Nearly four weeks in, the federal government remains at a standstill over the president’s maniacal demand for $5.7 billion in American taxpayers’ dollars to erect a giant wall.
But local government, at least, is raring to go. “Eighty percent of what we do is not a Republican or Democratic issue,” Republican Delegate Steve Landes tells us. “It’s what the government should do.” For Landes, that includes funding early childhood education and improvements to I-81. Let’s hope “what government should do” also includes making it easier for citizens to exercise their right to vote. As we reported in November, Virginia is the second-hardest-place-to-vote in the U.S. (thanks, Mississippi!).
With an almost evenly divided House, a new Democratic minority leader, and an election looming on the horizon, political analyst Stephen Farnsworth tells us a basic voting reform like no-excuse absentee ballots may have a chance. We won’t hold
our breath for Governor Ralph Northam’s package of common-sense gun control measures (Only one handgun purchase a month? Let’s not get crazy.).
Here in Charlottesville, five residents have already announced their intention to run for City Council, and that’s not including Don Gathers, former chair of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces, who is hoping
complications from a heart attack clear up in time for him to make the March filing deadline. Current councilors Wes Bellamy, Kathy Galvin, and Mike Signer haven’t yet said whether they’ll be running for re-election. Bellamy, at least, will likely continue
to be in the spotlight either way, as he promotes his new book revealing his take on the last two years.
With candidates talking about affordable housing, making the city carbon neutral, and addressing the “pipeline to prison,” the election season is sure to bring up some worthwhile debate. Let the games begin.—Laura Longhine
Start reading about the opioid epidemic, and there’s no shortage of staggering statistics. Drug overdose has become the leading cause of death in the U.S. for those under 50, surpassing deaths from firearms, car accidents, homicides, or HIV/AIDS. In 2017, the number of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. reached a record high—70,237, more Americans than died in the entire Vietnam War. The majority of those deaths are from opioids.
In two decades, the crisis has shifted from prescription opioids to heroin to synthetic opioids like fentanyl. But the numbers have only gone up. In Virginia, drug overdose deaths involving heroin went up 21.8 percent from 2016 to 2017, more than in any
other state. In Dopesick, author Beth Macy, who spent 25 years as a beat reporter for the Roanoke Times, tells the stories behind those numbers.
“So many people in America have no idea how bad this epidemic is,” she tells us. “I wanted to write something that would illuminate it.”
In this issue, we also talk to Jordan McNeish, a Charlottesville resident who has turned his struggles with addiction into a way to help others, through the Jefferson Area Harm Reduction group. Harm reduction acknowledges the reality that
not everyone who abuses drugs is ready or able to quit, and focuses on minimizing the risks and providing support.
McNeish appeared before City Council in December, to advocate for more accessible, anonymous distribution of naloxone, and a needle exchange program. He was influenced by groups like the New England Users Union, whose president, Jess Tilley, told NPR, “I feel as an outed drug user, I speak for the people who can’t speak for themselves.” When people feel ashamed about not being able to quit, they use alone, and that’s when they die, she says. “I want people to realize that they don’t have to be alone in this.”—Laura Longhine
Although technology may, overall, be destroying our collective attention span, the internet has also brought us new ways of telling stories. And the startling popularity of podcasts is proof that many of us are still hungry for a slower kind of media, one that pauses to examine the esoteric, interesting, and complex stories that don’t make it into our social media news feeds.
In this issue, we take a look at how area residents are using this medium to dig into everything from the latest neurology research to the lives of returning veterans, from food and fashion to the history that underlies our current debates.
In News this week, we note the planned closing of the Central Virginia Training Center outside of Lynchburg, once infamous for the forced sterilization of more than 4,000 Virginians deemed to be “feeble-minded.” Among them was Charlottesville resident Carrie Buck, whose sterilization was made into a test case for Virginia’s new eugenics laws, and approved by the U.S. Supreme Court.
We’ve written previously about prominent eugenicists at UVA, who declared African Americans to be genetically inferior to whites. But eugenics also extended to anyone seen as “different,” including women and poor people.
