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Pilgrims’ report: What they brought back from civil rights pilgrimage

A month ago, around 100 locals set off on two buses to Montgomery, Alabama, carrying soil from the site where John Henry James was lynched in 1898 in Albemarle County. On August 5, nearly 200 people gathered at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center to hear the pilgrims’ report back to the community about what they experienced, what they learned and where they go next with what they brought back from the historic journey.

A common theme emerged: The violent events from last summer’s Unite the Right rally were not isolated events, but part of a continuum of white supremacy dating back to this country’s founding, say pilgrimage participants and organizers.

“Charlottesville has a long history of violent white supremacy,” said Jalane Schmidt, UVA religious studies professor and pilgrimage co-organizer. Along with James’ lynching, she listed the KKK in the 1920s—active at the same time controversial monuments of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were erected—sit-ins in the ‘60s to integrate restaurants, and August 11 and 12 last year.  “And in all of these cases, police were complicit,” she added.

The journey began on July 8, the anniversary of the KKK rally last year, but Andrea Douglas, executive director of the heritage center and the pilgrimage’s other organizer, pointed out that July 9 was a more significant anniversary—the 150th of the ratification of the 14th Amendment that gave African Americans citizenship, due process and equal protection.

“Those are the same things we’re talking about today,” she said.

The six-day pilgrimage hit civil rights landmarks and museums between Charlottesville and Montgomery, and included Danville, Greensboro, Charlotte, Atlanta and Birmingham. It began with a stop at Appomattox, where a national park depicts the surrender of the Confederacy with remarkably little information about slavery, the issue that had sparked the Civil War, the pilgrims noted.

“They were selling Confederate memorabilia” at a taxpayer-funded national park, reported Frank Dukes, UVA Institute for Environmental Negotiation professor.

Dukes identified the Sweet Auburn district in Atlanta, a historic African American community that has been preserved and works to remain affordable, as a model for Charlottesville. He also mentioned memorials to the legacy of racial terrorism and the civil rights struggle, such as the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial to Peace and Justice and the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “We don’t have enough of that,” he said.

Multiple people reporting to the community said school curricula is an issue.

Cauline Yates reports back for the Seasoned Saints, the demographic with the most years. Eze Amos

“We’d like to see schools do a better job of teaching black history—and not just at Black History Month,” said Cauline Yates.

Rising Charlottesville High senior Zyahna Bryant echoed the call for “more comprehensive black history” in schools. She, too, pointed out that the lynching of John Henry James “was not one singled-out event,” but is part of a history of white supremacy seen today in mass incarceration and “students of color failed over and over again.”

Bryant said the Real Justice PAC lobbies prosecutors. “I met with [Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney] Joe Platania about how we can get people of color out of the criminal justice system,” she said.

Zyahna Bryant was one of the high school students who made the pilgrimage. Eze Amos

DeTeasa Gathers and Patsy Goolsby were among the 21 faculty and staff UVA sent on the pilgrimage, which they describe as transformative and enlightening, while evoking feelings of anger, pain and shame, empathy and gratitude. “The pilgrimage was hard,” said Goolsby.

“Did I really miss all of this in history?” Gathers asked. “Did I miss what happened to my people?”

“The original sin was not slavery, but the narrative of white supremacy,” said Goolsby. She says European-Americans have a “moral obligation” to work with other white people to understand this history.

The message they bring back to UVA: “Acknowledge people of color’s ability to serve in leadership roles,” said Gathers, to applause from the audience. Blacks have to work twice as hard as whites and “this is UVA’s reality.”

Civil rights is an ongoing effort, she added, and “make sure everyone votes.”

Her husband Don Gathers, chair of the city’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces and member of the newly formed Charlottesville Police Civilian Review Board, says he was struck by the interactions among the people sharing a journey that affected them “spiritually, psychologically and emotionally.”

The pilgrims visited places where they experienced joy, sorrow, lamentations and anger, “all fueled with clear recognition of the persistence of white supremacy over our history,” he says.

