farther afield, it appears that Justin Vernon, frontman of the Wisconsin-based band Bon Iver, has an LLC registered in Charlottesville, and has given $2,800 to both Sanders and Warren from that address.  

According to VPAP, Buttigieg has raised the most money in Virginia and raised the most from the Piedmont region, which includes Charlottesville and a few counties north of town. 

November might feel like it can’t come soon enough, but March 3 will be the last stand for some campaigns that have come a long way. “I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be some campaigns that get suspended after Super Tuesday,” says Saxon.

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Youth Movement

Most of the students at Charlottesville High School aren’t old enough to vote—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t engaged.

CHS doesn’t have an official Young Democrats or Young Republicans club these days, but there are other groups around the school with a political bent. Jamila Pitre, one of the co-leaders of CHS’ Young Feminists club, is backing Bernie Sanders because of his commitment to “wealth equality, the Green New Deal, [and] his approach to foreign policy.” 

Julianna Brown, the other leader of the club, is supporting Elizabeth Warren, due to “her more liberal economic plans” and “policy experience.”

Brown thinks most people in her organization support Sanders or Warren, but says “a lot of people are struggling to balance their own personal beliefs with electability.”

For example Lily Wielar, a senior, says she supports Joe Biden, because “he has the greatest chance of beating Trump.”

At the same time, others aren’t feeling so inspired by the slate of available candidates. Noelle Morris, the head of CHS’ Black Student Union, says she has “not been following the Democratic primary” and doesn’t know who the most popular candidate is for the students in her group. No matter who the nominee is, he or she will have to figure out how to get young people united and on board.

—Charlie Burns

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Clean up your act: Local environmental groups sound off on Trump’s Clean Water Act rollback

The Clean Water Act helped depollute the James River.

Keeping our waterways swimmable, fishable, and drinkable seems like an uncontroversial goal—but the Trump administration apparently disagrees. Since assuming control, the administration has made a series of efforts to weaken long-standing protections for America’s waterways. Local environmental groups have grave concerns about the potential effects of these suggested laws in Virginia and across the country.

The Clean Water Act prevents people, farms, and factories from dumping waste into water and using chemicals that could lead to harmful runoff. The most recent piece of Trump legislation, announced in late January, would redefine which types of waterways are protected by the act. 

“These rules will reduce the scope of Clean Water Act protection in an unprecedented way, in terms of putting hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands in Virginia at risk,” says Jamie Brunkow, senior advocacy manager at the James River Association.

“There are industrial and other interests that stand to profit by a narrower scope of Clean Water Act protections,” says Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Jonathan Gendzier. “That includes big industrial agriculture, homebuilders, and other polluting industries.”

Trump’s rules “reflect a simplistic notion that we should only be regulating navigable waters,” says Chris Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council.

Confining the Clean Water Act’s jurisdiction to “navigable waters” means leaving out smaller tributaries that feed in to larger waterways. Vernal pools, intermittent streams, prairie potholes, and other seasonal but critical water features could lose protection. Since all of these waterways are interconnected, pollution anywhere means pollution everywhere. “All the little ravines that have rocks in them and no water until it rains, if you’re allowed to dump whatever you want in there, the second it rains all that is going to come into your streams,” says Bryan Hofmann, deputy director of Friends of the Rappahannock.

The Clean Water Act was initially passed by the Nixon administration, with bipartisan support, in 1972. It’s widely considered an environmental success story, and has directly resulted in improvement of water quality in places like the James River, says Brunkow.

“It’s hard to imagine, but we didn’t have any rules in place that prevented you from directly putting sewage into waterways,” Brunkow says. “The James in Richmond was largely considered an open sewer prior to the Clean Water Act.”

This rollback is bad news for people and animals alike. Brook trout, endangered Shenandoah salamanders, oysters, otters, blue crabs, bald eagles and even dolphins all rely on the Rappahannock system, says Hofmann, and any pollution wreaks havoc on those fragile systems. Meanwhile, “In Charlottesville, most of the public drinking supply comes from surface water, which runs off the land,” Miller says. 

Repealing the federal rules means more responsibility falls to states. Virginia has decent protections in place, compared to neighboring states like West Virginia or Pennsylvania, says Hofmann, but the rollback means fewer staff and a decreased budget. 

The rule change “puts an additional strain on our state agencies,” Brunkow says. “It’s really a devastating blow to have lost that national standard.”

The Southern Environmental Law Center has been fighting against Trump water deregulation since the administration took office, says Gendzier. They plan to challenge this new rule as well, and anticipate a months-long legal battle.

“Having a big power plant go through and discharge whatever they want into the water, farms having their cattle sitting there all day long and defecating into the stream—” Hofmann says, “The Clean Water Act prevents those huge bad things from happening.”

