International human rights attorney Irwin Cotler met with Jens Soering in prison, and says Soering’s case has “all the markers” of a wrongful conviction.
Staff photo
The former UVA Echols Scholar convicted for the 1985 murders of his girlfriend’s parents has gotten another prominent supporter. Former Canadian minister of justice Irwin Cotler, who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and who was an attorney for political prisoners Nelson Mandela and Natan Sharansky, was in town March 5 and says he thinks Jens Soering is wrongfully imprisoned.
Cotler says he was talking to Innocence Project founder Jason Flom and mentioned an upcoming visit to UVA law school. Flom told him about Soering, whom many believe is innocent of the horrific murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom in their Bedford home, particularly since new DNA analysis from blood at the crime scene indicates that other previously unidentified people were there, but not Soering.
Soering, a German citizen, has long claimed he confessed to the crime to protect then-girlfriend Elizabeth Haysom from execution. He says Haysom told him she’d killed her parents, and hemistakenly believed he would have diplomatic immunity if he confessed to the crime.
He’s been in prison almost 33 years, and his case has been an international cause célèbre, with Germany calling for his repatriation and then-governor Tim Kaine agreeing to do so, only to have Bob McDonnell reverse the okay when he took office in 2010.
Cotler first became involved in wrongful convictions with the case of Steven Truscott, who was convicted of the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl when he was 14. Cotler reviewed the evidence, and “I came to the conclusion there had been a miscarriage of justice,” he says.
After looking at the Soering case, “It struck me it had all the markers I’ve come to appreciate as the indicators of a wrongful conviction,” he says, listing false confession, inadequate attorney representation, and junk forensic science.
“It was a classic case of a wrongful conviction,” he says, and a “compelling case, which cried out for injustice that needed to be redressed, having gone on for 35 years.”
Cotler joins a prominent and growing array of Soering defenders, including bestselling author John Grisham and actor Martin Sheen, who wrote a letter to the Richmond Times-Dispatch earlier this year calling for Soering’s release.
Albemarle Sheriff Chip Harding, who launched his own investigation of the case with a number of other cops, came to the conclusion Soering was innocent and wrote then-governor Terry McAuliffe that the evidence supports Soering’s innocence and that if tried today, he would not be convicted.
Cotler, who is an honorary member of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, spent two hours with Soering at the Buckingham Correctional Center. “I was very much taken by his remarkable demeanor,” says Cotler of Soering, who has written 10 books while in prison, has been denied parole 14 times, and has never had an infraction during the more than three decades he’s been incarcerated.
“He doesn’t bear any rancor or desire for revenge,” says Cotler, who notes that Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years before becoming president of South Africa, and taught that country “the importance of reconciliation.”
Soering has “a real feeling for what justice is all about,” says Cotler. “I hope his freedom will allow him to make the mark he has made in prison.”
A German documentary,Killing for Love, was released in 2016 and supports Soering’s innocence. And in an interview for the film, Elizabeth Haysom said her mother had sexually abused her for years, which experts like Harding say would be a motive for the murders.
Soering’s attorney Steve Rosenfield filed a petition for pardon in 2016 with the governor’s office, where’s it’s languished. A call to the secretary of the commonwealth, which handles pardons, was not returned, nor was a message to Governor Ralph Northam’s office.
Cotler is hopeful investigators for the governor and the parole board will resolve the matter and free Soering. The case, he says, “is a blot on the criminal justice system as a whole.”
Rob Vaughan “didn’t just love his work at Virginia Humanities, he lived it,” says current executive director Matthew Gibson.
John Robinson
Rob Vaughan, founder of Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, died March 6 at age 74, after a rapid progression of Alzheimer’s disease, according to his obituary. He leaves behind the largest, best-funded, and what a colleague calls “the gold standard” of humanities organizations in the country.
When then-UVA president Edgar Shannon tapped Vaughan, an English teacher working on his Ph.D., to explore starting a new humanities organization in 1974, he chose a man with an uncanny ability to connect the stories of all of Virginia’s communities, and to underscore the importance of those stories.
Kevin McFadden, chief operating officer of what is now called Virginia Humanities, describes Vaughan as a “builder” who “knew how to create the invisible structures that gather and unite people for a common purpose.”
McFadden worked with Vaughan for 17 years, starting out at the Virginia Festival of the Book, which is now in its 25th year and was Vaughan’s favorite program of the many created during his tenure.
Besides the better-known programs like the book fest, Encyclopedia Virginia, radio shows “With Good Reason” and “Backstory,” and the Virginia Folklife Program, the foundation supported thousands of projects, some that became institutions in their own right, such as the Moton Museum in Farmville, American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, and Furious Flower Poetry Center at JMU. Those organizations were helped by grants “at a critical moment that helped each one flourish on its own,” says McFadden.
Vaughan wooed Sarah McConnell away from WINA in 1999 to host “With Good Reason,” and he took copies of the show, which interviews leading scholars, to listen to when he traveled, she says.
