Tag: Brian Lambert

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On guard: Opposing camps face off as sun sets on Confederate statues

Charlottesville's Confederate statues continue to attract nighttime activity.

Confederate monuments have toppled across the South since the slaying of George Floyd at the hands of police. In Charlottesville, statues of generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson still stand, and continue to attract nighttime patrols from both statue defenders and opponents.

In the wee hours of June 28—three days before a law went into effect allowing Virginia localities to determine the destinies of their own Confederate war memorials—Lee was once again splattered with red paint, and later that night, police responded to a call about a man with a gun at Court Square Park, where Jackson resides.

Statue defenders have been on alert for weeks: In Richmond, after the United Daughters of the Confederacy headquarters was set on fire May 31 and several Confederate monuments were graffitied, local statue supporters organized sign-up sheets to defend the generals. 

Brian Lambert, a member of the Gordonsville Grays chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, called for monument guards on social media. “Here in Charlottesville, we were able to stop an assault on our local Memorials by Antifa, with the cooperation of CPD,” he wrote.

It’s the alleged cooperation with the Charlottesville Police Department that troubles anti-racist activists.

Activist Molly Conger tweeted on June 19 that when she went to check on the “confederate vigilantes,” one of them called 911, and seven police cars responded. 

UVA prof Jalane Schmidt regularly leads tours of Confederate markers in the Court Square area. After a June 11 tour, “I was stopped by police because of suspicious behavior,” says Schmidt. “They called in about 30 officers,” and had paddy wagons and squad cars circling the parks while officers questioned tour participants. She says she pointed to the armed statue defenders as those who were suspicious.

A Facebook page called Save the Robert E. Lee Statue, which lists a link to the Monument Fund (one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the city for its vote to remove the Confederate generals), thanks the volunteer statue guards. 

“Nightly, there are cars and people on foot casing the monuments, hoping for an opportunity to strike,” says the post. “Social media trolls have threatened to ‘dox’ the monument guards; and those standing guard have been verbally assaulted and had the Police called on them with fabricated stories of threats of harm.” 

Attorney Buddy Weber, a plaintiff in the lawsuit and the group’s spokesperson, did not respond to phone calls from C-VILLE.

Lambert declined to comment when contacted by C-VILLE, and we didn’t get to ask whether he was the man with a gun reported to police June 28.

Schmidt says her neighbors are “so unnerved seeing these guys with guns that they stopped walking in the parks.” 

Robert Klonoski lives across from Market Street Park and has observed the statue protectors almost every night. “I don’t like having people hanging around my neighborhood with guns,” he says.

Charlottesville Police spokesperson Tyler Hawn declined to comment on how many calls police have gotten about gun-toting statue defenders or about would-be vandals, and refused to provide any information on the June 28 call about an armed man at Court Square Park.

“The vandalism incidents in front of the police department and at Market Street Park are under investigation,” Hawn says. 

According to the Emergency Communications Center, 30 calls were made in June about suspicious behavior in the two parks.

By June 29, Lee had been scrubbed clean, although a Black Lives Matter T-shirt hung from Traveller’s bridle. Jock Yellott, a plaintiff in the statue lawsuit against the city, sat on a bench in Market Street Park reading Aristotle in the early evening.

A stream of out-of-towners came through to inspect the statues. Rhode Islander Marlene Yang had already seen the graffitied Lee statue in Richmond. “It really opens a lot of discussion on what people think is important,” she says.

A visitor from New York, who declined to give his name, says, “For the record, we love the statues.” He had just been to Gettysburg. “We wanted to see them while they’re still here,” says his wife.

Even the Monument Fund, which won an injunction prohibiting removal, acknowledges the statues’ days in city parks are numbered. The plaintiffs, who are still seeking attorneys’ fees, filed a motion June 5 with Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Rick Moore to partially dissolve the injunction.

The city has appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court to entirely dissolve the injunction so it can proceed under the new state law.

A statue supporter, who spoke only on the condition he not be named, is concerned about the safety of the Confederate monuments, which have been repeatedly vandalized. “People of goodwill are looking for a place to put them,” he says. “We can’t do that if they’re destroyed. Whether you like them or not, vandalism isn’t a good idea.”

While Richmond hoisted Stonewall Jackson off his pedestal July 1, Charlottesville continues to wait for the legal process to unwind.

“The nice thing about here is there’s a clear exit ramp with the motion to the Virginia Supreme Court,” says Schmidt. “It’s slower, but at least I’m seeing steady progress.”