 

 

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Battlefield battles: Proposed African American history museum draws criticism

The Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation's headquarters in New Market.

The Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, a historic preservation group that installed a monument to Confederate soldiers in Winchester last year, is now angling for a $1.6 million grant from the state of Virginia for the creation of a different kind of monument—an African American history center. 

Some local black history organizations have expressed concerns.

“We were sort of dumbfounded when we learned that they had requested funding for the Shenandoah Valley African American history center,” says Dorothy Davis, a board member at the Josephine School Community Museum, a black history center in Berryville. “They generally have not been forthcoming to support African American groups, organizations, museums, in the valley.”

The Battlefields Foundation uses private money as well as $435,000 annually from the National Parks Service to acquire, maintain, and interpret Civil War sites in an eight-county bloc in the Shenandoah Valley. It hopes to open a center focused on the region’s black history in an old building across the street from its office in New Market.

A budget amendment, submitted by Republicans Chris Collins and Emmett Hanger, would give the group $825,000 each year for two years to support the black history project, as well as unspecified “visitor improvements to the New Market Battlefield.” Collins says the Battlefields Foundation has done good work in the past to encourage lucrative Civil War-based tourism in the area, and though he’s heard criticism, he has no plans to pull the amendment. Hanger’s office did not respond to request for comment. 

Keven Walker, the CEO of the Battlefields Foundation, says the amendment represents an unprecedented investment in the under-appreciated African American history of the region, and that groups opposed to the project have “been spreading half truths and slanted information” in an effort to slow things down.

Robin Lyttle, director of the Shenandoah Valley Black Heritage Project, is among those with concerns about the proposal. She says the Battlefields Foundation didn’t approach her until after the amendment had already been submitted, and that when she asked for more time, Walker said they were going to go ahead with the project with or without her group’s support.

“We ascertained that no African Americans had been included in the planning or discussion,” says Lyttle, who is white. She wants the amendment postponed for a year, so her group and others in the area have time to weigh in. 

“No money was put in for acquisition of resources or research,” Lyttle says. “We found out that they thought that would be volunteers.” 

The proposed museum would be on the second floor of an old schoolhouse, where black children were taught while white children were taught on the ground floor. Lyttle is worried the black history exhibit will be tucked away and inaccessible in the old house. She says she suggested multiple alternate sites nearby with more significance to local black history, but that the Battlefields Foundation wasn’t open to discussion. 

Ultimately, the Josephine School and the Shenandoah Valley Black Heritage Project both  declined to sign on to the project. 

Walker sings a different song. “One of the things that was very absent in the valley, in our opinion, was a concerted, unified effort to preserve sites related to African American history,” he says, adding that the impressive grassroots work of groups like Lyttle’s has “not been promoted to the level that it should.”

Walker denies the claim that no African Americans were consulted in the process. According to Walker, John David Smith, Jr., the first ever black mayor of Winchester, “supports the project wholly.”

“That is a bold-faced lie,” says Smith, Jr. “I never told him that. I don’t know enough about the project to offer any type of answer.”

Walker also says he spoke with the Northeast Neighborhood Association, a community history group in Harrisonburg, who had been “extremely supportive.” When asked about the nature of that collaboration, the Northeast Neighborhood Association declined to comment on the record. 

Other local leaders have come out against the project. Tina Stevens, the first black woman ever elected to nearby Stephens City’s town council, says “It is very disturbing to me that we wouldn’t postpone this budget amendment until next year, when they can really talk to everyone.” 

“African American educators, historians, church leaders, organizers—these are all people that should be included in the conversation,” Stevens says, “and we were not.” Stevens says her views do not reflect the official position of the town council.

In 2018, the Battlefields Foundation sponsored an even-handed panel on Confederate iconography at James Madison University, featuring UVA history professor Caroline Janney and former American Civil War Museum CEO Christy Coleman.

But at the same time, the foundation allows the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a nationwide group of descendants of Confederate soldiers, to meet in the foundation’s Winchester museum. The Sons of Confederate Veterans’ website tells visitors that the group is committed to “vindication of the cause” of the Confederacy, and that “The preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South’s decision to fight the Second American Revolution.”

Lyttle also says she is concerned about “the diversity issue” within the Battlefields Foundation’s leadership—their board is composed of 15 white men and one white woman.

Then, of course, there’s the Confederate monument that the Battlefields Foundation installed in Winchester last year, a tribute to a group of Alabama soldiers who died at the Third Battle of Winchester. The six-foot-tall monument, inscribed with a Confederate flag, was paid for entirely by a member of the group’s board of trustees. 

At the monument’s dedication ceremony, Walker said, “Unlike some other places throughout the country, here in the National Historic District monuments are going up, not coming down.”