Every year, Vaughan delivered a lecture to the General Assembly on the history of the legislature going back to the House of Burgesses, she says. “He was not political, but he knew all Virginia lawmakers across the aisle.” And that, she says, helped achieve a “more diverse Virginia.”
McConnell describes Vaughan’s style as “entrepreneurial. He never said ‘no’ to a new program.”
Donna Lucey, author of Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas, works on Encyclopedia Virginia. She also calls Vaughan an entrepreneur and says he encouraged that among his staff, and gave them plenty of autonomy. “If they had a great idea, he’d let them go for it.”
Lucey, however, saw Vaughan as “a consummate politician walking the halls of the General Assembly where he knew everyone.” In 2017, the legislature passed a resolution honoring Vaughan.
“He had that Old World demeanor,” says Lucey. “I never saw a hair out of place. Even if he wore jeans, they were pressed.”
“I want to grow up to be like Rob,” says writer Earl Swift, who wrote three books as a foundation fellow, most recently Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island.
“He was smart, empathetic, generous, and elegant—a man with a hungry mind, coupled with a profound faith that the ties that bind us, as a country and as people, are vitally important subjects of study, exposition, and support,” says Swift. “There was nothing fussy about his advocacy: He saw stories worth telling among Virginians of every walk of life, and every imaginable circumstance.”
With Vaughan, it always comes back to the stories—and to books. He was in a book group of men for over 40 years.
Observes McConnell, “He was really at base a shy preacher’s kid who loved books.”
A memorial service will be held at 1pm Wednesday, March 13, at Westminster Presbyterian Church.
“I want to grow up to be like Rob.” Writer Earl Swift
Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Frank Earnest is unwavering in his belief that the Civil War was not about slavery, and the statues of generals Lee and Jackson honor defenders of the state. Photo: Timothy C. Wright
Before August 12, 2017, many people thought of America’s Confederate statues as harmless pieces of history—if they thought of them at all. Then the hate groups came to Charlottesville, ostensibly to protest the monuments’ removal. The violent clashes that led to the death of Heather Heyer and the injury of dozens, and the sight of Confederate flags waving alongside Nazi flags, brought new urgency to the conversation about the meaning of Confederate symbols.
Cities like Baltimore and New Orleans quietly sent their monuments packing. Descendants of General Robert E. Lee and General Stonewall Jackson have said statues of their ancestors have become tributes to white supremacy and need to go. And many brought up the words of Lee himself, who was opposed to memorializing the Confederacy after the war was over.
But one group of citizens remains unconvinced—the 13 plaintiffs in the lawsuit known as Monument Fund v. Charlottesville.
The people and organizations suing to stop the city from moving its Confederate statues straddle a spectrum that ranges from First Families of Virginia to a heritage organization that has members who were here August 12 with a secessionist, neo-Confederate gang.
“You’ve got the bow tie, upscale people tied to the League of the South people who want to secede and are slavery apologists,” says activist and UVA professor Jalane Schmidt.
Three years ago, some City Council members and local activists raised the idea of removing the Confederate statues from downtown. The city appointed a community commission that spent months examining the issue and ultimately presented City Council with two options to consider: relocating the statues to McIntire Park or re-contextualizing them by transforming the existing sites. In February 2017, City Council voted 3-2 to remove the Lee statue, and in April voted to sell it.
Then came August 12. Following the trauma that made Charlottesville a national hashtag, former “no” votes Mike Signer and Kathy Galvin joined Wes Bellamy, Kristin Szakos, and Bob Fenwick in saying that both the Lee and Jackson statues should go.
And that’s the issue in the lawsuit: whether councilors violated Virginia state law, which forbids the removal of war memorials, when they voted to send the Confederate generals on their way.
The lawsuit is approaching its second anniversary March 20. It’s scheduled to be in court March 11, but plaintiff spokesman Buddy Weber is dubious that it will go to trial then because Jones Day, one of the largest law firms in the world, is representing four of the five councilors and has asked for a jury trial.
In the two years the case has been active, Judge Rick Moore has ruled that the councilors do not have immunity and are personally liable for voting to remove the monuments.
In January, Delegate David Toscano carried a bill to allow localities to decide for themselves whether they want Confederate statues in their midst. The bill was killed in subcommittee.
While much has been written about—and much blame thrown at—those who first raised the idea of removing Confederate monuments from the center of town, very little attention has been paid to those still fighting the city’s decision. C-VILLE reached out to the plaintiffs to find out why they joined the suit and whether anything had changed for them since 2017.
Here’s what we found out:
Edward Dickinson Tayloe II
Tayloe, 76, comes from a First Family of Virginia that was one of the largest slave-owning dynasties in Virginia. His ancestor, John Tayloe II, called “one of the richest men of his day,” built Mount Airy plantation in Warsaw.
John Tayloe III, ancestor of lawsuit plaintiff Edward Dickinson Tayloe II, was one of the wealthiest men of his generation and “bred horses and slaves,” says the New York Times review of Richard Dunn’s A Tale of Two Plantations.
Tayloe’s great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, invested in his brother Henry’s plan to start a cotton plantation in the Black Belt of Alabama in 1835, according to Richard Dunn’s 2015 book, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia.