Carrie Buck’s mother was declared to be feeble-minded and institutionalized in Lynchburg largely because she had a child out of wedlock. Years later, Carrie was sent there herself, committed by her foster parents after they discovered she’d been raped by their nephew and was pregnant. (Like her mother, Carrie was accused of being feeble-minded and promiscuous.) Carrie’s baby was taken from her, and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. declared that “three generations of imbeciles is enough,” sanctioning her sterilization.
This fascinating story is told in Encyclopedia Virginia’s Not Even Past podcast, which includes an interview with researcher Paul Lombardo, who visited Carrie late in life (he found her working on her daily crossword puzzle). “The same kinds of impulses that led her to her victimization are still around today,” he says. “When times are difficult, we will find scapegoats.” That’s why we need these stories. —Laura Longhine
Before we turn the page on 2018, another tumultuous year, this issue takes a look back at what grabbed our attention over the last 12 months. Like the year itself, this is a somewhat incongruous mix, with the A/12 anniversary lockdown jostling against MarieBette’s insanely good “prezzant”(a pretzel croissant) and the great music, art, and theater that has carried us through.
I like to ring in the new year with poems, and if I could fit them here I’d gift you Kim Addonizio’s lovely and moving “New Year’s Day,” and Mac McCaughan (of Superchunk)’s still-apt 2016 anthem, “Happy New Year: Prince Can’t Die Again.”
New Year’s is about hope, that we can leave the bad stuff behind and start anew. Whenever I’m visiting friends and family in NYC for the holidays, I stick around for the Poetry Project’s marathon reading at St. Mark’s Church In-The-Bowery. As the organization describes it, the roughly 12-hour, drop-in benefit involves “over 140 poets together revealing not just that a better life could exist, but that it already does, sexy and wise, rancorous and sweet, big hearted and mad as hell.”
Wherever you are this New Year’s, I wish those same sentiments for you. —Laura Longhine
Among the many Christmas rituals going on at this time of year is the Mexican tradition of las posadas (literally, “the inns”), which commemorates Mary and Joseph’s search for shelter in Bethlehem. In the nine nights leading up to Christmas, families, friends, and neighbors go on a candlelight procession, knocking on doors and asking for a place to stay. When they reach the host’s home (sometimes a church) they are at last invited in, and a celebration begins.
It’s a fitting time, then, for this week’s cover story, which takes a look
at the everyday struggles of Charlottesville’s community of undocumented immigrants, and the local groups that have stepped in to offer them help and refuge. “To welcome the stranger is one of our greatest and most consistent religious commandments,” says the Reverend Brittany Caine-Conley, who
recently traveled with other local advocates to provide humanitarian aid to
migrants at the U.S. border.
Reasonable people can disagree about the particulars of our country’s
immigration laws. The question of who gets to stay here, and why, has been debated since the United States was founded. But you don’t have to be
religious to think that people fleeing danger and looking for a better life
deserve to be treated with decency and kindness.
The tradition of the posadas is a reminder that we, too, may at one point be the pilgrims, the ones seeking a safe place for our family to stay. And that if we are lucky enough to be the ones with the shelter, we can give the gift of welcome.
The story Charlottesville tells through its most prominent public monuments was largely written by one man: Paul Goodloe McIntire.
“C’ville is awash with monuments. Why no statues to women besides a cowering Sacajawea (who happened to be pregnant but still led the white guys through the wilderness)?” – Donna Lucey
“We do have three statues of women, you know,” says former mayor Virginia Daugherty, her soft Southern voice a bit sly. She’s referring to Sacagawea, crouching at the foot of Lewis and Clark on West Main Street; an angel at the foot of the Jackson statue; and the head of an anonymous woman that appears, along with a man’s, on an abstract statue called “Family” in front of the old jail.
That’s what passes for female representation in Charlottesville’s dozens of monuments, from Homer and multiple likenesses of Thomas Jefferson scattered across Grounds at the University of Virginia, past explorers George Rogers Clark on University Avenue and Lewis and Clark on West Main, and over to the most prominent statues in town: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Johnny Reb.
“When you look around, you just think it’s not right, the way that it is,” says Daugherty.
So why hasn’t the city, which is 51.6 percent female, honored any women?