Walker walks back that quote now, saying it was taken out of context by the Winchester Star, and that his group “wants more monuments to go up, monuments to all of our history.”

Larry Yates, a local historian and activist based in Winchester, says the Battlefields Foundation “does a lot of useful things in terms of preserving battlefields” but its museum is “basically a relic collection, with very little attention to African Americans.” 

For now, the decision is in the hands of  the state legislature. And it’s no sure thing that the amendment will pass. “If we get this budget amendment, it will be the largest appropriation ever given by the commonwealth to preserve and protect African American history in the Shenandoah Valley,” Walker says. 

But the Josephine School’s Davis isn’t convinced that the Battlefields Foundation is the right organization for the money. “They haven’t been a very positive force in the valley in supporting African American groups or activities,” she says. “They think they have, but they haven’t.”

 

Updated 2/19 to to reflect that the organization is called the Battlefields Foundation, not the Battlefield Foundation.

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Bounce back: Formerly homeless Charlottesville resident will speak in front of the UN

Gwen Cassady is a formerly homeless Charlottesville resident turned activist and entrepreneur. Photo: Eze Amos

Gwen Cassady has lived a lot more life than could fit into a half-page newspaper profile. She’s been homeless four times, and spent a period living out of an office on the Downtown Mall. She’s been to 64 countries, as well as a royal Saudi compound, earned two degrees from UVA, and is currently enrolled in a Harvard graduate program. Next week, she’ll speak about her experience with homelessness in front of the United Nations as part of the organization’s Civil Society Forum. 

Through all those twists and turns, Cassady’s entrepreneurial spirit hasn’t wavered. She’s got a studio now, a small room tucked in the side of a warehouse in Woolen Mills, jammed with boxes overflowing with fabrics and beads. She has a dozen projects in the works, everything from a “net-positive, off-grid, small-home community” in Greene County to a jewelry business that sends 100 percent of profits to victims of Boko Haram in Nigeria. Her latest endeavor is Eco Chic Boutique, a clothing shop and tailoring service that Cassady coordinates with local refugees. They sell jeans, bridesmaid dresses, and other custom-fit apparel.

She’s also become a tireless advocate for homelessness awareness in Charlottesville, where our housing crisis has exacerbated an already difficult situation. Cassady is working on three documentaries about homelessness, and will premiere one of them at the UN. We caught up with her ahead of her speech on February 13.

 

C-VILLE: What’s the movie about?

GC: We focus on the global pandemic of homelessness, but our primary focus is on Charlottesville. We interview a lot of really awesome people, amazing people who are currently homeless, people who are formerly homeless.

 

What support was most valuable to you during your periods of homelessness?

I found that in Charlottesville, when I had too much pride to ask my closest friends for help and assistance, my homeless friends always looked out for me. My 35th birthday, I will never forget…They were pooling all their money from food stamps and from SNAP benefits, which I was on too, just so I could have a nice steak dinner on my birthday. I remember exactly where we were standing, right outside the library.

 

How have you managed to survive in so many different environments?

I’ve always been able to blend in to any environment because I’ve always treated everyone the same. 

 

You’ve been knocked down plenty of times, but you always get back up. Where does that resilience come from?

My daily driving forces are my friends who are currently homeless. Like Ricky on the Downtown Mall. Chris, in D.C., who was lit on fire by rich white kids. Understanding the systemic issues, I just want to make a difference.

 

What can we as individuals do to help?

My whole speech [at the UN] is about how the kindness of strangers reinstated my faith in humanity when I was homeless here on the streets of Charlottesville…You offer random acts of kindness. You do what you can do.

 

How does it feel to be speaking at the UN, after all you’ve been through?

It’s surreal beyond words. I still can’t wrap my head around it. I will never be able to, fully, even while I’m speaking.

 

Gwen Cassady, in brief

Education: UVA economics BA ’97, UVA education MA ’14, Harvard sustainability masters in progress

If you could pass any law what would it be: Removing the statute of limitations on sexual assault.

Priority for change in Charlottesville: Building more affordable housing.

Meaningful quotation: “The poverty of being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for is the greatest poverty of all.” —Mother Teresa

 

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Funding fight: City and school board struggle with budget as statewide activism gathers steam

Activists hold signs over the bypass to advocate for increased state investment in public schools. Photo: John Robinson

“FUND OUR SCHOOLS” read the twinkling electric signs over the Dairy Road footbridge on the evening of January 29. Students, parents, teachers, and activists held the individual letters, making the simple demand that the state devote more money to public education. The message was met with a stream of supportive honks from drivers on the 250 Bypass below. 

“We’re in this exciting moment where Democrats have control in both chambers,” said Brionna Nomi, education organizer at the Legal Aid Justice Center, which coordinated the demonstration. “So we’re hoping to make some movement on state funding legislation for public schools.”

