Author: Lisa Provence

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News

Sines v. Kessler, day two

Defendant Richard Spencer leaves the courtroom after the first day of the trial. Photo: Eze Amos

Each day, we’ll have the latest news from the courtroom in the Sines v. Kessler Unite the Right trial. For coverage from previous days, check the list of links at the bottom of this page.

The difficulty of finding a jury without preconceived notions and biases about the Unite the Right rally here in Charlottesville continued into the second day of the Sines v. Kessler trial. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of nine plaintiffs, alleges a conspiracy among the white supremacist and neo-Nazi rally organizers to commit racially motivated violence when they gathered August 11 and 12, 2017.

It was after 6:30pm Tuesday when Judge Norman Moon decided to call it a day with only 10 jurors seated. He was willing to go with a panel of 11, but the defendants called for 12. Two more groups of jurors will be called in on Wednesday.

Other issues arose throughout the day. Attorney Edward ReBrook, working on behalf of defendants National Socialist Movement, the Nationalist Front, and Jeff Schoep, was in the emergency room, with no report on his condition by the end of the day. And the plaintiffs have a motion to reconsider a juror the defendants struck Monday, claiming the defendants’ challenge was made on the basis of race. 

“I’m hoping we can get a full panel by noon,” said Moon, while acknowledging opening arguments may not be able to proceed Wednesday.

Twenty-six potential jurors showed up at the federal courthouse. Some were dismissed for work concerns if seated for a four-week trial. Others said they had already formed opinions about both the defendants and the plaintiffs.

One woman identified the two parties in the case as “Black Lives Matter and antifa.” She also had a problem with the rights of “radical communists and atheists” to protest. Moon dismissed her.

Another said her son’s after-school teacher was “Mr. Dre,” whom the judge concluded was DeAndre Harris. Harris was severely beaten in the Market Street Garage. She began to cry on the stand, and Moon said he was striking her for cause as well.

“I never liked protests. I felt like everyone should stay home,” said a third woman, who was struck for cause. Asked whether she could set aside her preconceived notions about protesters, she ballparked her odds at 75 percent.

One potential male juror said, “I am biased against the defendants. I believe they’re evil and their organizations are evil. I would find that difficult to set aside.” 

“Crying Nazi” Christopher Cantwell and alt-right leader Richard Spencer, who are both representing themselves, wanted to question the man further after Moon was ready to dismiss him. That led to defense attorney James Kolenich lamenting pro se litigants, and said they could be prejudicial to his clients. Kolenich represents Jason Kessler, Nathan Damigo, and Identity Evropa.

A civics teacher who called the defendants “heinous” said he thought he could be fair. That was too big a leap for Moon, who struck for cause again.

One man called the left “unhinged” and said he believed the plaintiffs “probably” were armed. Another said, “I have already made up my mind. I live in this town. I know people who were assaulted. That poor girl died. I’ve already made up my mind.” Both were excused with cause.

At the end of the day, the court had seated three jurors: two men and a woman. Jury selection will continue into Wednesday.

Previous Sines v. Kessler coverage

Pre-trial: Their day in court: Major lawsuit against Unite the Right neo-Nazis heads to trial

Day one: Trial kicks off with jury selection

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Arts Culture

Queer country

Bo McGuire wants people to see a new kind of South. Photo: VAFF.

If there was one guiding light throughout director Bo McGuire’s near-zero-budget filming of Socks on Fire, his tale of family division over his beloved Nanny’s house, it would be Dolly Parton know-how.

From the country icon, McGuire learned to “work with what you have.” He was at NYU, and had the equipment to make a film, but no funding. Meanwhile, his Aunt Sharon had kicked his drag-queen Uncle John out of his grandmother’s house in his hometown of Hokes Bluff, Alabama.

“This drama was going down in my family, who are characters in their own right,” he says. He also knew the local landscapes, which “look beautiful on film.” He decided to take a camera and couple talented friends down to Alabama to “see what happens.”

Until the day of filming, McGuire hadn’t decided if he was going to appear on screen. “I went to my closet and pulled out the brightest colors I could find—and I made sure I had accessories.” That, he says, is Dolly Parton know-how: making do with what you have.

Home videos interspersed throughout the film are evidence of the close-knit family McGuire grew up in. “It was emotional for me,” he says. “I felt very possessive and responsible for my grandmother’s legacy, while watching my family implode.”

The Dolly Parton influence can be seen throughout Socks on Fire. Photo: VAFF

He stresses that Socks on Fire, which refers to the airing of one’s dirty laundry—or in this case, the torching of it—is his own version of the event. “This is how I feel about it,” says McGuire.

His telling has poetry—and pyrotechnics. Local drag queens reenact parts of the family drama. And family members and friends appear on camera, turning the story into an homage to the important women in McGuire’s life.

“I was trying to capture what was going on and where I come from, somehow, in some mystical way.”

His mother didn’t understand why people would want to watch “our family being our family,” he says. “Then you have my Uncle John, who has been waiting for this moment. He loves the camera.”