In part, this is a national problem. “Statues of women never get names,” notes journalist Kriston Capps in a CityLab story called “The Gender Gap in Public Sculpture.” “They’re archetypes, symbols, muses, forces.” Of the hundreds of statues in New York City and Washington, D.C., he writes, each city has just five statues that depict historic women. “There are 22 statues of men in Central Park alone, but not one (non-fictional) woman.”
The explanation has to do with who, historically, has commissioned the building of monuments, and for what reasons.
In Charlottesville, the story we tell through our most prominent public monuments was largely written by one man: Paul Goodloe McIntire. As a 5-year-old boy, McIntire reputedly shook his fist at Union troops as they marched past his house in 1865, marking the end of the Confederacy. Decades later, McIntire got his revenge by gifting the city a series of segregated parks and installing the now-infamous statue of Lee, along with Stonewall Jackson, Lewis and Clark, and George Rogers Clark. (McIntire himself is memorialized in a bust behind the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society).
On a recent chilly Saturday morning, roughly 50 people turned out for a Confederate monument tour led by Dr. Andrea Douglas, director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, and Dr. Jalane Schmidt, associate professor of religion at UVA.
Beginning at the barely legible plaque commemorating black history at the site where slaves were bought and sold, and ending at the graceful, imposing statue of Lee on his pedestal, Schmidt noted that our monuments show “whose history matters in the community.”
Defenders of our current Confederate monuments often express the desire to “preserve history.” But much of our local history is buried, Schmidt and Douglas said. Court Square Park, for instance, was once the site of a multiracial community called McKee’s Row. Fifty years before the more famous destruction of Vinegar Hill, McKee’s Row was demolished to make way for McIntire’s whites-only park, anchored by the statue of Stonewall Jackson. “You’d never know it,” Schmidt said. “You’re not supposed to know it.”
The Jackson statue, she also pointed out, was erected in 1921, the same year the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan was founded.
The Johnny Reb statue, one of hundreds of similar statues planted in front of courthouses throughout the South after the end of Reconstruction, was erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy but paid for in part by city and county funds. Among those on the statue committee, said Schmidt, was the prosecutor who declined to charge anyone in the lynching of John Henry James, which was attended by 150 unmasked white men.
“These are monuments to Jim Crow,” she said.
Other Southern cities have found ways to broadcast new values through their choice of monuments. “What they’ve done in Richmond is really great,” Daugherty says, referring to the way that city has balanced its boulevard of white male Confederate leaders with more recent monuments to female African American heroes like Maggie Walker, a teacher and the first African American woman to charter a bank, and Barbara Johns, who, as a high school student in Farmville, led a student strike to protest separate and unequal schools. Here in Charlottesville, she suggests, the city could recognize a local writer, like Amélie Rives or Julia Magruder, or an activist like Grace Tinsley or Otelia Love Jackson.
“There’s lots of good ideas,” Daugherty concludes. “I think it just takes a little organization.”
Some local women have been recognized in other ways—for instance, Jackson-Via Elementary in the city and Greer Elementary in the county are both named for female educators (Nannie Cox Jackson, Betty Davis Via, and Mary Carr Greer). And in 2011, UVA dedicated a memorial to Kitty Foster, a free black woman who worked as a laundress at the university. (A metal “shadow catcher” sculpture now demarcates the family’s graveyard.)
In 2009, after several protests, the city added a plaque to the Lewis and Clark statue commemorating Sacagawea’s contributions. Performance artist Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell, who organized a “theatrical protest” there in 2007 and started a petition that garnered 500 signatures, says the plaque was “a very minor concession to our protest,” and that she had hoped the city would make a bigger gesture.
As for new monuments to women, she says, “I would say I’m ignorant, like a lot of people, about what that would look like.”
But she’s not so sure about statues.
“I think a living way where you have artists who are paid to keep these things alive,” she suggests. For instance, she and other female artists were commissioned by UVA last spring to perform pieces at the Lee and George Rogers Clark statues, in response to August 12.
“In terms of countering a lot of the male statues I guess it’s important,” she says of the idea of women monuments. “But putting a lot of land into memorializing people…I don’t know if that’s the way to go.”