An 1807 ban on importing slaves had opened the domestic slave trade for Virginia and other coastal states. The Tayloes had a surplus of enslaved laborers at their Mount Airy plantation and they sent them to the Deep South.
In 1838, the Tayloe brothers forced 57 slaves to walk 800 miles to Alabama, where most were sold. It was “the cruelest act that I have found recorded in the Tayloe papers,” writes Dunn.
Benjamin Ogle Tayloe continued to send rebellious slaves to Alabama as a warning to remaining slaves, says Dunn.
Between 1833 and 1854, the Tayloes marched 120 enslaved people to Alabama, and another 98 were sent during the Civil War, says Dunn. The domestic migration of enslaved people separated families, made Virginia a major slave exporter, and further enriched the Tayloes.
Plaintiff Tayloe’s father, Edward Thornton Tayloe IV, was vice-chair of the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority when the decision was made to raze theAfrican American community of Vinegar Hill over the objections of its residents, many of whom were unable to vote on the issue because of a poll tax.
And the plaintiff, a portfolio manager, was past president of the Lee-Jackson Foundation, which has an endowment of nearly $4 million, according to 2014 IRS filings, and awards scholarships to students who write essays examining the legacies of the Confederate generals.
According to the lawsuit, Tayloe saw combat during the Vietnam War and served in Special Forces, and has a “special interest in the protection and preservation of war memorials in the city.” The Lee-Jackson Foundation contributed money in 1997 to the restoration of the Lee and Jackson statues, says the suit.
A woman answering the phone at the Tayloe residence referred a reporter to spokesperson Weber.
The plaintiff’s cousin, Tayloe Emery, who lives at Mount Airy plantation and who used to work at C-VILLE Weekly, bristles at a reporter’s inquiry about whether family members share his uncle’s enthusiasm for Confederate monuments. He writes in an email, “It’s a shame that our family name is being dragged around by the media and that reporters have the audacity to ask me stupid questions, like ‘do all of your family support Confederate monuments?’
“The answer is of course, no. The vast majority of my Virginia family are against Confederate monuments and anything that pays lip service to white nationalism in any way, shape, or form. Though many of us do in fact disagree with this lawsuit, we still support family members who may think differently on the subject and we hope that through continued conversation that they might see things from a different perspective and understand the bitter feelings and abhorrent racism associated with Confederate monuments.”
Says Schmidt, “For generations this family has been roiling the lives of black people, and this is what [plaintiff Tayloe] chooses to pursue.”
Anthony Griffin
Britton Franklin Earnest
Virginia Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans
Smithfield resident Tony Griffin, 57, is a Sons of Confederate Veterans “commander,” and Frank Earnest, who lives in Virginia Beach, holds the title “heritage defense coordinator.”
Earnest, 63, has been representing the Sons for almost 30 years, he says. “We are the bloodline descendants of the Confederate Army,” and when people start “mudslinging” about the Confederacy, they’re “talking about my great-great-grandfather.”
The Sons of Confederate Veterans contributed money to the 1997 restoration of the Lee and Jackson statues, and to the litigation, according to the lawsuit. “We don’t want to see monuments to defending our state removed,” says Earnest.
Earnest was in town August 11, 2017, for a Katie Couric interview and then got the heck out of Dodge. “It’s pretty bad when you know a riot is coming,” he says.
But the violence and open white nationalism of the Unite the Right rally have not changed Earnest’s mind about Confederate monuments. “Absolutely not,” he says. “It’s not something that comes or goes. They honor our ancestors.”
And he maintains the SCV has nothing to do with the white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups that showed up here, adding that it advised its members to stay away. “We have always denounced racist groups over our hundred-year history,” he says. “We have nothing to do with those people.”
Yet some Sons of Confederate Veterans members were here and hold dual affiliations with League of the South, which describes itself as a “Southern nationalist organization.” Its website honors John Wilkes Booth for his service “to the South and humanity.”
“We’re an organization of thousands,” says Earnest when asked about brothers George and Gregory Randall. He believes they’re still SCV members. “I don’t think we determined anyone in SCV did anything that rose to the level of complete expulsion.”
And, he says, Sons of Confederate Veterans are “in no way associated” with League of the South.
Sons of Confederate Veterans member George Randall carries the flag of neo-Confederate League of the South at Unite the Right. Photo: Rodney Dunning
Gregory Randall, who portrays General Stonewall Jackson in Civil War reenactments, and his twin George were in Charlottesville August 12 with League of the South.
George Randall, who lives near Fredericksburg, says he keeps his memberships separate and describes Sons of Confederate Veterans as a “historical” group while League of the South is “more political.”
Of the latter, he explains, “We’re secessionists.” He cites his ancestors and the Lost Cause narrative in objecting to Confederate monument removal. “We were invaded.” And he insists, “The war had nothing to do with slavery.”
He also blames Wes Bellamy for the whole monument mess, and says Bellamy is a “black supremacist.”
Says Randall, “I’m tired of everything being about race, race, race.” He objects to being called a white supremacist for wanting to “protect our culture. If you stand up for your people, you’re a Nazi or racist. It has nothing to do with hate.”