In particular, the group supports bills in both the House of Delegates and State Senate that would repeal public education spending limits put in place after the 2008 recession.

The Charlottesville protest comes less than a week after hundreds of teachers from around the state rallied in Richmond to make similar demands. In Virginia, the state holds power over cities and counties when it comes to generating revenue and dispensing funds. Nomi says local districts have to pick up the slack for what the state does not provide, and that’s an undue burden. “We need to generate more revenue, and we believe that that’s the responsibility of legislators,” she says.

That burden was on display last week when the Charlottesville City School Board presented its annual budget request to City Council and the city manager. 

In part because of state funding cuts, the board requested a budget increase of $4.5 million. But City Manager Tarron Richardson said he’d hoped the figure would be more like $2.1 million. 

The city is trying to cut back its own budget, and the disparity between the school’s request and the city’s anticipated number is significant. “I want to help as much as we can, but that additional two-plus million will really impact us in terms of trying to close our gap,” Richardson said. 

The city increased the school’s budget by $2.7 million in fiscal year 2019 and $3.4 million in fiscal year 2020, for a total of $57 million last year.

The school district’s request provides for the creation of a handful of new positions, including an additional orchestra instructor for Walker Upper Elementary, where one conductor currently teaches 199 students, and a “specialist for annual giving,” a new position that would solicit philanthropic contributions to the public schools. “That’s a position the board has desired for quite a number of years,” said Superintendent Rosa Atkins.

Hundreds of students are enrolled in a new engineering program at Walker, but Buford Middle School doesn’t have sufficient engineering faculty, so the district also hopes to hire someone to keep the program running as those students transition schools.

But the bulk of the requested budget increase—$2.8 of the $4.5 million—would go toward insurance and salaries for teachers and staff. “We are in the people business,” said school board member Jennifer McKeever. “So much of this is so they continue to be insured and able to live around here.”

Charlottesville’s skyrocketing property values have serious effects on the schools. Teachers need to earn more to live here comfortably, and the school district receives less funding from the state. 

Virginia distributes money based on each district’s relative need, measured through a metric called Local Composite Index. LCI takes into account the value of property owned by each school district, and this year, CCS’s property value increased “about 23 percent,” according to Atkins. In the eyes of the state, CCS is less needy than other localities and will therefore receive less state money. That’s one reason the district’s request to the city was higher than Richardson’s ideal figure.

Council will have to work with the schools and the city manager’s office to close the gap between Richardson’s number and CCS’s request.

“I don’t have too many comments at this time, because we haven’t received the full presentation on our budget,” said Mayor Nikuyah Walker at the work session. “Once we have that meeting I’ll have a better understanding. Just in case people are wondering why I’m quiet.” 

Those discussions will continue through the spring, but according to Atkins, the budget may not be finalized until June.

Meanwhile, the long-term future of the district includes a major school reconfiguration. Buford will expand to include sixth graders, elementary schools will add fifth grade, and Walker will become a citywide preschool. The district plans on hiring an architectural firm this month, but there won’t be a cost estimate for the project until 2021. 

The city allocated $3 million to the project in its five-year Capital Improvement Plan, but some early estimates say the reconfiguration could cost as much as $58 million. 

“We will not know how much the project will cost until it gets at least partially through the design process,” says Michael Goddard, a senior project manager with the city. “As of the present, no funds have been allocated for construction of the project. It will be up to city leadership to direct funding for construction.”

 

Correction 2/5: Updated to reflect that the city has not yet hired a design firm for the school reconfiguration process. 

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Race-based bias: Consultants demonstrate racist policing, council says study didn’t go far enough

Local justice systems disproportionately contact black people, a new report finds.

A report from a private consulting firm has concluded that Charlottesville and Albemarle disproportionately arrest black people, and that race-based disparities exist in the treatment of individuals in otherwise similar situations.

The report analyzes adult arrest data from the beginning of 2014 through the end of 2016. During that period, more than half (51.5 percent) of those arrested in Charlottesville were black men, despite black men making up only 8.5 percent of the city’s total population. In Albemarle County, where black men made up only 4.4 percent of the population, 37.6 percent of arrests were of black men. (The full report can be viewed here.)

That disproportionality is accompanied by racial disparity at multiple levels of the area’s criminal justice systems. African American defendants received harsher charges than white defendants for similar crimes. African American defendants were held without bond more often. African American men were held in jail prior to trial twice as long, on average, as white men.

The majority of people booked in Charlottesville are black, even though black people make up a small minority of the city’s population.