 

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Keeping watch: Statue defenders take security into their own hands

Bystanders at Jalane Schmidt's monuments tour on Monday night, December 9. Photo: Andy Orban.

Nearly four years after a student’s petition called for their ouster, three years after a City Council vote to remove them, two years after a deadly white supremacist rally in support of them, and months after a judge ruled generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson must stay, Confederate statues continue to roil Charlottesville.

In the latest skirmishes, vandalizations of the statues have prompted Confederate monument supporters to mount their own security measures, including the installation of a trail camera and a tripwire at the Jackson statue, and hiring private security. 

Those who want the statues removed say they’ve been accosted while traveling through Market Street and Court Square parks by people impersonating police and city employees, creating a confusing and dangerous situation. 

UVA prof and activist Jalane Schmidt says she was questioned December 8 by a man in civilian attire with a badge purporting to be a Charlottesville cop, who asked what she was doing in the public park, which is open until 11pm.

Schmidt, who regularly conducts tours of Confederate markers around Court Square, says the private security efforts intimidate the public in what historically was a whites-only park and “are making the police an extension of their neo-Confederate organizations.”

Following her encounter with the alleged undercover cop, Schmidt led an impromptu 9pm tour December 9 that was attended by around three dozen people—including a few monument supporters. A member of the National Lawyers Guild offered a brief tutorial on citizen rights during encounters with police in public spaces.

Activist Molly Conger says she was told to leave the park December 7 by a man wearing a green vest who claimed he worked for the city. The man identified himself as Mr. Green and said he was securing the statue. When pressed on which department he worked for, the man replied, “The statue,” says Conger.

She’s also spotted convicted tarp-ripper Brian Lambert, who was banned from the parks, wearing a city-logoed sweatshirt in hope of looking like a city employee, according to a video he posted. Lambert also was on the periphery of the tour. He did not return a phone call from C-VILLE.

A group called the Gordonsville Grays, a newly chartered Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter to which Lambert belongs, says on social media that its members have worked to protect the statues and patrol the parks. Virginia Flaggers, known for hoisting giant Confederate battle flags along interstates, will be “contracting private security to give the folks on the ground a hand,” according to its blog. Neither the Grays nor the Flaggers responded to requests for comment.

After a couple of teens were spotted in one of the parks, there was talk on neo-Confederate sites of shooting them, according to Schmidt and Conger. The Grays also have posted that Conger is on their “watch list.”

“It’s a continuance of state-sanctioned white supremacy,” says Conger. “They’re openly organizing to shoot people.”

Grays commander William Shifflett is also associated with a neo-Confederate group called Identity Dixie, according to Conger. That group, says The Southern Poverty Law Center, helped organize the Unite the Right rally. Shifflett did not respond to a Facebook message from C-VILLE.

“The Charlottesville Police Department recently received information that private citizens are walking through the parks during hours when the park is open to everyone,” says spokesman Tyler Hawn in an email. “These citizens have been seen wearing reflective safety vests, and are believed to be concerned over the recent vandalisms at both parks. The police department has not received a report of any of these citizens acting inappropriately.”

Nor, he says, have police received any reports of citizens being “accosted” in the parks. He notes that officers are either in uniform, or, if in plain clothes, “carry appropriate identification and will present it to a citizen should there be a concern as to their identity or authority.”

Anyone with information about the vandalizations is encouraged to call police, he adds, and a citizen has donated a $1,285 reward for information leading to an arrest.

Local Cynthia Neff was at the park as a legal observer for the National Lawyers Guild, and says she witnessed the private security guards. “I worry it will have a chilling effect on people wanting to assemble or access this public resource, especially if it is patrolled by people that are perceived as a direct threat to anti-racist residents and visitors.”

John Heyden, 66, a Charlottesville native who says he has been “guarding” the parks, attended Schmidt’s December 9 monument tour. He confirms he photographed Conger and says he’s given license plate numbers of people coming in and out of the parks to police. “They’ve basically ignored them,” he says.

Heyden says he’s not a neo-Confederate, nor is he a Gordonsville Gray, “I don’t know what that is.”

He’s not worried about the potential for violence in the parks—at least not from anyone he knows. “Wouldn’t you consider the damage they’re doing [to the statues] violence in the first place?” he asks. 

Both statues have been repeatedly spray painted with messages like “1619,” referring to the year the first enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia, and “this is racist.” The base of the Jackson statue has suffered noticeable chisel damage, including the figures of Valor and Faith losing their noses.