While Jackson and Lee never set foot in Charlottesville, there are plenty of notable women who actually lived here whose stories are largely unknown. Here are just a few:
Nancy Astor
1. Nancy Astor Nancy Witcher Langhorne was born in Danville and moved, at age 13, to an estate in Albemarle County. After an early, unhappy marriage to socialite Robert Gould Shaw II, Nancy moved to England, married fellow expat Waldorf Astor, and became the first woman to serve in Parliament.
Sarah Patton Boyle
2. Sarah Patton BoyleBoyle was born on a former plantation in Albemarle County, the granddaughter of Confederate veterans. She attended the Corcoran School of Art, married, and raised two sons. As she got older, she began questioning the views she was raised with and became an outspoken advocate for desegregation, writing hundreds of articles and speeches for the cause, and drawing attention from both Martin Luther King, Jr., who mentioned her by name in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, and the Ku Klux Klan, which burned a cross on her yard. The first white person to serve on the board of Charlottesville’s NAACP, Boyle was later recognized by the city as a “Bridge Builder,” with her name on the Drewary Brown Bridge.
Frances Brand
3. Frances Brand An artist and activist once known around town as “the purple lady,” Brand was born at West Point and attained the rank of Army major, doing liaison and intelligence work. In later life she became an activist for peace, women’s rights, civil rights, and other causes. Her “First” series of paintings commemorate more than 150 notable but under-recognized local citizens, many of them women or African Americans. (The paintings were bought by the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, but are not currently displayed, and were removed from the organization’s website after a recent redesign).
Queen Charlotte
4. Queen Charlotte There are two statues of Queen Charlotte in one of her other namesake cities, Charlotte, North Carolina, but none here in Charlottesville. Legend has it that the German monarch, who married the British “mad King George,” wrote a widely circulated anti-war letter to Prussian king Frederick the Great, and was committed to social welfare. But in recent years, especially after Meghan Markle’s wedding to Prince Harry, Queen Charlotte is perhaps best known for being (possibly) the first black British monarch.
Isabella Gibbons
5. Isabella Gibbons Born into slavery, Gibbons managed to learn to read and write, and taught her children to do so as well. After the Civil War, she established a school for freed blacks, earned her own diploma, and then taught in the newly established (segregated) public school system for more than 15 years.
Alice Carlotta Jackson
6. Alice Carlotta Jackson Jackson was the first African American to apply to UVA, in 1935. After earning a BA in English and taking additional courses at Smith College, Jackson applied to UVA for a master’s in French, which was not offered at any of the black colleges and universities in Virginia. The Board of Visitors denied her application, but it set off a series of public arguments, and the threat of a future lawsuit led the Virginia General Assembly to pass the Dovell Act, which paid qualified black students the additional money required to attend schools out of state. Jackson used her grant money to earn a master’s degree from Columbia University, and taught at a Florida college for 45 years.
Grace Tinsley
7. Grace Tinsley Tinsely was the first African American woman elected to the Charlottesville School Board. “[She] used her voice on the board to make sure that people were treated fairly,” her daughter told Charlottesville Tomorrow. She was also the first nurse to work at Charlottesville High School. After her retirement, Tinsley successfully lobbied to establish a public defender’s office in Charlottesville. The Charlottesville Democratic Party named a scholarship in her honor, which is awarded to Charlottesville High School seniors from low- or middle-income households, and her name is on the Drewary Brown Memorial Bridge.
Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy
8. Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy The goddaughter of Robert E. Lee, Rives was born in Richmond and grew up at Castle Hill, in Albemarle County. She began writing as a young girl, and her bestselling first novel scandalized many for its portrayal of a woman who experienced sexual feelings. She went on to write more novels and, later, Broadway plays. After divorcing her first husband, she married Prince Pierre Troubetzkoy, an artist and aristocrat, and the couple moved back to Rives’ childhood home.
The CHS cafeteria was packed October 23 with community members eager to talk about longstanding racial disparities that became a national news story.
Dede Smith
Charlottesville City Schools has opened up a dialogue on racial disparities in its schools, with a survey to parents and a series of community forums, the first of which was held on October 23.
Though data on the black/white gap in city schools—in everything from suspension rates to participation in gifted programs—has existed for decades, the outreach is in response to an October 16 ProPublica/New York Times story spotlighting the district as having one of the biggest racial achievement gaps in the country.