Growing up in eastern Alabama, McGuire had no model for going into film. Instead, he studied creative writing and got an MFA in poetry. “I didn’t want to be an academic,” he says—he wanted to make music videos. At NYU, he studied with Spike Lee, who, it turns out, is a big Alabama football fan.

“He was very encouraging,” says McGuire. “I think he wants to see young filmmakers be rebellious.”

Making a movie in his hometown offered some production benefits in housing, locations, and feeding his crew. “People in Gadsden, Alabama, were excited about shooting a film, and they’re willing to let you do things for free,” notes McGuire.

Ultimately, he wants people to see a new kind of South. “Narratives of the South are often spun by people not from here,” he says. “The South gets scapegoated for a lot of the country’s problems.” 

McGuire says there’s a lot to love. “The largest percentage of LGBTQIA people exist in the Southeast. I just wanted to hold a mirror up to the South. You are a place that believes in original storytelling, where we’re queer, weird, out there, and different.”

A story about the disputed settling of an estate could have been bitter, but McGuire says he took care not to bully his aunt, who was his favorite growing up. “I would like people to see the love,” he says.

The Parton influence factored again when McGuire cooked breakfast for his crew and played generous host so that people wanted to collaborate and were excited about what he was doing.

“Being nice is Dolly Parton know-how,” explains McGuire. “You can get away with a lot more if you’re kind and generous.”

Socks on Fire

October 28

Violet Crown Cinema

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News

Their day in court

Jason Kessler (center) and two dozen other Unite the Right organizers and participants go on trial October 25 in Sines v. Kessler. Photo: Eze Amos

Four years after white supremacists invaded Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally, the biggest civil trial in federal court here starts October 25, and could last up to four weeks. 

The case is Sines v. Kessler. Nonprofit Integrity First for America filed the complaint in October 2017 on behalf of victims of that violent August weekend. IFA’s strategy is simple: Make white nationalists and neo-Nazis pay for what the suit claims was a conspiracy to engage in racially motivated violence.

“It’s an incredibly ambitious case to bring justice,” says Heidi Beirich, co-founder of Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “A big chunk of organized white supremacy is being sued. I can’t think of another anti-hate case of this magnitude.”

The number of people involved in the case is huge: nine plaintiffs—and their pro bono attorneys, two dozen defendants and their attorneys, jurors, witnesses, court staff, and security. Citing COVID safety, Judge Norman Moon has ordered that they’re the only people allowed in the courtroom during the trial. 

Citizens who want to follow the trial are relegated to a live audio feed. Reporters who secure credentials will watch a live video feed from another room in the courthouse.

Plaintiff Elizabeth Sines was a second-year UVA law student who survived both the August 11 tiki-torch march through UVA Grounds and neo-Nazi James Fields plowing his Dodge Charger through a crowd of celebratory counterprotesters August 12, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring dozens more. 

Marcus Martin and fiancée Marissa Blair were on Fourth Street with their friend Heyer. Martin was captured suspended in mid-air in Ryan Kelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo. So was Thomas Baker, a conservation biologist who still cannot stand for long periods of time without pain. Fields’ car also struck UVA student Natalie Romero and crisis counselor Chelsea Alvarado, and, like plaintiffs April Muniz and the Reverend Seth Wispelwey, they still suffer from extreme emotional distress, according to the complaint.

The trial originally was scheduled for 2019, but has been delayed because some defendants have flouted orders to produce evidence. A judge has granted default judgments against seven defendants, including Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi founder of The Daily Stormer. An arrest warrant has been issued for his colleague Robert “Azzmador” Ray, who has blown off every court order.

Also earning default judgments are the Nationalist Front; the East Coast Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; the Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights, the military arm of the Proud Boys; FOAK leader Augustus Invictus; and the Loyal White Knights of the KKK, who protested in Charlottesville in July 2017.

The trial hasn’t started yet, but for the defendants, things are already falling apart. 

The court has sanctioned Traditionalist Worker Party founder Matthew Heimbach, Unite the Right’s operations manager Elliott Kline, aka Eli Mosley, and neo-Nazi group Vanguard America and ordered them to pay the plaintiffs’ attorneys $41,000. 

Wrote Judge Joel Hoppe, “For now it is enough to say that each Defendant disobeyed at least four separate orders to provide or permit discovery of materials within his control while the litigation slowed and everyone else’s costs piled up.” 

Kline also was found in contempt and jailed last year. The plaintiffs won an adverse influence ruling against him, which means the jury will be instructed to assume that allegations the defendants “formed a conspiracy to commit the racial violence that led to the Plaintiffs’ varied injuries” are plausible, according to a court document.

The same ruling has been made against Azzmador Ray and the National Socialist Movement, and the plaintiffs are asking for adverse inference against Heimbach.

Some lawyers representing defendants have asked to be released because of nonpayment or failure to produce evidence, or have cited their client’s “repugnant” behavior in the case of Chris Cantwell, who threatened the plaintiffs’ lead attorney Roberta Kaplan.