The city commissioned MGT Consulting Group, a national firm that often works with municipal governments, to put together the report in 2018. The city paid for $65,000 of the $155,000 project, with the remaining funding coming from the state. Charlottesville ran a similar study on the juvenile criminal justice system in 2011, which also found racial disproportionality.

In addition to the raw data, the report incorporates interviews with law enforcement officers, lawyers, and people who have been arrested, and consultants held a series of community meetings over the last nine months.

At the February 3 City Council meeting, the consultants made an official presentation of their findings.

The report provides statistical support for a state of affairs that was already well known to those affected.

“If you’re a member of the black community, as I am, this is something that I’ve been seeing for years,” said Mayor Nikuyah Walker at the meeting. “You didn’t need this study in the first place. You have the lived experience of it.”

“What this study does is it documents the problem, it validates the problem,” said Reggie Smith, the director of the project for MGT. “Perceptions and opinions are one thing. But we have done the work and the statistical analysis to say this is not happening by chance.”

Kaki Dimock, the city’s director of human services, said at the council meeting that the report was a “marathon data problem,” the beginning of a “seven- to 10-year process,” and a jumping-off point that “begs a series of additional sets of whys.”

“We do know the why,” Walker responded. “And the why has been apparent since enslavement ended.”

Walker and others were critical of the report’s recommendations for addressing the disparities. The document suggests supporting re-entry programs, increasing transparency in city and county police departments, increasing diversity in law enforcement, conducting additional research, and more. 

“These are things that we have been doing,” Walker said. “The city has been investing millions of dollars into some of these programs.”

A strong Police Civilian Review Board, to provide transparency and  community oversight of the police, is among the report’s recommendations. Charlottesville created an initial CRB  in 2018, and councilors are currently interviewing candidates for a permanent board. Albemarle County does not have a Police Civilian Review Board, and according to the consultants, the county Board of Supervisors has not scheduled a time to formally hear the report.

Charlottesville criminal justice lawyer Jeff Fogel says he feels the report provides valuable data, but he wants more specificity in the plan moving forward.

“I would take a look at all the police officers and what their rates of arrest are in terms of blacks and whites,” Fogel says. Taking a more individualized approach could help determine if the cause of the disparity can be ascribed to specific officers or larger systems.

Councilor Lloyd Snook, a defense attorney, called for similar specificity. “Which judges are doing what? Which judges are worse than others?” Snook asked. 

The study did not identify specific persons at any point in the justice continuum, even though that data could have been made available to the researchers, says Fogel.

“I don’t think we can move forward if we don’t look at the who,” Walker said. “We have to be bold enough to take a look at that.”

The report also doesn’t address the longer-term effects of discriminatory policing, which Fogel would like to see studied. “How many people can’t get jobs because they have a prior record?” the attorney asks. “How many people are not living with their partners because they have a drug offense and they cannot live in public housing? We know if a child’s parent goes to prison, the likelihood of that child going to prison has been multiplied.”

Council will have to decide how much more city money to spend on additional research. 

“One of the big questions I have,” said councilor Michael Payne, “is what does this change? What, if anything, changes in the behavior and policies of the city as a result of this? That’s a question in part for us as a council to resolve.”

 

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Owning it: Housing advocate becomes a homeowner

LaTita Talbert in front of her new home. Photo: John Robinson

LaTita Talbert is a single mother of six, a city bus driver, and a commissioner on the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority—and now, she’s a homeowner. On January 25, Talbert’s friends and family gathered in the backyard of the neat gray house on Sixth Street SE that Talbert renovated with Habitat for Humanity, to celebrate.

“It’s a privilege. We’ve worked very hard to get to this point,” Talbert says. “I’m excited about being loved and having so many family members and friends come out to celebrate us. It’s a joy.”

The day had been a long time coming for Talbert. Habitat purchased the house more than a year and half ago, and construction began nine months ago. Talbert moved to Charlottesville in 2006 and lived in public housing and Section 8 rentals until she moved in to her new home. 

“Just from the standpoint of being low-income, and the stigma that comes along with being low-income, where people think that they can’t have anything, they can’t do anything—I think that I pushed some boundaries,” Talbert says.

She hopes she can be an example for others. “I’d like to see every housing resident as a homeowner,” Talbert says. “I know that it’s possible that somebody sees me and says, ‘She did it, I can too.’” 

Dan Rosensweig, CEO of Charlottesville Habitat for Humanity, says Habitat selects potential homeowners based on their “willingness to partner and the housing conditions that folks are in.” 

“Then they get into the program and they start doing what’s called sweat equity,” Rosensweig says. Talbert did more than 150 hours of that work: contributing to other Habitat job sites, taking home ownership classes, and participating in community service projects.