At the forum, hundreds of community members filled Charlottesville High School’s cafeteria, where Charlene Green, manager of the city’s Office of Human Rights, told the crowd: “This is not about holding hands and singing ‘We Are the World,’ because it’s not going to happen. We need to figure out how we’re going to have these difficult conversations and listen to each other.”
In breakout groups, attendees discussed issues like gifted identification and hiring and supporting teachers of color.
Valarie Walker, who grew up in city schools, was in attendance along with her daughter, Trinity Hughes, who was one of the two African American students featured in the Times article.
Walker talked about her own experience as a child at Greenbrier Elementary School, which she enjoyed. “I still talk to my fifth grade teacher to this day,” she says. “We give each other hugs.”
But she also brought up her struggle to get her older daughter enrolled in an advanced course at Charlottesville High School, where she eventually thrived. Trinity, too, is now doing well in Algebra II, the class she could not get into her junior year because she struggled in math as a freshman. “I think it’s just trying to make sure that all kids have opportunities,” Walker says of the changes that need happen. “I think a lot of the kids just get pushed to the back.”
She’s glad the city is offering the forums (a second is scheduled for November 27). “You have to have the community’s input,” she says. And like many attendees, she was encouraged by the conversations happening that night. “When everybody gets together and everybody feels the same way, it makes you feel better.”
John Santoski, a former school board member whose two daughters attended city schools (one is now a teacher at CHS), says it was “good to see so many people come out,” but he’s withholding judgment on the city’s response.
“We’re really good here in Charlottesville at getting together and talking about things,” he says, noting that he was involved in many of these same conversations 25 years ago, when he was on the school board. “Whether there’s really going to be action…the jury’s still out.”
SURVEY SAYS
Initial results from a Charlottesville City Schools survey sent to all parents in the district revealed a glaring gap between the way white parents and black parents experience city schools.
For instance, in response to the statement: “My school values cultural similarities and differences,” 82 percent of white parents, but only 47 percent of black parents, agreed that the schools were moving in the right direction. On all questions, a greater proportion of white respondents rated the schools as moving in the right direction.
At the forum, city schools spokeswoman Beth Cheuk also noted that only 14 percent of respondents identified as black (in a district that’s roughly a third black), a red flag that the schools need to do a better job of reaching out to parents of color.
Dr. Rosa Atkins has led Charlottesville City Schools for nearly 13 years. During her tenure, the system has made progress on raising graduation rates and reducing suspension rates, but black students are still more than four times as likely as white students to be held back a grade and almost five times as likely to be suspended. Photo: Eze Amos
Last week, ProPublica and the New York Times published a scathing indictment of Charlottesville City Schools, pointing out persistent and widening achievement gaps between white and black students. The article also highlighted the overrepresentation of white students in the city schools’ gifted program, and made a general case that the needs of black students and families are not being met.
The piece set off a storm of reactions on social media, with one teacher on Facebook blaming a lack of “support or discipline at home,” while others brought up issues like frequent leadership turnover in city schools, disempowered teachers, and the role of affluent white parents in preventing real change.
The city school system has responded forcefully. In a press conference and a letter to parents, Superintendent Dr. Rosa Atkins, who has been in her position for nearly 13 years, highlighted what she says are the district’s efforts to address these issues, but also acknowledged responsibility. “Our primary response should be to listen and learn from the central truth of this article,” she wrote. “We have not made consistent or satisfactory progress for all our students.”
The city followed up with a survey to parents, and is holding a community forum on Tuesday, October 23.
For many, the issues raised in the story were not a surprise.
Gaye Carey, 34, says she’s been concerned about the achievement gap since her daughter, Lamira, was in first grade at Johnson Elementary and a teacher recommended her for QUEST, the city’s gifted program. Carey, who is African American, says she remembers Lamira being one of only two black students pulled out of class for QUEST. “And I just know [there’s]plenty of smart black kids,” she says, “so I’m just not understanding.”
‘The same thing is still going on’
Lamira is currently in fifth grade at Walker Upper Elementary, and she’s in accelerated math classes, where, again, most of her classmates are white. It’s an experience that seems unchanged from when Carey herself was a student in Charlottesville’s schools.
“When I was in high school, I was in advanced classes and I was one of three black kids out of 27 kids,” she says. “And now it’s going on with my daughter. The same thing is still going on.”