Cincinnati attorney James Kolenich is listed on court documents representing a dozen defendants, but now his only clients are rally organizer Jason Kessler, Identity Evropa, and its founder, Nathan Damigo. Kolenich declined to comment about the case.

“Crying Nazi” Cantwell, who was ordered out of Virginia after pepper spraying counterprotesters at the Thomas Jefferson statue August 11 and currently is in prison for threating to rape the wife of a fellow white nationalist, will represent himself.

So will UVA grad Richard Spencer, who headed the National Policy Institute and was a poster boy for the alt-right. He told the court in June 2020 that the lawsuit was “financially crippling” and he can’t raise money because he’s been booted off so many platforms, according to IFA.

The suit is already having an impact, says Beirich. “Some of the groups sued are falling apart.” Spencer’s National Policy Institute is “basically defunct at this point,” she says. “Other groups like the League of the South have descended into infighting and ineffectiveness in the face of the lawsuit.”

Even Beirich, an expert in extremism for years with Southern Poverty Law Center, was shocked at the number of white supremacists who showed up in Charlottesville in August 2017. The suit is “bringing judgment for the victims of the biggest white supremacy rally in recent years,” she says.

“Sines v. Kessler basically said, ‘No, we are not going to let this continue,’” she says. “They’re holding so many different individuals and organizations, who orchestrated that horrible weekend in 2017 financially liable for their activities that caused so much great harm.”

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Culture

Whose Monticello?

“It’s great and a little crazy,” says Charlottesville writer Jocelyn Nicole Johnson about the acclaim she’s getting for her first book. Photo: Eze Amos.

Charlottesville writer Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s first book is getting a lot of buzz. She’s earned accolades from acclaimed authors, like Colson Whitehead, who called My Monticello “a badass debut by any measure—nimble, knowing, and electrifying.” It’s a Kirkus Prize finalist, and a Netflix adaptation is already in the works.

“It’s great and a little crazy,” says Johnson, whose book of five short stories and a novella comes out October 5. 

Although Johnson taught art in local schools during the 20 years she’s lived in Charlottesville and says teaching “is a love of mine,” this is not her first time putting pen to paper. “I’ve been writing for a really long time,” she says. “I’ve been down this road before” trying to get a work published.

Locals will recognize many details in her stories. In the title novella, “My Monticello,” residents of First Street, which is around the corner from where Johnson lives, flee violent white supremacists by riding a JAUNT bus to Monticello. “That story absolutely was influenced by August 12,” says Johnson.

The JAUNT bus is driven by Da’Naisha Love, a UVA student who is a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. 

“It’s a time of unraveling,” says Johnson. “The grid has gone down. There’s unspecified environmental trouble.” 

And armed white men cruise through the city in trucks, carrying burning torches and shouting “ours!” The scene recalls the summer of 2017, when the Ku Klux Klan came to Charlottesville and the deadly Unite the Right rally followed. “It was disturbing and really troubling,” says Johnson. 

Locals will recognize many details in Johnson’s stories, including Monticello, where First Street residents flee to escape violent white supremacists. Photo: Jack Looney.

After that summer, the city and the nation began discussing the history of race and racism in Charlottesville. During the 20th century, the city erected statues of Confederate generals, closed schools to avoid integration, and razed Vinegar Hill in the name of urban renewal. The period after the summer of 2017 “was a time of reflection for me,” Johnson says. 

The story “Control Negro,” published in The Best American Short Stories of 2018, contains an incident in which a black UVA student is handcuffed and bloodied on the Corner. It was “definitely a reaction” to Martese Johnson’s arrest by ABC officers in 2015, says Johnson. She calls it a “Frankenstein story about who gets to claim America, who gets to be safe here.” Seeing a UVA student “bullied” by ABC agents made her think, “That could be my kid or someone I knew.”

Johnson sees connections between white supremacy and the environment. “I believe the identities we bring and how we treat others is absolutely connected to how we treat the environment,” she says. “I’m worried about all of it, honestly.”

Her stories “think broadly about the idea of home,” she says. “Who gets to claim America economically, who gets to afford to be safe, and what’s going to be left to claim if we don’t take care of the Earth.”

One of those stories, “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse,” is written in the form of a list: “Check your credit score with that app on your phone when you bolt awake in the middle of the night. Scroll to see how swiftly the Amazon burns. Scroll to see how many hundreds of species have been lost or consumed within the last twenty-four hours.”

“I have crazy to-do lists,” chuckles Johnson. “I have to make side lists and then I put post-its on that.” It seemed natural to her to make a list when buying a house. “And your anxieties creep into that list and then your desires creep in.” 

UVA English professor Lisa Woolfork is teaching My Monticello in a graduate class on contemporary African American literature this semester. “Jocelyn’s writing is dynamic yet precise, affirming as much as it disrupts,” says Woolfork. “I especially appreciate the local context that she shapes with such a deep imaginative complexity. And even as her work has a strong local connection, there are ways that her stories illustrate meaningful, if difficult, truths that resonate far beyond Charlottesville.”