Randall was here for a lawsuit hearing in 2017 to provide security for an unnamed person, he says, but did not seem keen on returning for the upcoming court date because the last time he was here, his tires were slashed.
“I think Charlottesville sucks,” he says, denouncing “anarchist communists” and “antifa” whom he says threw urine and feces at him and his League of the South colleagues August 12. Says Randall, “You can’t wear a MAGA hat. I think it’s a crying shame.”
“Did we have a couple of rogue members in Charlottesville?” queries Earnest. “Probably, but we told them not to come.”
Is there a perception that the Sons of Confederate Veterans is a racist organization? “How much more prejudiced and bigoted can you be to ask that?” says Earnest, who has had a lot of experience talking to the press, not all of it to his satisfaction.
For instance, he was not pleased with a November 28 Washington Post story about him titled “Sins of the Fathers: The Confederacy was built on slavery. How can so many Southern whites believe otherwise?”
“I was very disappointed,” he says.
Charles L. Weber Jr.
Buddy Weber was in the U.S. Navy for 27 years, serving as a combat pilot before getting his law degree from UVA in 1998. He was chair of the city GOP, and in 2013, he ran for City Council with former city cop Mike Farruggio.
Attorney and Vietnam War vet Buddy Weber worries that if memorials to unpopular wars can be removed, Vietnam War monuments could be next. Photo: Elli Williams
Weber, 73, initially was appointed defense attorney for Heather Heyer’s murderer, James Fields, but cited his role in the lawsuit as a conflict of interest.
He says he signed on as a plaintiff for two reasons. As a lawyer and firm believer in the rule of law, “it’s my earnest belief City Council had violated the law, whether you believe the statues should stay or go,” he says.
And as a veteran of the “very unpopular” Vietnam War, he worries that those memorials could be next, negating the sacrifice citizens made of life and limb to defend this country. Virginia state law “protects these memorials from the shifting tide of public opinion,” he says.
If the General Assembly decides to change that, it can, he says, but he thinks Toscano’s bill to allow localities to make their own decisions about Confederate monuments is “a cop out.”
Weber also distances himself from those who showed up to support the Confederate monuments in 2017, taking the battle to court instead. “We do it without lighting tiki torches,” he says. “I don’t personally feel tarred because we have no association with them.”
Lloyd Smith
The founding partner of law firm Tremblay and Smith and a founder of Guaranty Bank and Virginia Broadcasting, the parent company of today’s NBC29, died last summer at age 85.
From 1997 through 1999, the former Marine represented a private group of citizens who raised money to restore the Lee and Jackson statues. That was a major reason he signed onto the lawsuit, says his son, Garrett Smith.
“The city agreed to maintain the statues in perpetuity,” he says, adding that his father always felt that when he represented people as clients, he continued to represent them.
Lloyd Smith “had a great love of history” and would visit Civil War battle sites, says Garrett Smith. “He believed the facts of the Civil War and the oppression of enslaved people was a history that needed to be told and understood.”
According to Smith, when Weber and attorney Fred Payne were helping to organize the lawsuit, they knew his father as “a Democrat and he represented a different group. He wasn’t a hardcore conservative Republican.”
He says his father was saddened by the events of August 2017, but Garrett Smith doesn’t think that changedhis father’s mind about the statues. “The city had become a flashpoint for a larger national debate.”
Frederick W. Payne
Attorney Fred Payne declined to comment for this story. In the first court hearing on the case May 2, 2017, Payne testified as an expert on Civil War uniforms because he “grew up with Confederate insignias since he was 10 years old.”
Fred Payne, an attorney and lawsuit plaintiff, has testified as an expert on Civil War uniforms. Staff photo.
The founder of Payne and Hodous in 1992, he serves as county attorney for Fluvanna, and was deputy county attorney for Albemarle from 1974 to 1987. He was also was an assistant commonwealth’s attorney for the county in 1979, according to the Payne and Hodous website.
Payne graduated magna cum laude from Yale, and got his law degree at UVA. He’s been president of the Charlottesville Albemarle Bar Association, as well as head of the city and county criminal bar association.
One of Payne’s better-known cases was his defense of widow Shirley Presley, who, in 2002, strung razor wire to block Rivanna Trail hikers from a path on her property along the river. The Rivanna Trail Foundation neglected to get her permission or an easement for that portion of the trail. A judge ruled in Presley’s favor on a code violation, and she settled her $1.5 million lawsuit against the city and foundation in 2008.
John Bosley Yellott Jr.
The Monument Fund
Jock Yellott is the fourth plaintiff in the lawsuit who’s an attorney. He’s also executive director of the Monument Fund, a nonprofit formed in October 2016 to help fund the statues’ defense. In 2017, it raised nearly $119,000, according to its IRS 990 form.
Because of his fundraising, Yellott, 64, has a financial interest in the outcome of the suit, and he conducts history tours describing the monuments, according to the complaint. He testified that he walks his dog through Market Street or Court Square parks daily. He did not return C-VILLE’s call.