Darnell Walker, who attended city schools from elementary through high school, agrees. “I thought these issues for Black students in Charlottesville would have died a few years after I left CHS, in 2000, but I see it’s still alive, strong, and shows no signs of letting up,” he says in an email.
Like Zyahna Bryant, who was featured prominently in the ProPublica/NYT story, Walker recalls that he was one of the rare black students pushed toward gifted programs.
“I was one of those students who teachers would call ‘different,’ knowing they meant I was nothing like my Black friends,” he writes. “But I definitely was just like them. They were all smart.”
The article noted that white students make up more than 70 percent of students in QUEST (in a district that is 42 percent white). And the percentage of white students who are identified as gifted has shot up from 11 percent in 1984 to roughly 33 percent today.
School administrators say what the piece left out were the active steps they are taking to make the QUEST program more inclusive: Changes in the way students are identified as gifted have resulted in an increase in referrals to the program over the last decade. Still, the overall ratio of white to black students hasn’t changed much.
Bev Catlin, a district coordinator for the program, says the ratios are beginning to shift, but it will take time. In the meantime, the city’s gifted specialists are increasingly “pushing in” to classrooms, collaborating with teachers to offer lessons to students who are not identified for the program—both so everyone can benefit from higher-level lessons and so specialists can identify strengths in students who might have been overlooked.
‘All children have gifts’
The city gives all students a formal assessment for its gifted program in first grade, rather than in second like Albemarle County, because national data suggests that kids from disadvantaged backgrounds benefit from being tested sooner. Being behind “really does compound year to year,” says Christine Esposito, a gifted specialist at Johnson Elementary. “Kids who don’t feel successful in school will start to shut down.”
Esposito says she and her colleagues are always thinking about ways to make the program more inclusive. “If we had the answer, we would have fixed it by now. We come to work and we try our best to do our best for every kid that we see.”
On the high school level, Charlottesville High has instituted an honors-option program, in which students can pursue standard or honors-level credits in the same classroom, instead of being tracked into separate classes. The district says this program has led to a significant increase in enrollment in honors and AP level courses for African American students.
Margaret Thornton, who taught English at CHS when the program was introduced, says it gave her a much more racially heterogeneous class. Students used different texts to tackle the same big questions, and they learned from each other, improving both test scores and engagement, she says. “It’s a completely different way of teaching, when you’re organizing around these big ideas and then exposing students to all sorts of diverse viewpoints,” she says.
While the honors-option program is expanding, eliminating tracking altogether would be a difficult lift. Even among white students, school systems were traditionally designed to categorize and separate students by ability levels, says Thornton, who is now a doctoral student studying detracking at UVA’s Curry School of Education. “We never righted those structures to make them more inclusive and to make school about enriching experiences,” she says.
“Every child should be getting these enriching experiences,” she adds. “All children have gifts that we can be uncovering.I don’t think school as we currently have it is designed to do that.”
What will it take?
Indeed, the one thing almost everyone involved can agree on is that the racial achievement gap is a problem that goes beyond Charlottesville, and that no one has effectively solved it.
“What’s happening in Charlottesville is not at all unique to Charlottesville; this is a nationwide trend that schools are failing our black students,” says a city elementary school teacher who asked not to be identified by name. “My questions are, who is doing this better than us, with a similar population? What do we need to do differently?”
A 2016 Stanford University study of standardized test scores found that Charlottesville ranks with other college towns in the 10 percent of districts with the widest racial achievement gaps, but that these gaps exist nationwide. And it’s difficult to separate the school system’s problems from those of the community itself: Charlottesville is a rapidly gentrifying city with a long history of racial and economic segregation.
Grappling with that legacy, several educators say, will require some deep, long-term work, like rethinking teaching to be culturally relevant, and hiring and retaining more African American teachers.
Justin Malone, who started as principal of Jackson-Via Elementary last year and led Charlottesville High School for four years before that, says he recognizes the problems identified in the story, but that in his experience, Charlottesville City Schools are committed to trying to improve.
“Even before the events of Aug 11 and 12, it’s hard not to just ask yourself, are you doing it right, are you doing it well?” he says. “That’s been the work.”