Esquire named My Monticello to its best books of fall 2021, and calls Johnson “an electric new literary voice” and “an emerging master of the short story form.” (Esquire also adds another Charlottes-villian’s work to that list: Lincoln Michel’s The Body Scout.) My Monticello made Time magazine and Chicago Tribune lists, and it’s still early in the best-books season.

The day before Johnson spoke with C-VILLE, she was nominated for the Kirkus Prize, where she finds herself in competition with Colson Whitehead’s new book, Harlem Shuffle. And LeVar Burton and Aja Naomi King will narrate the audiobook of My Monticello.

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s My Monticello has been named one of Esquire magazine’s best books of fall 2021.

“Let’s just say it’s exceeding my expectations,” says Johnson.

Her current agent—her third—”really loves short stories,” which Johnson says is rare in the publishing world, where the novel “is considered the gold standard.” Johnson decided to make her collection of stories about Virginia, and “got a ton of interest.” She ended up with a two-book deal with Henry Holt/Macmillan, which “made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

Says Johnson, “It’s been this really long, long journey. I turned 50 this year. I think it’s kind of funny I’m going to be this debutante.”

But she seems to have known all along she’d be a writer. A photo of her as a child on a card is captioned, “This is the author. She was 7 when she made this.”

Laughs Johnson, “I especially like that I wrote it in the third person.”

Her book tour will be mostly virtual, with local events at The Haven and Monticello, the latter of which of course figures prominently in the novella. Perhaps Monticello will carry her book—disruptive, challenging, and unusual as it is—in its gift shop?

Says Johnson, “That’s my goal.”

New Dominion Bookshop and WriterHouse will host an in-person launch of My Monticello October 8 at 7pm at The Haven.

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Culture

Death wishes

Longtime NPR host Diane Rehm will be in Charlottesville this week for a screening of her documentary Whem My Time Comes. Publicity image.

Longtime NPR host Diane Rehm is arranging flowers as she talks about death.

Rehm became involved in the right-to-die movement after watching her husband of 54 years die from Parkinson’s disease. John Rehm could no longer stand, walk, or eat by himself, but his Maryland doctor said there was nothing he could do to hasten the inevitable. John’s only option: to refuse food and water until he died 10 days later.

“I sat by my husband’s side as he slowly died,” Rehm testified before the Maryland General Assembly in 2019. “Watching John in those last 10 days of his life made me angry. Why did our laws infringe upon an individual’s decision to peacefully die when dying was inevitable within a few months?”

In 2016, director Joe Fab contacted Rehm. “He says he was stalking me,” laughs Rehm. “He waited for me to announce I was giving up my daily show.” Fab asked if she’d be interested in doing a documentary on the right to die.

Her response: “You bet I would.”

The documentary, When My Time Comes, will be screened at the Paramount on July 15, with Rehm on hand for a conversation afterwards.

Despite Rehm’s strong feelings that end-of-life decisions should be made by the person dying, she approached the documentary as a journalist. “As a talk show host for 37 years, my role was always to hear all sides of an issue, to question, to listen, to spur the discussion on, but never to put anyone down because of their ideas,” she says. 

“I went into it feeling as if I’d like to learn why there are such strong feelings on both sides,” she says. “I really wanted to understand better. I heard sincere religious, ethical, compassionate views as to why people felt so strongly against it and also why they were so much in favor.”

She is adamant that medical aid in dying is not suicide.

“The whole idea of suicide is that you commit it because you no longer want to live,” says Rehm. “People in favor of medical aid in dying—they all want to live.”

She talked to a woman in the film who was dying from breast cancer. “She said, ‘If I had my druthers, I’d live to be 90, but I know I’m dying. I don’t want my children to see me suffer.’” The woman didn’t want her 13-year-old son to experience what she did watching her own mother die. “She said, ‘That’s not suicide. I want to live,’” recounts Rehm.

Another misperception she encountered was the idea that “somehow people are being forced into this, when in fact it takes a lot to accomplish this.”

Medical aid in dying is now legal in 10 states—Virginia is not one of them—and the District of Columbia. The laws require the person seeking aid to make two requests and to be approved by two doctors, says Rehm. Some states require a psychiatric exam to be certain the person is of sound mind.

“This is no spur-of-the-moment decision,” she says. “This has to be decided within six months of death. In some cases, the patient, who is very ill, who has had all kinds of treatment—all kinds of chemotherapy, radiation therapy—has tried to stay alive. They don’t want to die. They have suffered physically and emotionally. They are really, really ready to go. That’s the difference between suicide and medical aid in dying.”

Rehm, 84, is leaving nothing to chance with how she’d like her own death to play out. In the documentary, she has her grandson film her. “I tell him exactly what I want,” she says. “I’ve written my plans. I’ve spoken with my doctor.” While doing the film, she changed doctors because her former physician didn’t want to participate in medical aid in dying. 