Betty Jane Franklin Phillips
Phillips, 82, is described in court documents as a collateral descendant of Paul Goodloe McIntire, who donated the controversial statues and the once-segregated parks they inhabit, along with a number of other monuments, parks, and buildings around town. The Keswick resident is a Lane High School graduate. She did not respond to phone messages from C-VILLE.
Edward Bergen Fry
Ned Fry, 31, is the youngest of the plaintiffs. His great uncle Henry Shrady was the sculptor McIntire hired to create the Lee statue, and Shrady also did the Ulysses S. Grant statue in Washington near the Capitol.
Fry is himself a sculptor and graduated with a degree in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University. The CHS grad did not get back to us to discuss further his participation in the lawsuit, but at a 2016 Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces hearing, he said he was in favor of keeping the statues because, “They are historical works of art and, more importantly, because Henry Shrady is my great-great-great uncle.”
Virginia C. Amiss
The 94-year-old plaintiff remembers riding the trolley from downtown to the Rotunda when she was 7 years old to take violin lessons, and that’s when she decided she wanted to study nursing at UVA, she wrote to Virginia magazine in 2010. She graduated in 1946, and worked at UVA and in Houston, as an operating room supervisor.
Amiss had had dental surgery and didn’t feel up to talking when C-VILLE reached her, and she did not respond a follow-up call.
While she is suing to keep the Confederate statues, she was not a fan of other sculptures installed around town by the city’s Art in Place program, a nonprofit dedicated to public art. In 2005, she asked City Council to eliminate the $5,000 it gave to the program. As Cvilleindymedia.org reported, “At the last meeting, her immortal words rang out: ‘Rearranged junk is still junk.’”
On Facebook, she supports prayer in school—and in the White House.
And through marriage, Amiss is related to Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler. According to Ancestry.com and U.S. Census records, her husband, Lester “Randy” Amiss was first cousin to Kessler’s great-grandfather, LaSalle Norvell.
Stefanie Marshall
Albemarle resident Marshall is chair of the Monument Fund and has “personally expended money and effort in cleaning graffiti from the Lee monument in 2011 and 2015,” says the complaint.
She and her husband own construction company M3, which specializes in masonry. The company supports the Fraternal Order of Police, Live Arts, The Paramount Theater, Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society and various local charitable organizations, according to its website.
The lawsuit is not the first time the county resident has had a problem with city government. In 2016, she took issue with City Council’s decision to honor Khizr and Ghazala Khan, and told council: “It seems to me that in order for a Gold Star family to be honored and recognized by the current City Council, they must speak at the Democratic National Convention. This is not appropriate, nor is it acceptable. It reeks of choosing to honor specific families or individuals because they fit your narrative.”
Marshall, 52, did not respond to a message from C-VILLE.
Correction March 7: Tayloe Emery is a cousin, not nephew of Edward Tayloe, and this Stefanie Marshall did not graduate from Albemarle High.
An all-star lineup of local musicians will perform along with students at the Albemarle High School Jazz Ensemble benefit on Sunday. Photo by Gloria Londono
During his decades-long career as a National Geographic photographer, Bill Allard traveled the world and documented everything from India’s Untouchables and residents of the Marais in Paris to Montana cowboys and Easter week traditions in Peru. But for all of Allard’s adventures, there’s something the octogenarian, who’s also an accomplished musician, still longs to do: sing with a large jazz band.
On March 10, he will get his chance. Allard, who says “music has been a driving force for my entire life,” is one of several local musicians who will perform with the Albemarle High School Jazz Ensemble during the second annual Swing Into Spring benefit concert. The show will help pay for the band’s April trip to Swing Central Jazz, a three-day workshop and competition that’s part of the Savannah Music Festival.
For Allard, the evening is also a family affair. He’ll take the Jefferson Theater stage with his daughter, Terri, a singer-songwriter and host of public TV’s “Charlottesville Inside Out,” and grandson, Will Evans, a trumpeter in the AHS band.
“It’s always a joy to play music with both of them,” says Will of his mother and grandfather. “We have this connection, and I know where they’re going to go with things musically. I just try not to step on their toes and complement what they’re doing. I love it; it’s one of my favorite things.”
Terri says she’s always “thrilled” when she has an opportunity to perform with Will and her father. “They’re each so passionate about music, and both of them have greatly influenced my growth as a musician and music-lover.” When she was growing up, Terri says her dad, who’s sat in with her band for years, filled their house with music, and introduced her to the work of musicians who still remain some of her favorites. As for her son, she says Will’s “passion and respect for jazz and for music in general is contagious. I feel fortunate to be his mom and to follow him along his musical path.”
But the Allards aren’t the only family act on Sunday night’s bill. John Kelly has decades of experience as an acoustic singer-songwriter, and says he rarely gets nervous before a gig. Except, that is, when he performs with his daughter, Sam, a saxophonist and singer in the Albemarle jazz band. “I have enormous respect for her talent and for her musicianship,” Kelly says. “She is someone who is completely in command of what she is doing on stage.”