Gathers was moved by “sacred moments”: seeing the struggle for justice, standing in front of August 12 victim Heather Heyer’s picture at the Southern Poverty Law Center, standing in the pulpit at Dexter Baptist Church in Montgomery where Dr. Martin Luther King preached and marching across the Pettus bridge. “We don’t get this kind of learning in schools,” he said.

“The future is long and the work is never done,” said Gathers. “Those on the pilgrimage can no longer sit on the periphery. We are forever changed.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In brief: A lost neighborhood, a plane crash and C-VILLE wins big

Vinegar Hill reimagined

The winners of a Bushman Dreyfus Architects and Tom Tom Founders Festival competition to use public spaces to create constructive dialogue and to reimagine Vinegar Hill, the city’s historic and predominantly African-American neighborhood, proposed an 80-foot wall made of layers of metal maps of the lost neighborhood on the west side of the Downtown Mall.

The wall, similar in size to the Freedom of Speech Wall on the opposite side of the mall, would be surrounded by rolling benches. Winning team members Lauren McQuistion, a UVA School of Architecture grad now based in Detroit, A.J. Artemel, director of communications at Yale School of Architecture, and Tyler Whitney, a former junior designer at local VMDO Architects who is also now in Detroit, received a grand prize of $5,000. All three are 2011 UVA graduates.

Thanks to urban renewal, Vinegar Hill was razed in 1964, and the city is currently considering how to memorialize it, independently from the competition, which garnered submissions from 80 applicants across 20 countries.

Quote of the Week: “One of the saddest outcomes of Ryan Kelly’s Pulitzer-winning Charlottesville #photo is he’s leaving #journalism altogether & not returning. He now works for a brewery.” —K. Matthew Dames, an associate librarian for scholarly resources and services at Georgetown University, on Twitter. Kelly had already planned to leave the Daily Progress, and August 12 was his last day.

Crozet triangle

A twin-engine Cessna crashed off Saddle Hollow Road April 15, killing the pilot, not far from where Piedmont Airlines Flight 349 slammed into Bucks Elbow Mountain in 1959 with one of the 27 people onboard surviving. Crozet also was the scene of a GOP congressional delegation-carrying Amtrak crash into a Time Disposal truck that killed one person January 31.

Rain tax quenched

Photo by Richard Fox

Albemarle Board of Supervisors decided April 11 to use its general fund to pay for the stormwater utility fee because of massive farmer outrage. Next issue to get riled about: property taxes going up.

Park entry fees upped again

It’s going to cost five bucks more to visit Shenandoah National Park this summer. Starting June 1, vehicle entrance fees will be $30, motorcycles $25, per person is $15 and an annual pass is $55. Good news for seniors and frequent parkers: The annual pass to all parks and the senior lifetime pass remains $80.

Call to condemn

Activist groups Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice want City Council and the Albemarle supes to approve a resolution written by Frank Dukes that condemns the Confederate battle flag that’s been erected in Louisa near I-64.

Cullop walloped

Things are not looking good for 5th District Democratic candidate Ben Cullop, who scored zero delegates at the April 16 overflow Albemarle Democratic caucus in his home county. Leslie Cockburn received 18 delegates, Andrew Sneathern 13 and R.D. Huffstetler will take eight to the Dem convention May 5 to choose a challenger to U.S. Congressman Tom Garrett.

A capacity crowd packed the Monticello High School gymnasium April 16 to participate in the 5th District Democratic caucus.

Court referendum

The General Assembly passed a law that means if Albemarle wants to move its courts from downtown, voters will have a say.

Power of the press

During the 2017 Virginia Press Association awards ceremony on April 14, C-VILLE nabbed accolades in 10 categories in the specialty publication division, along with two best in show awards for design and presentation (Bill LeSueur and Max March) and artwork (Barry Bruner).