Most states require the person to self-administer medication, which is a problem for people with neurodegenerative diseases like ALS. “In California, the largest number of people who go through medical aid in dying are those with ALS,” says Rehm.

Alzheimer’s disease, the fifth leading cause of death among Americans 65 and older, is another tricky situation. Rehm says she’s fortunate to have no history of that in her family, but she’s already talked to her children. “If I experience early signs of Alzheimer’s, I want to be able to go to Switzerland, which has [nonprofit right-to-die org] Dignitas, which is available for those with Alzheimer’s. I’d make sure I’d go while in the early stages so I could state my own wishes so everyone could know.”

Maryland has not passed medical aid in dying. “I am hopeful,” she says. “The particular time I testified we lost by only one vote. I believe more and more legislators are coming around and hearing the pleas of those who believe medical aid in dying is a right that should be afforded to each of us.

Or as one legislator says in the film: “Each of us is just one bad death away from supporting these laws.”

Categories
Culture

Microaggression rebrand

Tiffany Jana will discuss her work at this year's book festival.

Tiffany Jana doesn’t like the term microaggression. “The very nature of the word puts people on the defensive,” says the diversity and inclusiveness expert. “It definitely is not a place from which people grow very readily.”

Jana and co-author Michael Baran both took umbrage with the term and set out on a mission to rebrand it in their 2020 book, Subtle Acts of Exclusion: How to Understand, Identify, and Stop Microaggressions.

Subtle acts of exclusion is a much more value neutral descriptor of the phenomenon, says Jana, who assures that everyone does it, just as everyone has unconscious bias, the subject of an earlier book by the author.

“Every day, every single solitary day I slip up and commit an SAE in what I call a piece of diversity doo-doo—and I’m considered an expert in the subject matter,” says Jana.

Their most frequent offense when talking to a group? The use of “hey guys,” says Jana. “There are gender nonconforming people, nonbinary people, women in this group. I apologize to the people I might have offended. By modeling the behavior and process, I’m engaging with people in a more intentional way.”

If you think you may have committed a subtle act of exclusion, Jana advises heeding that funny feeling—if you get one—and to “check in with the person you think you offended” or check in with an observer. “When you call each other in, it’s a sacred gift,” Jana says.

Subtle Acts of Exclusion provides strategies for handling the slights, whether one is the initiator, subject, or observer. And Jana firmly believes in the “essential goodness of all people” and that most are well-intentioned.

Jana’s motto: “Kindness. It’s great for yourself and it’s great for others.”

The author also believes a new, more inclusive world order is possible, “because the reality of exclusion and exclusiveness was created with great intention. It was no accident whatsoever in any aspect of society and economically.”

Jana says, “It will take an equal amount of intention by inclusive-minded, good-hearted people who recognize the world is not equitable right now and we have an opportunity to course correct.”

The anti-racist uprisings during the summer of 2020 led to this point, says Jana. “We are now entering a beautiful, transparent, transformative, and empathetic phase of our development as a society, and that gives me great hope.”

“This moment comes to you courtesy of unchecked institutional racism that came to a crescendo and is allowing us to have, for the first time in my lifetime, these honest conversations.”

Tiffany Jana will discuss Subtle Acts of Exclusion: How to Understand, Identify, and Stop Microaggressions with Kaki Dimock on March 15 at noon.

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News

Voter frustration

Albemarle County is divided into four House of Delegates districts, three of which stretch far past county lines. Courtesy Albemarle County.

A dedicated few have long tried to slay the gerrymander beast that allows politicians to pick their voters. For nearly 20 years, state Senator Creigh Deeds proposed redistricting reform bills that typically died in subcommittee. In 2013, attorney Leigh Middleditch founded advocacy nonprofit OneVirginia2021 to reform redistricting, an initiative that was seen as a long shot at the time.

But last year, 66 percent of voters approved a constitutional amendment to have district lines drawn by a bipartisan commission. The commission is ready to roll once the 2020 census numbers come in.

There’s the rub. 

All hopes of conducting 2021 Virginia House of Delegates elections in newly drawn districts crashed when the Census Bureau announced that redistricting data will not be available until September 30, way too late for Virginia to amend districts before the November elections for state offices.

“It was very disappointing that it was at the mercy of census data,” says Middleditch.

That disappointment is particularly keen in Albemarle County, which is split into four House of Delegates districts and has two state senators. Only one of the six representatives lives in Albemarle. 

Sixty-six percent of Albemarle County voted for Joe Biden in 2020, but at the state level the district is represented by four Republicans and two Democrats. Only one of those districts is even remotely competitive—in 2019, five of the six Albemarle pols won their races by at least 19 percent. 

“In my ideal world, Albemarle wouldn’t be four [House] districts,” says Albemarle County Democratic Party chair Stephen Davis. “It would be two,” made up of Charlottesville and Albemarle County in two compact districts and communities of interest, key criteria in fair redistricting.