And like Will Evans, Sam Kelly has music in her blood: Her grandfather played saxophone and flute in the Glenn Miller Orchestra, and her mother, Angela, is a musician and music teacher. “I’ve spent my entire life watching my parents perform, and they have both inspired me to pursue and have a passion for music,” Sam says.
In addition to the Kellys and the Allards, the evening of jazz standards and pop and R&B hits will feature performances by Adar, John D’earth, Charles Owens, Stephanie Nakasian, Barbara Edwards, Madeline Holly-Sales, Berto Sales, Danny Barrale, Davina Jackson, Taylor Barnett, Ryan Lee, Lydie Omesiette, Moasia Jackson, and Michael Elswick.
“When we had the idea to do this last year, we thought it would be a great platform for this community to see and hear just how talented these kids are, and the kind of program a once-in-a-lifetime educator like Greg Thomas has built at AHS,” says John Kelly. “Those of us who were there last year, whether on stage or in the audience, learned that it was much more than that. It was an evening of first-class music. Period.”
Doors for Swing Into Spring open at 6pm, and the music starts at 7. Tickets for the March 10 event are $15-25 in advance ($80 for a table for four), and $18-28 at the door. For tickets and more information, go to jeffersontheater.com.
Jeff Schoep, longtime head of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, says he’s still in charge.
AP Images for the Southern Poverty Law Center
The National Socialist Movement, a defendant in a post-Unite the Right lawsuit, made a bizarre shift when its former leader signed over the organization to black civil rights activist James Hart Stern, who then filed a motion admitting liability for the neo-Nazi group.
The complaint, Sines v. Kessler, alleges that the 25 white supremacist defendants who showed up in Charlottesville August 12, 2017, conspired to commit violence. California resident Stern filed a motion for summary judgment in federal court February 28 “based on the truth of all statements made in plaintiffs’ complaint against defendant National Socialist Movement being true.”
Stern says he took over the group February 15 and does not hold the values of the neo-Nazi organization. The motion “rights a wrong that is over 25 years coming,” he says in the court filing.
Jeff Schoep, who has run the organization since 1994 and who is named individually as a defendant in the case, told the Washington Post that Stern “deceived” him when he convinced Schoep to sign over the NSM presidency.
According to Stern, Schoep called his neo-Nazi org an “albatross hanging around his neck” and was worried about the cost of the lawsuit.
It’s not the first time Stern has convinced a white supremacist to give him control: Stern was doing time for wire fraud in Mississippi and former KKK grand wizard Edgar Ray Killen, who was convicted of killing three civil rights workers in 1964, was his cellmate, the Post reports. Killen signed over his life story and power of attorney to Stern, who dissolved that Killen’s Klan in 2016.
And in another lawsuit involving some of the same players, attorney Elmer Woodard filed a motion to dismiss a complaint filed by Jason Kessler and the National Socialists and Traditional Workers Party against former police chief Al Thomas and Virginia State Police Lieutenant Becky Cranniss-Curl for not protecting their First and 14th Amendment rights August 12.
NBC29's Jennifer Von Reuter and Matt Talhelm will soon be working for Gray Television.
The local broadcast landscape underwent a major shift Monday when Gray Television announced it was buying legacy station NBC29 for $12 million—and unloading the stations it started here as the Newsplex 15 years ago.
Gray, the third largest broadcast group in the country, has had its eye on NBC29 “forever,” says Gray VP Kevin Latek.
And because of federal regulations, Gray is selling CBS19, ABC station WVAW, Fox WAHU and MeTV to Lockwood Broadcasting for $25 million, says Lockwood president Dave Hanna.
NBC29 was Charlottesville’s first TV station, founded by Harold Wright, who’s still general manager, Bob Stroh and attorney Lloyd Smith. It went on the air as WVIR in 1973, and was acquired by Florida-based Waterman Broadcasting in 1986.
Its founder, Bernard Waterman, passed away in 2017 and his widow, Edith Waterman, decided to sell the privately owned station. Gray president and CEO Hilton Howell went to UVA, and he told Mrs. Waterman, “Gray’s the right station to buy NBC29,” says Latek.
Gray started the Newsplex in 2004. “When you start a station, you have to be more scrappy,” says Latek. “We own a lot more stations like WVIR than start-up stations. It took 15 years to get up to speed.”
WVIR has the ninth-highest all-day ratings of NBC affiliates in the country, and once the sale closes, Gray will own nine of the top 10 NBC affiliates in the country, according to a Gray release.
Lockwood has acquired other stations Gray had to divest when it bought Raycon Media for $3.6 billion in 2018. “When we had to divest, we thought [Lockwood] would do better for our employees,” says Latek.
“We’ve always coveted Charlottesville as a market,” says Lockwood president Dave Hanna. The owner, James Lockwood, is also a UVA grad. “There are few opportunities you get to come into a market insulated from the economy” with a university, he says. He expects “the political season will be strong,” and Charlottesville is near Lockwood’s Richmond operations headquarters, he says.
“We started conversations with Gray six or seven years ago,” says Hanna. “We always told ‘em if the stations didn’t fit their model, we’d be interested.”