Talbert’s house was purchased after a foreclosure and then renovated. Rosensweig says the property, on the west edge of Belmont, was chosen in part to combat gentrification in Charlottesville. “Our goal, in addition to building as many homes as we can, is to find those neighborhoods that might be ripe for gentrification and try to make sure that we can keep low-income home ownership, affordable home ownership, as part of the mix for people who’ve been here,” Rosensweig says.

Habitat does three things: “We build homes in mixed-income communities, we rehab neighborhoods without displacement, and we’re trying to work on the policy level to try to, essentially, fix a broken housing system,” says Rosensweig. He thinks Talbert’s house project helps Habitat with all three of those goals. 

Talbert says participating in the renovation made the payoff even more satisfying. “You can walk through your own home and say, ‘I painted that wall. I did that nail. I put that together. I helped do that.’ It’s exciting to see the end process from the beginning.”

“I’m trying to retrain my mind from saying, ‘I’m paying rent,’ to ‘I’m paying a mortgage,’” she says.

Talbert’s success offers a stark reminder of the dire housing situation in Charlottesville. According to a 2019 report from the Central Virginia Regional Housing Partnership, more than 16,000 people in the region are cost-burdened or severely cost-burdened by housing. Hundreds of people are on the waitlist for public housing, and wait times can be as long as eight years. Average rents are rising.

Habitat works wonders for the individuals who pass through the program, but at this point it’s not a large-scale solution for the deeply ingrained issues facing the town. Rosensweig says application cycles often see roughly 150 people apply for about 20 Habitat homes. 

On Saturday, however, the mood was celebratory. Talbert and her children sat across folding chairs in the backyard, with friends and family and Habitat employees scattered behind them. 

Pastor Stanley L. Speed of God’s House of Faith began the proceedings with a prayer. “I thank God for this moment,” Speed said. “I praise God for the Talbert family, the action of faith coming to fruition today.”

In her remarks at the end of the ceremony, Talbert thanked her church community. “The days I was frustrated, trying to juggle life and Habitat and everything else, they held me up,” she said.

Vice-Mayor Sena Magill spoke briefly as well. “On behalf of the City of Charlottesville, welcome home. You have earned this. Habitat is not an easy program,” Magill said. City Councilor Heather Hill and former vice-mayor Wes Bellamy were also in attendance. 

Magill emphasized the importance of property ownership as a building block towards a fairer Charlottesville. “Home ownership is where true equity begins,” Magill said. “Now you have something that you can leave to your children.”

In a city beset by a housing crisis, Talbert’s new homeownership represents both an admirable success story and a reminder of the tremendous amount of work left to do.

“To see where we came from to where we are now, it’s just like, wow,” Talbert says. “It’s a wow moment. We really did this.” 

 

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Map quest: Committee seeks to create historically accurate tour of downtown

Court Square will be describe more accurately in the new brochure. Photo: Skyclad Aerial

For years, the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society and the city’s visitor’s center have been distributing a pamphlet that guides guests on a walking tour of downtown Charlottesville’s historic sites.

There’s one problem, though: the map hasn’t been updated in ages. Robert Watkins, the city’s assistant historic preservation and design planner, says the old map is full of “interpretive flaws.”

The current iteration of the guided tour still refers to Market Street Park as Lee Park. The Stonewall Jackson statue is noted as “one of the world’s finest equestrian statues,” rather than a monument to the Confederacy. The brochure takes visitors past the former Eagle Tavern without mentioning that it was the site of multiple sales of enslaved people.

When the city ran out of that version of the pamphlet, the Historic Resources Committee declined to print more, voting instead to establish a Historic Resources Walking Tour Map Subcommittee to create a new tour course. That subcommittee had its second meeting last week.

“We’ve been told that the walking tour map is very popular,” said committee member and former Charlottesville vice-mayor Dede Smith after the meeting. “As our narrative is expanding and becoming more inclusive, it’s vital that the document that most tourists see reflects our larger, more accurate story.”

That’s easier said than done. Local history often relies on scant sourcing; in this case, the subcommittee will be forced to build its story out of a sundry collection of oral histories, dubiously sourced guidebooks, and old newspaper advertisements. 

Downtown Charlottesville has evolved over the centuries, through years of formal and informal segregation. For much of the area’s history, “you have two societies functioning side by side,” said committee member and local journalist Jordy Yager.

One pamphlet is a small space for all that history. “There’s no way you can be comprehensive in this,” Smith said during the meeting. “The balance problem we have is—it’s 250 years. It’s a lot of time.”

Each entry in the brochure is only a few sentences long, so every word has to be perfect. The subcommittee debated whether those sold in Court Square be referred to as “people,” “persons,” or “men, women, and children.” They pondered whether it was accurate to say that the Nelson House “was built by John A.G. Davis,” even though the wealthy professor likely never hammered a single nail. 