Although Albemarle County has turned blue over the past decade, currently Crozet, Ivy and western Albemarle are sliced off into the 25th District, which includes parts of Augusta and Rockingham counties, represented by Republican Delegate Chris Runion. 

Runion says in an email that western Albemarle shares with his Shenandoah Valley constituents the same “transitional position” of being neither high-density urban nor low-density rural, although the district has components of both. Of Crozet, he says, “Overall, I believe we are always more alike than dissimilar.”

The 59th District puts southern Albemarle into a district that stretches south of Lynchburg and is represented by Republican Rustburg resident Matt Fariss.

“Certainly an improvement would be three districts, not four,” says Davis. “The 59th District goes to Campbell County. It dilutes the Democratic effort in three [Albemarle] precincts.”

And the 59th is not a community of interest, he says. “We don’t even get the same television or radio stations as Lynchburg.”

Ben Moses is a North Garden Dem who plans to challenge Fariss in November in a district drawn to favor Republicans. “When I decided to run,” says Moses, “my presumption was I would be running on the existing lines.”

Had the lines in the 59th been redrawn, he could have faced a different—and possibly more favorable—electorate. “My excitement in running is not dampened by redistricting,” he says. “There’s so much else we can focus on.” He notes that all 45 Republican-held House of Delegates seats will be challenged by progressive candidates who call themselves the “broadband caucus,” a nod to what many rural communities lack.

Virginia’s constitution requires that lines be redrawn every 10 years based on the latest census. Because that’s not going to happen this year, state elections will use the current lines—and there’s a chance that the state will have elections three years in a row.

Davis predicts that once people know what the new districts are, there could be a court challenge that would result in an election in 2022, and then back to the regular state election schedule in 2023.

Delegate Sally Hudson, a Democrat who represents Charlottesville and part of Albemarle in the 57th District, says the delay is “one of many unfortunate consequences of COVID and the Trump administration. It’s frustrating to all of us who want fair districts.”

The issue probably matters more to people in other districts, she says. “I have one of the few coherent districts on the map.”

Liz White, executive director of OneVirginia2021, points out the delay in redistricting offers opportunities for voter education, resources, and tools, “especially for those historically marginalized by redistricting.”

When drawing new lines, the Virginia Redistricting Commission is required to try to keep “communities of interest” together in the same districts.

“It’s easier to define what a community of interest isn’t,” says White. It could include language, economic interests, or a faith community, she says. It could be, “We all go to this one hospital or we all go to this rec center.”

Communities of interest are not based on “political affiliation or relationship with a political party, elected official, or candidate for office,” according to state code. Citizens can tell the commission what their community is through public hearings or online.

Despite the census setback and the uncharted territory for state elections, she says, “So far we’ve been pleased with the makeup of the commission,” which has eight legislators and eight citizens, equally split between Democrats and Republicans.

Deeds, a Bath County Dem whose own gerrymandered Senate district includes Charlottesville, is not surprised with the latest setback. “The way the last administration handled the census, I wasn’t shocked,” he says.

He says information is already available on where population changes have occurred. “We know which areas have grown and which have lost people. We have a new game plan and we don’t know where it’s going to go.”

For North Garden resident Diana Mead, it’s been a long 10 years since the lines of the 59th District were last drawn. “My outrage over the years has settled into real disappointment with Virginia politicians,” she says. “I am just tired of feeling disenfranchised.”

Categories
Arts Culture

Souza’s shade: Documentary recalls a world not so long ago

Pete Souza will discuss The Way I See It, a documentary showing on MSNBC on October 16, about his eight years photographing Barack Obama. A conversation with Souza and former deputy secretary of labor Chris will be available through virginiafilmfestival.org for a limited time beginning October 21. Image courtesy of VAFF.

Four years ago, former White House chief photographer Pete Souza wouldn’t have imagined he’d be the subject of a documentary and an Instagram superstar.

“We hadn’t elected Donald Trump four years ago,” reminds Souza in a phone interview.

Three years and 10 months ago, that had changed. Souza began posting photos of former President Barack Obama on Instagram with wry commentary that sharply contrasted with the actions of the White House’s current occupant. “I didn’t think Trump was competent,” he says. “He was a reality TV star.”

Since leaving the White House in 2017, Souza has published two books and accrued over 2.3 million followers on Instagram. The photos in Obama: An Intimate Portrait and Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents, inspired the documentary The Way I See It, which airs at 10pm October 16, on MSNBC.

He admits he didn’t know what throwing shade was when he posted a photo of the red curtains in the Obama Oval Office after Donald Trump opted for the glitzier gold draperies, and Souza said he liked the old ones better.

“I didn’t think I would get the attention I have,” he says.

The film also traces Souza’s evolution from photojournalist to White House historian—he worked for President Ronald Reagan too—to outspoken critic.

“I had gone back and forth twice,” says Souza, working for the Chicago Tribune between his stints in the White House. “It’s not like you walk into the White House and become a different type of photographer. The work itself is the same.”