Resolution may end up coming from Richmond, where a Democratic majority takes hold of both houses of the General Assembly in January. Several bills have been filed to strike the Virginia law that prohibits localities from ditching Confederate statuary.

 

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Still guilty: Statue trespassers appeal their sentences, with mixed results

In March 2018, Brian Lambert (left) said he and Christopher Wayne (right) would take their punishment for trespassing and attempting to remove the tarps off the Lee and Jackson statues “like men.” Then they appealed, and all but one of their convictions were upheld. Photo by Eze Amos

The outspoken Confederates convicted for trying to remove the shrouds that once covered the Lee and Jackson statues downtown were back in court on appeal April 25–and one of them was back to his past courtroom antics.

Christopher Wayne, a 35-year-old from Monterey, was removed from the courtroom, handcuffed, and given an additional 10 days in jail for his bad behavior, which included hurling a pen across the room and screaming, “You can all go fuck yourselves.”

In March 2018, Wayne was found guilty of destruction of property and two counts of trespassing. Judge Joseph Serkes—whom Wayne repeatedly argued with—sentenced him to serve five months in jail, prompting the defendant to spew profanity outside the courtroom, and flash his middle finger at reporters.

During this go-round, in Charlottesville Circuit Court, Wayne continued to make offhanded comments to testifying witnesses, his own attorney, and prosecutor Nina Antony, who asked him to stop multiple times. Judge Rick Moore called it “entirely improper,” but refused to reprimand him in that moment.

“If he thinks he’s helping his case, I’m going to let him do it,” Moore said, noticeably annoyed.

Defense attorney Josh Wheeler, former director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, called two of Wayne’s friends—one who said he met the defendant through “heritage events” and the other through the Virginia Flaggers—to the stand to dispute evidence from another witness, Hank Morrison, who claimed he saw Wayne tampering with the tarp in Market Street Park on February 16.

Morrison recounted seeing Wayne standing inside the orange fencing the city had erected around the Lee statue. He also said it sounded like someone was yanking on the tarp that shrouded Lee as the city mourned the August 12, 2017, death of Heather Heyer.

Wayne and one other person, identified as William Shifflett, began walking away when they noticed Morrison take out his cell phone to call the police, Morrison said. An officer responded almost immediately and stopped Wayne and Shifflett near the park.

But both Shifflett and Wayne’s other friend, Barry Isenhour, who said he drove the men downtown that day for “supper” on the Downtown Mall, testified that they never saw Wayne tamper with the tarp covering the statue.

Wheeler argued that the testimony from Shifflett and Isenhour was as credible as Morrison’s, and the judge agreed.

Moore upheld Wayne’s guilty verdict for trespassing that day, but dismissed the charge for destruction of property, saying the prosecutor didn’t prove without a reasonable doubt that he also tampered with the tarp that night. Though “chances are, he did it,” Moore said.

He also found Wayne guilty of trespassing in Court Square Park on February 23. Detective Declan Hickey testified that he saw Wayne hiding in the park’s bushes after 11pm, when the park is officially closed, which is marked on signs at its entry points.

When Hickey approached Wayne, the officer testified the defendant claimed he didn’t know the park was closed because he can’t read. Added Hickey, “He called me a fat cunt [and] asked how many kids I’d had sex with,” and when he took him to jail, Hickey said Wayne told the magistrate he identified as an “African helicopter.”

This second guilty verdict apparently didn’t sit well with Wayne, who stood, called it “a farce of justice,” and said he was just trying to enjoy his Confederate statues.

“Your statues?” asked Moore of the Monterey man.

Wayne then asserted again that he couldn’t read the “no trespassing” signs.

“I don’t know [I’m trespassing] if I don’t know how to read,” Wayne said. And answered the judge, “I don’t think you know how to think. …Your attitude is horrible.”

Deputies stationed in the courtroom began inching toward the aggravated defendant, which is when he threw his pen and shouted an obscenity as he was being escorted out. Out of view, but within earshot, Wayne was charged with contempt of court. A short physical altercation could be heard as he was being handcuffed.

“Christopher!” exclaimed one of his supporters, who was also clearly frustrated.

“Bring him back in,” said the judge. Moore then added an additional 10 days for bad behavior onto Wayne’s 45-day jail sentence.

“If you want to keep adding to the sentence, I will let you do that,” the judge said, to which Wayne responded, “Great.”

Brian Lambert, who flashed a white power symbol at his last trial was also appealing his statue-related convictions, but, as the judge noted, behaved considerably better than Wayne this time around.