First place

Design and presentation: Bill LeSueur, Max March

Food writing: Caite White, Samantha Baars, Tami Keaveny, Erin O’Hare, Lisa Provence, Jessica Luck, Erin Scala, Eric Wallace

Illustrations: Barry Bruner

Front page or cover design: Bill LeSueur, Max March, Eze Amos, Jeff Drew

Combination picture and story: Eze Amos, Natalie Krovetz, Lisa Provence, Samantha Baars, Erin O’Hare, Susan Sorensen, Jessica Luck, Jackson Landers, Bill LeSueur

Pictorial photo: Jackson Smith

Second place

In-depth or investigative reporting: Samantha Baars

News portfolio writing: Lisa Provence

Third place

Feature story writing: Erin O’Hare

Public affairs writing: Lisa Provence

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Ring of freedom: UVA acknowledges its past with slave memorial

At the same time Charlottesville has faced controversy over its decision to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, the University of Virginia has approved a memorial—with nary a peep of protest—to the enslaved workers who built and maintained the school.

“I don’t think it’s coincidental,” says Frank Dukes, a member of the design team, co-founder of University and Community Action for Racial Equity and past director of the Institute for Environmental Negotiation in the School of Architecture. He notes that the UVA plan has been in the works since around 2008. “It’s the same impetus. So much of our history has been mistold or ignored.”

Adds Dukes, “It’s part of the zeitgeist, but it is separate.”

The Memorial to Enslaved Laborers got its start from students in UCARE, following resolutions from the General Assembly and Board of Visitors expressing regret for slavery in 2007.

A bombshell rocked the university community in 2006, when an undergrad discovered there were slaves at UVA besides those who built the university.

“The narrative here was that Jefferson didn’t allow slaves,” says Dukes. “He wanted to prohibit students from bringing their ‘servants.’”

Even as an undergrad at UVA in the ’70s, Dukes says the fact that slave labor kept the university running “was never mentioned.” Another faculty member concurred, he says. “We heard there were no slaves here.”

In 2013, President Teresa Sullivan appointed a Commission on Slavery and the University to explore the university’s historical ties to slavery and ways to commemorate the enslaved.

On June 9, the BOV unanimously approved the Freedom Ring, a dual circle that symbolizes a broken shackle designed by Höweler + Yoon. The memorial will occupy an area east of Brooks Hall and across from the Corner.

Constructed of local Virginia Mist granite, its exterior is rough, to represent the hardship the slaves endured, but it’s polished on the inside, and will bear the names of those who labored for Mr. Jefferson’s university—at least those who are known.

So far, researchers have found nearly 1,000 people worked there between 1817 and 1865, but that number could be as many as 5,000. The interior wall will have space to add names as they’re discovered.

Those working on the memorial realized, “you can’t just talk about the degradation,” says Dukes. “They had lives, families, skills. There’s an element of celebration of the lives of these people and the beauty they brought.”

He says, “These are people who couldn’t have dreamed that their descendants could attend the university as students.”

Memorials are often controversial—think the Vietnam War or World War II memorials. Perhaps that’s what’s the most unusual about the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers. “Generally we’ve been astonished with how supportive people are,” says Dukes.

Before designs were ever drawn, there was massive input from university students and faculty, as well as the community. Dukes says numerous meetings and hundreds of people weighed in on the monument and the story it should tell. “This was not some artist going somewhere and coming up with an idea,” says Dukes.

The Board of Visitors gave the project the go-ahead a year ago. “The advantage of this taking a long time is that people have gotten slowly used to this idea, and then enthusiastic about it,” he says.

He was surprised the BOV unanimously approved the design in June without wanting to tinker and consider it over the summer.

Nor were there any complaints about putting the memorial on prime, highly visible real estate across from the Corner. The administration said it could go anywhere, says Dukes, and he imagined it might be off the Lawn. “Community members said, ‘Don’t put it there. We don’t go there,’” he recounts.

“Definitely it’s about time,” says UVA religious studies professor Jalane Schmidt. “I’m so glad UVA is facing up to its past.”

While Schmidt admires the “cool” design of the memorial, she says, “We wish UVA would connect its past to the present. A lot of workers who are descendants of slaves are not making a living wage. Further steps are needed.”

Fundraising has begun for the $6 million Freedom Ring, with its flowing water and circular bench creating a space for reflection, and the university would like if finished by the time it celebrates its bicentennial in 2019.

Said Sullivan to the BOV, “Our decision to create a memorial to enslaved workers is an expression of our shared commitment to tell the full story of the university’s past, as we look toward its future.”

Updated July 6 to include the President’s Commission on Slavery and the University.