Diligently asking these small questions is the only way to build an accurate large-scale narrative. “It’s better to tell good history, but delayed, than bad history promptly,” Yager said. 

Efforts to re-contextualize Charlottesville’s downtown are ongoing. UVA professor Jalane Schmidt and Jefferson School head Andrea Douglas have led their own walking tours of local Confederate monuments since last year. 

The old brochure has 36 locations. The subcommittee has identified an additional 20 or so that might be worthy of inclusion. Winnowing down that list is one of the biggest challenges ahead of the group in the next few weeks. 

“One of the really wonderful things about Charlottesville is that people are interested in history here, both people that live here and people that come here as tourists,” Yager said. “It’s an opportunity to help set that historical record more holistically. For a variety of reasons, some of that history has not been told as enthusiastically. We have a great opportunity to popularize that and bring that into a more mainstream experience.” 

The group hopes to have a new map ready for distribution by summer at the latest.

 

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Low pay, little power: Charlottesville mayors have limited authority

Mayor Walker speaks at a City Council meeting.

Mayor Nikuyah Walker was re-elected on January 6, after a short but intense discussion at a City Council meeting that left part of the new council feeling put out. Two councilors, Heather Hill (who made her own bid for mayor) and Lloyd Snook, abstained from the vote rather than cast their support for Walker.

Just watching the proceedings, you’d never know that the mayor of Charlottesville wields essentially no more formal power than any other city councilor.

That’s not a new revelation: The mayor’s role has been debated before, especially in the summer of 2018, when the aftershocks of the 2017 Unite the Right rally led to the hiring of a new city manager and a period of introspection from a government accused of lackadaisical leadership in a time of crisis. City Council chose not to pursue a change of system then, and some critics still see incongruities in the city’s way of governing.

Charlottesville currently operates under a “council-manager” or “weak mayor” system, which UVA law professor and municipal government expert Rich Schragger categorized as the most common form of government in towns and small cities across the country.

In a council-manager system, “The council is the board of directors, the mayor is the head of the board of directors, and the city manager is the CEO,” Schragger says. “Our mayor is for the most part a figurehead.”

Dave Norris, Charlottesville’s mayor from 2008-11, says that the mayor does serve an important role, but agrees that it’s mostly ceremonial. “Oftentimes it’s the mayor that people go to when they have issues,” Norris says. During his term, people would regularly stop him in the grocery store or the gym to give him their 2 cents about whatever happened to be going on in town.

Placing ceremonial authority and decision-making authority in the hands of two different people is a potential source of uncertainty, however. “The city manager makes decisions which the citizens think are being made by the mayor or the city council,” Schragger says. “It’s a kind of diffusion of authority that sometimes causes confusion.”

The city manager, the most powerful individual person in the government, isn’t elected at all. Charlottesville’s city managers have historically held the office for long terms. Prior to current city manager Tarron Richardson, who took office in 2019, Maurice Jones held the role for eight years. Before that, Gary O’Connell was manager for 15 years and Cole Hendrix was manager from 1971 to 1995. 

“After having served as mayor, I really feel like the chief executive officer of the city should be directly accountable to the people of the city,” Norris says. 

Nancy O’Brien, who became the city’s first female mayor in 1976, isn’t as pessimistic about the system. She feels that the weak mayor system can encourage collaboration across the government. “You need a consensus on major items,” O’Brien says. “A little more community-building is required to move forward with things. There’s a leadership opportunity…you say, ‘what do you think, can we work together to get this done.’” 

O’Brien also says that it’s good to ensure that the person running the day-to-day operation of government always has the “professional management skills” of a hired city manager.

Both Norris and O’Brien agree on one big structural issue with the mayorship, however: the pay is too low. 

“The time I put in, I may have made 25 cents an hour,” O’Brien says. If the mayor’s salary isn’t enough to live on, mayors have to have additional income, which closes the door for many potential candidates, says O’Brien. “It’s important that it be accessible to people of talent.”

“Even though it’s a weak mayor system, it’s still easily a 50 or 60 hour a week job if you do it right,” Norris says.

The mayor’s salary is currently $20,000 per year. The other city councilors make $18,000. The city manager is paid $205,000. 

Overhauling the mayor system would mean changing the town charter, a complicated process requiring approval from the General Assembly. Better compensation for city councilors is an issue independent of the mayor system, however, and one that local legislators hope to address more directly. 

Charlottesville Delegate Sally Hudson, for example, pointed to legislation she’s introduced that would remove the cap on salaries for Charlottesville City Council members without overhauling the whole system. The bill was filed just this week.

The conversation about Charlottesville’s mayor is part of a larger debate about the push and pull between state and local power in Virginia. A legal precedent called the Dillon Rule means localities here can only exercise power explicitly given to them by the General Assembly. “Cities are subject to the whims of the state legislature,” Schragger says, adding that the most obvious example is Charlottesville’s state-protected Confederate monuments.