Moore found that Lambert, 50, was still guilty of the two trespassing and two destruction of property charges, but that the sentence Serkes initially imposed of eight months in jail was too harsh.

Even Antony, the prosecutor, said that punishment was “substantially more than what we would ever anticipate, and Moore sentenced Lambert to just 55 days.

The men didn’t have the right to interfere with the shrouds just because they didn’t like them, Moore reminded them. “We are a nation of laws,” he said.

Lambert said he was “embarrassed for the town,” after August 12, 2017, and the tarps “added insult to injury. …In my heart, I really honestly felt like I was doing the right thing.”

Quipped Wheeler, who also represented Lambert, “The road to hell is often paved with good intentions.”

Correction April 30: Josh Wheeler is the former director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, not its current director.

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Confederates convicted: Statue unshrouders say they’ll appeal

Brian Lambert and Christopher Wayne await the outcome of their March 26 trials. They were charged with multiple counts of destruction of property and trespassing for attempting to remove the black tarps from the once-shrouded General Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson statues in their respective parks. Photo by Eze Amos

Immediately following a March 26 trial in which Charlottesville’s Brian Lambert was found guilty of multiple charges of trespassing in Emancipation and Justice parks and attempting to remove the tarps from the shrouded statues, Lambert could be seen applying a trail of Confederate flag stickers on surfaces in the direction of the General Robert E. Lee monument.

Judge Joseph Serkes had just sentenced him to four years in jail, with all but eight months suspended, in a hearing where Lambert flashed a distinctive hand signal behind his back. With his right thumb forming a circle with his pointer finger, and his three additional digits in the shape of a “W,” he held the “white power” symbol for about 30 seconds before turning to wink at the few people who showed up to support him, including Jason Kessler.

Louisa attorney Richard Harry defended Lambert, while Richmonder Christopher Wayne was represented by Thomas Wilson on similar—but fewer—destruction of property and trespassing charges. Wayne was sentenced to three years, of which all were suspended but five months.

The Richmond man’s trial was unorthodox, and he engaged in several debates with the judge. Lambert patted him on the back multiple times in what appeared to be an effort to get Wayne to stop talking.

Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Cooper Vaughan said Wayne’s frequent outbursts and repeated tampering with the city’s tarps after being arrested were an indicator of his disrespect for the City Council’s August decision to shroud the Confederate statues while the city mourned the deaths that took place during the summer’s Unite the Right rally.

“He’s absolutely right,” Wayne said.

“They believe these laws do not apply to them,” said Vaughan, who added that active jail time was the only way to convey to the men that there are consequences for breaking the rules.

Lambert also was charged with assaulting the Reverend Seth Wispelwey, a United Church of Christ minister, in the early morning hours of November 5, when the clergy member testified he was walking to his parked car on Second Street when he saw and heard what appeared to be someone cutting down the orange fencing surrounding the Lee monument.

Wispelwey said he called out to Lambert that he was trespassing.

“He said, ‘Yeah, I’m trespassing. What are you going to do about it?’ And started coming at me with a knife [with a six-inch blade] in his hand,” said Wispelwey.

But a Charlottesville police officer testified that when he apprehended Lambert, the man had a box cutter and a firearm on him, but no such knife.

Lambert was found not guilty of assault in that interaction, but the officer said he was unsteady on his feet, his speech was slurred, and he told the cop his name was “Brian Brian.” He was charged with public swearing or intoxication and paid the $25 fine on December 28.

In the same November interaction, the officer said Lambert made a “spontaneous utterance” that he had cut the tarp off the statue “at least seven times” by that point, and when he was caught doing so—also while apparently drunk—in a January 9 encounter, he told police he was “doing a public service,” according to another officer’s testimony.

“He told me he was never going to stop,” a third officer told the judge.

Judge Serkes reminded the men that they couldn’t keep taking matters into their own hands. “That’s why we’re a country of laws,” he said.

Outside the courthouse, Lambert took a drag from a cigarette.

“We’ll take our punishment like men,” he said.

The two plan to appeal their verdicts.

Christopher Wayne (center) was unhappy to see the media outside of the hearing in which he and Brian Lambert (right) were sentenced to jail time. Staff photo

 

Corrected March 27 at 4pm to more accurately reflect the length of the blade Lambert was allegedly carrying November 5.

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In brief: ‘Hit piece,’ the unshrouder and more

Nikuyah Walker admits she doesn’t follow the rules very well. Staff photo

But her emails

Independent City Council candidate Nikuyah Walker was the target of a November 4 story in the Daily Progress that she and her supporters called a “hit piece”—three days before the election—in which an anonymous source in City Hall questions her ability to “work collaboratively with city officials.” The story described her emails to officials as “aggressive” and “often confrontational.”