CBS19 will be Lockwood’s ninth station, and Hanna says viewers won’t see any changes, nor will employees see any layoffs. “None,” says Hanna. “It’s not our tendency to trim stations.”
NBC29 uses reporters and camera men to cover stories, while Gray reporters do their own camera work. Latek says there will be no layoffs “at this time.” But “there will be some changes.”
Because of its size, Gray has economies of scale that Waterman couldn’t afford, says Latek, and the station will see better technologies and graphics.
“What they’re doing right now is what we wanted,” he says.
The sale is expected to close in the second or third quarter of this year.
With guitar and harmonica in hand, Douglas Day joined the summer of 2017 KKK counterprotest.Steve Trumbull, C’ville Images
Douglas Turner Day IV, former Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society executive director and noted Piedmont blues-style musician, died January 26 from pancreatic cancer. He was 63.
An avid social media-ist, he wrote on Facebook January 22, “Well, it’s official. Hospice later this week. I’ll be posting a fundraiser for my album.”
Day graduated from UVA, and earned a master’s and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina and University of Pennsylvania, respectively, in folklore and folklife.
He served as historical society director for five-and-a-half years. In 2007, Day launched the Hysterical Society blog to discuss local history in a “non-academic, non-stuffy venue,” he wrote. The blog lasted 12 days before the historical society’s board made him remove it from the organization’s website, with one board member dubbing it “tasteless,” Day reported. Four months later, Day was out.
His former wife, Sally Day, describes him as “passionate” about music and many other areas, for which he had an “encyclopedic mind.” His interest in folklife started with his interest in the blues, she says, and that expanded to the arts.
Art that came from cultures that didn’t necessarily start here, “that’s what excited him,” she says. “He did his field work working within a tradition and not an institution.”
“One of the times he was happiest was when he got the National Folk Festival to come to Chattanooga,” she says, where he was director of the folklore program at Allied Arts of Greater Chattanooga. “He got every community in Chattanooga to come together and everyone got an opportunity to shine.”
Ian Day, his brother and owner of Southern Crescent, recalls them playing guitar and ukulele as kids, and Doug practicing and “getting better and better.” World famous bass player Steve Riggs was their neighbor, says Ian, and he remembers the two playing on the front porch.
He also remembers his brother as a 16-year-old buying a steel guitar. “People said they wish they could play it as well as he did.”
Day spent the past year or so working on a recording project he dubbed The Great Egress. Using a number of different guitars, he recorded more than 30 favorite songs, including “country blues and rags, risqué hollers, and noble praise songs,” according to his obituary.
“That was the final act of his life,” says Sally Day. “It came down to the music.”
Albemarle county exec Jeff Richardson briefs media on the FY 2020 budget, with Lori Allshouse, director of the Office of Management and Budget.
staff photo
Although revenue is up in Albemarle, and county exec Jeff Richardson presented a sunny forecast to the Board of Supervisors February 15, his $457-million fiscal year 2020 budget is based on upping the current property tax rate by 1.5 cents.
He calls the budget, which increases spending 5.7 percent, “an ambitious vision statement that is both grounded in history and aspirational,” anchored by the county’s strategic goals of an “exceptional public education system” and a thriving economy, and “rooted in protecting our environment.”
In addition to the tax increase, the county will see more revenue from property assessments, which increased on average 4 percent. Also up are personal property tax revenues, which Richardson attributes to citizens buying new cars, and sales and food and beverage taxes.
The higher property tax rate was a possibility when voters approved a $35 million bond referendum in 2016 to expand Woodbrook Elementary, but was deferred the past couple of years because of higher revenues, said Richardson.
Now, he wants to dedicate the 1.5-cent tax increase to capital improvements and debt service.
The budget recommends nine priority areas for spending, including economic development, broadband expansion, and parks. Darden Towe will see athletic field improvements, and Hedgerow Park, Buck Island Creek Park, and the Rivanna Reservoir boat launch are slated for funding.
Economic development, such as the county’s wooing of WillowTree, which is going to rehab the aging Woolen Mills factory and bring high-paying tech jobs, is part of the “transformational” investment the county wants to make more of in the 21st century, and Richardson wants to be ready for the next emerging opportunity. “We’ve got to be poised to be able to pivot,” he says.
Sustaining a quality county staff is another budget goal, and if approved, county employees will see a 2.3 percent raise. The proposal adds 15.5 staff positions, including a circuit court clerk, a deputy sheriff, a police officer, and two positions at Parks & Rec.
Revenue sharing—the agreement that the county forks over 10 cents of its property tax rate to the city for stopping annexation in 1982—is always a sore point with county residents. This year that multi-million dollar payment will be down 9.5 percent. The formula used to calculate the payment lags 24 months, and Charlottesville’s 13 percent jump in commercial property tax assessments in 2017 was the “biggest variable,” says Richardson.
County schools get 45 percent of the county’s budget, and Richardson’s budget adds $8.5 million to schools. “An exceptional school system underpins our vision,” he says.
The Board of Supervisors will hold its first budget work session February 21. Read all 300 pages here.