The state government affects what the city can do in other ways, too. “Minimum wage, affordable housing, a lot of that stuff is dictated by the state,” Schragger says. “Existing gun laws don’t allow cities to regulate guns in the way they would have liked to. Charlottesville would have liked to regulate guns a long time ago.”

Although Mayor Walker’s re-election might have seemed dramatic, her next term in office will be subject to the same constraints that all of Charlottesville’s previous mayors have faced: being a largely symbolic figure in a city government that wields little power to begin with.

“Charlottesville used to think of itself as a small city or a large town,” says Norris, “but a lot of the things that we’re dealing with now are the kinds of things that some bigger cities have to grapple with.” 

As Walker seeks to continue to address those issues, she won’t have many levers to pull.

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Passed down: Descendants of people enslaved at Monticello work to reconnect with their families

Descendants of people enslaved at Monticello share their family stories at Northside Library.

“We were scattered all over the country, never to meet each other again until we were in another world,” wrote enslaved laborer Peter Fossett after his family and friends were sold in Monticello’s 1827 and 1829 estate sales.

Thomas Jefferson died in debt, and soon after his death his family auctioned off the crops, furniture, and people that Jefferson held at Monticello. The 130 enslaved people held there represented 90 percent of the appraised value of Jefferson’s property. 

At the Northside Library on January 13, a collection of descendants of those who had been enslaved at Monticello gathered to share the stories of their families. Niya Bates, Monticello’s director of African American history, moderated the panel.

“I want to thank you for going on this difficult journey with us tonight,” Bates said at the beginning of the event.

“We should not ever memorialize that sale,” said panelist Calvin Jefferson, a retired archivist and descendant of multiple Monticello enslaved families. (Jefferson noted that his surname does not come from Thomas Jefferson.) “The separation of the enslaved was a very tragic thing for the people that were separated.”

But now, the families forced apart in those traumatic diasporas are finding each other once again through painstaking genealogical work. Bates coordinates the Getting Word oral history project, which seeks to catalog the stories of these families and help descendants learn more about their ancestors. 

“It’s moving in a very deep way, the wealth of information that’s been given to us,” said Myra Anderson, a descendant of the Hern family. 

Jefferson has met some of his relatives through this process and found an immediate connection. “I’ve known you all my life, and I just met you,” he said. “It’s astounding. When we talk, it’s like we grew up together.” 

Complete genealogical information for these families often doesn’t exist. But even scant details can be comforting and empowering to descendants. “You know their names. You know what they did. You know they had kids,” said Anderson. “It’s no longer this abstract thought. You know everything about them.”

Anderson told a story about how two of her male ancestors successfully petitioned Jefferson to purchase their wives. She identified with their perseverance and attitude. “I think that spirit of advocacy runs in my DNA,” Anderson said. “That’s something I still do today.”

These tales sat untold for many years, buried by time and the pain of continued discrimination.

Joan Burton said she saw her family name, Gillette, in a book about Sally Hemings, and decided to inquire about a possible connection at Monticello. Indeed, she found that her family were descendants of enslaved people there. “I was totally bewildered by the fact that I had lived here all this time and never knew this,” Burton said.

For Burton, the desire to unearth this history is new. “I cannot say my family talked about their slave ancestors,” Burton said. “The motto was, ‘slavery was awful, and it’s over.’” 

“The pain caused by slavery still lives in many generations and in many ways,” Burton continued. “A lot of what we live with today is a result of slavery. I’m glad that it’s being discussed now because it’s something that everybody needs to know about.”

Nothing about this work is easy. “It’s a slog, looking for your family in property records,” Burton said. “But I won’t give it up.” 

The conference room at the Northside Library was full to the brim—organizers estimated more than 130 people were in attendance. While the Confederate statues still stand, the evening offered another indication that some part of Charlottesville is interested in engaging with this history, at least in a small way. 

“I am very proud to have a relative up at Monticello,” said Deborah Granger, another panelist. “You have to go up there. You have to sit there and feel their presence and what they went through. To me, I felt so overwhelmed, with their spirit going right through me.”

“I have a hard time talking about it, I’ll be honest,” said Burton. “When I go to Monticello, I go to the cemetery, because my fifth-great-grandparents are buried there. I have the feeling that I don’t really want to be there. But I can’t not go there.”

During a question period after the panel discussion, one audience member stood up and said she was an American history teacher. She asked the panelists if they had any advice for teachers trying to communicate this history.

“The answer to your questions is very simple,” said Jefferson. “Tell the truth.”

 

Correction, 1/23: An earlier version of this story referred to Joan Burton as Jill Merton.