“Advocates for social justice don’t always behave politely.”—Joy Johnson to City Council on the topic of protesters arrested at their August 21 meeting

Blank slate

Dillwyn’s entire town council is up for re-election, but when the longtime clerk retired, no one reminded the councilors to register as candidates to be on the ballot. The ballot will be blank, and Dillwyn’s 244 registered voters must write in the names of the seven councilors they want to elect, according to the Progress.

Fogel files again

Civil rights attorney Jeff Fogel is suing Charlottesville, City Manager Maurice Jones and law firm Hunton & Williams on behalf of five plaintiffs, contending that Jones had no authority to hire the firm’s partner Tim Heaphy to do an independent review of the city’s response to the events of August 12.

Jeff Fogel, with plaintiffs Joy Johnson, Tanesha Hudson and Walt Heinecke, wants the city to fire Tim Heaphy. Staff photo

An end to Democracy

Nelson County’s Democracy Vineyards, which opened in 2007, announced it will close after Thanksgiving this year.

Another attempt

Around 1am November 5, city police arrested Brian Lambert in Emancipation Park and charged him with vandalism, trespassing and being drunk in public for allegedly cutting the orange fencing surrounding the Robert E. Lee statue. Lambert, arrested for being drunk at UVA on September 12, when students shrouded their Thomas Jefferson statue, is also one of three people who attempted to uncover General Lee on September 16.

Best BACON

Charlottesville High’s code-writing wunderkinds in Best All-Around Club of Nerds win first place in the first round of NASA and  MIT’s Zero Robotics competition.

Keep ’em at home

Signs at Water Street Garage, Rapture and UVA lawn. Photos staff and Emily Bagdasarian

While another tragic mass shooting made headlines over the weekend, some Charlottesville institutions are putting forth their best effort to make this city bulletproof.

Twelve days before a man who was booted out of the Air Force for domestic violence dressed in all-black tactical gear and shot up a First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, killing 26 and injuring 20 others, about a dozen signs prohibiting all weapons appeared at every entry point on the University of Virginia Lawn.

UVA spokesperson Anthony de Bruyn did not respond to multiple interview requests about the warnings, but other local entities that ban firearms were willing to discuss their decisions.

Charlottesville Parking Center officials posted “No Guns” signs in the Water Street Parking Garage in the immediate aftermath of the August 12 Unite the Right rally, according to general manager and former mayor Dave Norris.

“We were concerned when we saw dozens of heavily-armed neo-Nazis using the garage as a staging area on the morning of August 12 and had no grounds to ask them to leave, and received no response from law enforcement when we reported this activity to them,” says Norris. “Now that the signs are in place, we are better equipped to manage situations like this in the future.”

As for the sticker on Rapture’s door that bans firearms, owner Mike Rodi says it was largely in response to the summer’s “hate rallies,” when KKK and Unite the Right protesters “made it clear that they would take advantage of Virginia’s open carry laws and come armed.”

The owner of the Downtown Mall restaurant says businesses near the epicenter of the deadly rally “used every tool at their disposal to keep racist troublemakers out,” and signage was part of that. On August 12, many businesses also posted dress code signs banning hate symbols.

Rapture has long had a no-gun policy, says Rodi. “Guns and booze don’t mix.”

Other businesses posted no-gun signs before this summer. In late 2015, shoppers in Whole Foods became upset when they spotted a man packing heat in the produce section. Though Virginia is an open-carry state, Whole Foods’ corporate policy bans all weapons, and a sign declaring so was posted on its door by January 2016.

Eugene Williams Day

Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy presents Eugene Williams with a proclamation on his 90th birthday. Staff photo

Charlottesville’s legendary civil rights leader Eugene Williams turned 90 November 6, and Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy presented him with a proclamation declaring the day Eugene Williams Day at a birthday celebration November 4 at the Boar’s Head Inn.

As president of the local NAACP chapter in the 1950s, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate but equal schools didn’t cut it, Williams recruited plaintiffs to sue the Charlottesville School Board.

In 1980, Williams convinced his wife, Lorraine, brother Albert and sister-in-law Emma to sink their life savings into Dogwood Housing to provide
affordable housing to families throughout the city, bucking the trend of housing the poor in projects.

And the proclamation declares, “Eugene Williams has served as a symbolic conscience of Charlottesville for what is right and fair for all people and for bridging the diverse parts of the Charlottesville community.”