For the newspaper, the concern is getting a photograph for the next day. In the White House, it’s “are you doing a good job documenting this president for history?” he explains.

“When I left the White House, I was not working as a photojournalist,” says Souza. “It’s like John Lewis says, ‘If you see something wrong, say something.’”

Says Souza, “I have a unique perspective on the office of the president,” and both Reagan and Obama respected the dignity of the office. “Maybe there was a little hesitation about speaking out, but not much. I was offended by [Trump’s] trashing of the office.”

Souza has been to Charlottesville several times, including when Obama showed up in 2010 to try to bolster Tom Perriello’s unsuccessful reelection to Congress.

He says he doesn’t see Charlottesville as a symbol for white supremacy after 2017’s Unite the Right rally, but rather as a place where “an incident of white supremacy” occurred, much as Minneapolis and Kenosha and Louisville have become known for incidents of racial injustice.

He did have an incident here at UVA on a book tour a couple of years ago, “the only time I’d done a presentation where something questionable happened,” he says. “Just as I began to speak, fire alarms went off. Someone had called in a bomb threat.” While nothing was found, it did leave him wondering whether that was coincidental or “because of me.”

Filmmakers Jayme Lemons, Evan Hayes, and Laura Dern were already Souza fans when they jumped on Lemons’ idea to do a documentary on him, and tapped director Dawn Porter, who was in post-production on John Lewis: Good Trouble. Porter realized the urgency to get the film out before the 2020 election after she saw a Souza appearance and his photographs moved her to tears.

“I didn’t realize until I saw them as a collection, the magnitude of what we’d lost in the 2016 election,” she says

Using Souza’s vast archive of 2 million photos from his eight years with Obama, the film crafts a montage of Obama’s leadership with intimate, candid shots. Authenticity was a clear goal for Souza, and his photographs make you realize that there are no such images coming from the current administration.

While Trump is rarely mentioned by name, in the film Souza demonstrates the difference in styles of the two presidents, comparing the iconic, nail-biting war room shot of senior Obama administration officials watching the takedown of Osama bin Laden in 2011, and a posed Trump photo with uniformed generals staring at the camera after Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in 2019.

Following Trump’s Bible-clutching photo op in front of St. John’s Church in June, Souza parried on Instagram with a shot of Obama inside the church and the comment, “No tear gas was needed to get there.”

Souza says initially he turned down the job with Reagan because he wasn’t that interested in politics. And while he didn’t agree with Reagan’s policies, Souza became a fan of Reagan’s genuineness and his empathetic understanding about the power of his decisions.

With his extraordinary access to both presidents, was he ever asked to leave the room?

“I think I had a good, intuitive sense of when to leave the room,” Souza says. He recalls one time when Obama asked him to leave when the president “was going to admonish someone.”

The Way I See It reminds viewers of what it’s like to have a president with a sense of humor. Souza recounts asking Obama if he could ride with him in the limousine to his second inauguration, and the president quipped that he had planned to make out with Michelle.

Souza worries that young people won’t realize that what is happening in the White House now isn’t normal, and he says in the film his decision to troll Trump isn’t partisan.

“It’s all about the dignity of the office,” he says. “This is somebody that I think is not a good person.”

Categories
Arts Culture

The politics of pie: Cuisine from the American Revolution

An 1831 Staffordshire plate decorated with a Thomas Cole landscape made Nancy Siegel wonder what had been served on it, and after poring over 18th- and 19th-century cookbooks, letters, and recipes, she discovered that female “culinary activists” used cuisine as a way to combat injustice.

Some study history through hieroglyphics or bone fragments. Nancy Siegel looks at what we ate, and the political statements food made about the fledgling American nation during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Every school child learns about the Boston Tea Party and the dumping of highly taxed tea into Boston Harbor. Not so well known is that the American revolutionaries’ response was to concoct blends from fruits and herbs and dub them Liberty Tea.

“I tell the history of the American Revolution by what we ate or what we celebrated in our dining rooms or living rooms,” says Siegel, a professor of art history and culinary history at Towson University.

Culinary history is a relatively new field that has “really expanded and exploded” in the past 10 years, thanks to the farm-to-table movement and the desire to grow heirloom varieties, says Siegel. “Academia is finally catching up.”

She became aware of how food could become politicized when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. After France refused to join the American military action, some Americans refused to order French fries, calling them freedom fries instead. “I thought this was the craziest thing I’d ever heard,” says Siegel.

But it also made her wonder what had been served in the English Staffordshire dishes, decorated with the landscapes of painter Thomas Cole, which she’d been researching for a book on Cole’s Hudson River School art movement. Siegel became convinced there were female landscape painters active in the movement, and as she pored over diaries and archival repositories, she found 18th- and 19th-century cookbooks, letters, and “hundreds and hundreds of recipes,” she says.

She calls the women of that era “culinary activists” who used cuisine as a way to “combat injustice and taxation” from England, first by boycotting and then by celebrating.