Delegate Rob Bell was on the subcommittee that killed a repeal of automatic driver’s license suspensions. AMY JACKSON SMITH
Things were looking good for opponents of Virginia’s automatic suspension of driver’s licenses for nonpayment of court costs. A federal judge had opined the state law is likely unconstitutional, a Republican state senator carried a bill that repealed the law, and it passed the Senate 36-4.
Then it got to a House subcommittee, where four Republicans, including Delegate Rob Bell, torpedoed the measure 4-3.
Senator Bill Stanley, a criminal defense attorney who represents a chunk of Southside, was not pleased, particularly with Bell and House Majority Leader Todd Gilbert and their grip on the Courts of Justice subcommittee.
He told the Roanoke Times February 11, “They just want to continue to punish people, they just want to continue to punish the poor, they just want to continue to put their will forth as the will of the commonwealth, two people determining the fate of 600,000 Virginians. This is rule by fiat.”
Stanley, who carried the same bill last year, figured it had a better chance this year, particularly after Judge Norman Moon issued a preliminary injunction in Stinnie v. DMV ordering the reinstatement of the plaintiffs’ licenses, which had been automatically suspended when they couldn’t afford to pay the fines and court costs, which thrust them into spiraling debt and, in some cases, jail for driving on suspended licenses.
Legislators who didn’t support the measure last year told Stanley they would vote for it this year, he says. “When Judge Moon made his decision, I thought we’re either going to fix this problem of debtors prison or a federal judge will,” says Stanley. “It looks like the judge will.”
He calls the automatic suspensions “punitive,” and the $145 DMV reinstatement fee a tax. “This has nothing to do with bad driving,” he says.
Bell “respectfully disagrees” with Stanley. For serious offenses like passing a school busor texting while driving, “when someone violates those, I do think it’s appropriate they be punished and they pay some penalty,” he says.
The General Assembly passed a law in 2017 that requires courts to offer payment plans or community service. “As long as you’re on the payment plan, you have your license and you can drive,” says Bell. “We do require you to have some punishment.”
“You miss one payment and your license is suspended,” retorts Stanley. And those plans are used “exclusively for those who are in front of the court. It does nothing for the 600,000 who have already had their licenses suspended.”
Stanley says the automatic license suspensions punish people for being poor, and makes it difficult for them to get to jobs and provide for their families. “It perpetuates poverty,” he says. “I don’t think you can have economic growth without removing the crushing cycle of poverty.”
He adds, “You’d think Republicans would want to get people off dependency.”
Angela Ciolfi, executive director of the Legal Aid Justice Center, represents the plaintiffs in the federal case. She says her team did an analysis of the results of the payment plan legislation and found that the new policy made almost no difference in the number of licenses suspended.
“And the suspension law hasn’t changed, either,” she says. “When someone doesn’t pay or falls off a payment plan, the law says that suspension is automatic, with no notice, no hearing, and no consideration of why the person didn’t pay.”
She’s working on making the case a class action suit, and anticipates theparties will be back in court soon.
Stanley believes that if Judge Moon orders the DMV to reinstate all the licenses suspended for nonpayment of fines, “it will create havoc in the DMV” that could be avoided if legislators fixed the problem.
And he’s still not happy that a subcommittee killed a bill he thought had broad bipartisan support in the General Assembly. “The rule of a few is determining the future of 600,000 people.”
Brian Pinkston, a project manager at UVA, is running for City Council. COURTESY SUBJECT
A UVA facilities project manager jumped into the race for City Council February 6. Brian Pinkston said to dozens at The Haven, “I’m running for City Council because I want our city to recapture this vision of the common good.”
He was introduced by former vice-mayor Meredith Richards, who noted Pinkston’s ability as a project manager to handle a lot of moving parts and to work collaboratively and effectively with others.
“I believe in this City Council election, people are looking for solid, trustworthy, unifying, and principled leadership,” said Richards.
A Georgia native, Pinkston, 47, said his work as an engineer taught him “how to dive into complex problems.” And in his late 20s, as a parent of small children, he started work on a Ph.D. in philosophy at UVA. “I can’t recommend philosophy highly enough,” he said.
He noted that he grew up in the deep South, and, pointing toward the statue of General Robert E. Lee across the street, said, “I recognize the past is still with us.”
More so than the other three Democratic candidates in the race, Pinkston also stressed his faith, and the wisdom found in religion.
He noted that 25 percent of families here don’t earn enough to cover basic needs for survival. It’s “morally unacceptable to tolerate these high levels of poverty,” he said.
Pinkston joins activist Michael Payne, RegionTen board member Sena Magill, and attorney Lloyd Snook in seeking the Democratic nomination for three open seats on City Council. Incumbents Wes Bellamy, Kathy Galvin, and Mike Signer have not said whether they’ll seek reelection.
Among those at The Haven were Magill, former councilor Bob Fenwick, and UVA associate professor Jalane Schmidt, who formed a new political action committee, Progressives for Cville, that has backed Payne and was going to endorse Don Gathers, who had to withdraw from the race because of health concerns.
The deadline to file for the June 11 primary is March 28.