By calling a plain cake an Independence Cake, “it’s imbued with larger meaning during this tumultuous period,” she says.

“These were women who were not out to make history—but they cooked history,” says Siegel.

The recipe for Election Cake—a yeast-risen fruit cake—already existed in Connecticut before the Revolutionary War. But as Election Cake, it celebrated the new democracy, she says. So did Washington Pie, Federal Cake, and Democratic Tea Cakes.

Food has been political in other eras, notes Siegel. Abolitionists in the 19th century refused to use sugar cane, which was produced from enslaved labor, and sweetened with sugar beets instead.

Reading political treatises can be cumbersome, says Siegel, but “everyone eats. It’s the great equalizer. It demonstrates the support that comes out of the kitchen.”

Siegel will discuss A Taste of Democracy: Federal Cake, Liberty Tea, and Culinary Activism in the Early Republic at 7pm on October 3 at Stratford Hall in an event sponsored by Virginia Humanities. Register online at virginiahumanities.org.

Categories
News

Upcoming vacancy: Visitors bureau to depart Transit Center, citing expense and declining tourism

The Charlottesville Albemarle Convention & Visitors Bureau plans to leave the Transit Center, where it’s been housed since the center opened in 2007. Staff photo.

Since the stylish, glass-walled Transit Center first opened in spring 2007 on the east end of the Downtown Mall, the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention & Visitors Bureau has been a tenant in what was the city’s first LEED-certified building. That long-term relationship will soon end.

Even before the pandemic turned the mall into a ghost town, the number of visitors finding the tourist center was down, says Albemarle Supervisor Ann Mallek, who serves on the CACVB board. “The decision was based on the very few interactions held in a building with very expensive rent,” she says.

The bureau announced plans for two mobile visitor centers—likely Ford Sprinter vans—to replace brick-and-mortar locations downtown and in the former Crozet train depot and “to reach and interact with even more visitors, by meeting them where they are located,” according to a release.

Mallek says at events such as the Heritage Harvest Festival, “I was handing out hundreds of brochures. I’m very much in favor of mobile vans.”

Councilor Heather Hill, the city’s representative on the CACVB board, says a pilot test moving the visitors bureau to the Old Metropolitan Center in the center of the mall earlier in the year revealed a “resistance to the public going into buildings.” She favors a hybrid model that offers more flexibility and reduces costs.

“Everyone is rethinking how much office space they need,” she says, “and not expending dollars on space we don’t need.”

The visitors bureau is funded from 30 percent of the city and county’s lodging tax, and pays the city $45,000 a year to rent the Transit Center space, says CACVB Executive Director Courtney Cacatian.

Charlottesville-area lodging occupancy rates through July of this year were down 42.6 percent compared to 2019, says Cacatian, citing an industry report. The average daily rate slid 22.7 percent, and the key industry metric, revenue per available room, is down 55.6 percent for that same period.

“Two years from now, we’ll really be feeling the budget impact from the coronavirus,” she says. “We’re still crunching the numbers to see what we’ll have left over for office space.”  

The bureau has a month-to-month lease, and will depart the Transit Center at the end of October, says Cacatian. 

When it was first proposed in the early 2000s, many considered the Transit Center a boondoggle to take advantage of $6.5 million in soon-to-expire federal funds for intermodal transportation. When a location on West Main near the Amtrak station—to connect trains or Greyhound coaches to city buses—was not forthcoming, the city decided to proceed on land it owned on the mall.

At the same time, plans were in the works to revitalize the east end of the mall with a music pavilion that would be leased long-term to and run by music/real estate magnate Coran Capshaw. The city now bills the Transit Center’s intermodality as connecting city buses, bikes, and pedestrians. 

Philadelphia firm WRT won awards for the design of the 11,200-square-foot space. Besides housing a Catch the CAT hub downstairs, original plans called for a retail space, but other than a brief run for Alex George’s Just Curry in 2008, that hasn’t materialized either.

The visitor center’s departure means the city will soon have more vacant space on the mall. “Obviously it’s a loss for that rental revenue,” says Hill.

As for future occupants of the space, city spokesman Brian Wheeler says, “At this point, they haven’t given notice. We aren’t making plans in absence of notice.”

“It’s kind of an awkward space, with a lot of volume but little square footage,” says Kirby Hutto, who runs the neighboring Sprint Pavilion. Whoever next occupies the space will have to work closely with the Pavilion once concerts begin again, because the Pavilion restricts access when there’s a show, he says.

Hutto thinks it’s important to have a visitors center on the Downtown Mall. “I’d like to see a place where people can ask questions and get directions,” he says. “I think it’s kind of sad there won’t be a visitors center.”

But Cacatian says the bureau will still have some sort of presence on the Downtown Mall. She notes that Arlington’s visitors bureau went mobile in 2010 and hasn’t reopened its brick-and-mortar  center. “It’s working great. They’re able to serve 40 percent more people.”

She adds, “The good thing is we have time to figure it out.”