The Democratic Convention won plaudits for its creative all-virtual roll call vote last week, as viewers were taken on a hokey, state-by-state tour of the country. Charlottesville local and Gold Star father Khizr Khan, who made a name for himself by delivering an impassioned speech at the 2016 convention, represented Virginia in the roll call.
Khan delivered his brief remarks in front of the free speech wall downtown. But sharp-eyed Twitter user @fern_cliff noticed that the colorful “Joe Biden” and “Vote 2020” written on the wall behind Khan had been chalked on top of preexisting Black Lives Matter protest art.
In one corner of the wall, the words “systemic racism” poke out from between the “Joe” and the “Biden.”
On the campaign trail, Biden has repeatedly mentioned that the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville—and Donald Trump’s ensuing “very fine people on both sides” comments—inspired his presidential run. The first words of Biden’s official campaign announcement in April 2019 were “Charlottesville, Virginia.” The former veep has not visited Charlottesville, however, even before travel was restricted by coronavirus. This latest chalk-job can’t help Biden’s standing among local activists who already feel as though they’ve been used as a campaign prop.
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Quote of the week
“The board put me on leave, took away my duties as prez, and that’s not permitted by my contract. And they put me on leave because of pressure from self-righteous people.”
—Jerry Falwell Jr. on his resignation from Liberty University, shortly after reports emerged that he and his wife had a yearslong sexual relationship with a former pool attendant
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In brief
Passing the test
Students returning to UVA for the fall semester were required to submit a COVID test before arriving in Charlottesville. The school has now received 13,000 tests—three-quarters of the kits they sent out—and just 36 students, or .3 percent of those tested, have come back positive, reports NBC29. In-person classes begin September 8.
Shut it down
A group of UVA employees have formed a union—United Campus Workers of Virginia—demanding that the university move fall classes entirely online, cancel move-in for most undergrads, and provide hazard pay for employees during the pandemic. A press release from the union says the group formed as “a direct result of growing dissatisfaction” with the school’s disregard for student and employee input in pandemic response planning.
Heads off
Not long after being splattered with an arc of red paint, UVA’s George Rogers Clark monument was once again recontextualized last week, as a nighttime visitor attempted to remove the general’s head with a saw, per photos shared by Twitter user @tormaid. The visitor left a good gash in the general’s neck, but wasn’t quite able to finish the job. Maintenance crews have been spotted trying to repair the damage, but the university has not released a statement.
Former VA guv Terry McAuliffe filed paperwork to run again. PC: John Robinson
Governor guesses
Terry McAuliffe’s long, coy flirtation with a governor’s run got a little more serious last week. After raising money through his old PAC for months, the former governor filed official paperwork to run as a Democratic candidate. He still claims he will not make an official decision until after the presidential election.
The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression owns the Free Speech Wall on the Downtown Mall. Discussions with the city are going on to determine the wall’s fate.
staff photo
During its heyday, the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression was known for calling out censorship with its Muzzle awards and for launching the Downtown Mall’s Free Speech Wall in 2006, where luminaries like John Grisham and Dahlia Lithwick turned out to chalk the first messages on the monument.
Over the past couple of years, the center seemed to have disappeared from the free speech landscape, and on July 1, UVA law school quietly buried news of the center’s death in a release for the relaunch of a First Amendment Clinic, funded in part from assets from the TJ Center.
Former Daily Progress owner Tom Worrell founded the center in 1989 with a reported $3.5 million gift and bestowed its unwieldy moniker. Worrell, who was on UVA’s Board of Visitors, offered the job of leading the new free speech institute to outgoing UVA president and constitutional law expert Bob O’Neil—who later said changing the name was nonnegotiable.
During O’Neil’s 21-year leadership, the center was involved in high-profile free speech cases. After televangelist Jerry Falwell sued Hustler publisher Larry Flynt—and lost—over a parody that contended Falwell had sex with his mother, O’Neil said he got the two men together and they became friends. The center also prepped Margie Phelps, a member of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church, which protested the funerals of soldiers with signs bearing messages like “God hates fags,” before her appearance in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Muzzles came out every April 13, on Jefferson’s birthday, and highlighted a free speech hall of shame. Locals occasionally made the list, either as victims of censorship, like Aaron Tobey, who was arrested by TSA in Richmond for displaying the Fourth Amendment on his chest as he went through airport security, or perpetrators, like Albemarle High for seizing and destroying all copies of the school’s student newspaper in 2010. (Physical education teachers didn’t like an op-ed that suggested student athletes be able to opt out of P.E.)
Board chair Bruce Sanford says the center had been winding down for the past year and a half. When Worrell founded it in 1989, “its chief mission was First Amendment advocacy in court,” says Sanford, although finding those cases and defending them was more difficult than anticipated.
Robert O’Neil, who died last fall, led the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression for 21 years. photo Michael Bailey
O’Neil taught a First Amendment clinic at UVA, as did Wheeler. “The First Amendment clinics are doing a lot of good work,” and both Columbia and Yale have them, says Sanford. “We’re very pleased to refocus our assets”—over $1 million—to fund the UVA clinic.
Attorneys from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press will teach a new generation of potential First Amendment lawyers, says Sanford. “It’s perfect for the original mission.”
As for why the center seemed to fizzle out, Sanford notes that the Muzzle recipients the past two years weren’t as compelling as in the past. And when O’Neil retired, “We didn’t have a leading constitutional scholar,” says Sanford. O’Neil died last fall at age 83.
Attorney Josh Wheeler succeeded O’Neil in 2011 and has been in private practice for the past two years. He did not respond to calls from C-VILLE.
The center’s shutdown leaves unresolved the fate of the Free Speech Wall, which has become the go-to site for protesters over its 13 years as a mall landmark.
When the city agreed to install the TJ Center-owned wall, it also agreed to not censor its content—although that did happen when a sexually explicit image was chalked on the wall in 2011. However, passersby are free to erase as they please, and the wall is cleaned twice a week to give citizens a blank slate.
“The cost of the upkeep is not great,” says Sanford, and the center is having discussions with the city about continuing the maintenance.
Longtime wall critic Kevin Cox says it’s an ineffectual monument to free speech, and it does not accomplish much as an educational tool. “It doesn’t really teach people what the First Amendment is” and how it applies to government, he says. Its location in front of City Hall creates the impression the government owns it.
He says the wall was a prescient “kind of a monument to Twitter” because it only accommodates short messages. Any lessons about free speech are “shallow,” he says. “It’s fun to write, ‘fuck City Council,’ but that’s about as far as it goes.”
Of the center’s closing, Cox says, “It seemed to be pretty superfluous. All they did was give their Muzzles.”
In fact, the TJ Center also filed a lot of briefs in First Amendment cases, according to Rutherford Institute founder John Whitehead. He calls O’Neil and Wheeler a “dynamic duo,” and says they would defend anyone’s free speech rights. “There’s never enough people doing First Amendment issues,” he says. “I hate to see them go.”
C-VILLE was unable to reach Worrell for his response to the shuttering of the free speech org he founded 30 years ago. He was active in the beginning, says Sanford, but moved to Florida and shifted his focus to other projects. Says Sanford, “He didn’t really stay engaged.”
Update: The original headline was “Muzzled: Free speech center shuts down.”
More than 2,000 turned out for Charlottesville’s rally to support the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., January 21. Photo by Ryan Jones
Charlottesville is no stranger to protests. The city’s Free Speech Wall is a testament to the First Amendment and a frequent gathering spot for citizens exercising their right to assemble.
That said, we’ve never seen anything like this.
Since the election of Donald Trump as president, at least seven new groups have sprung up, and a couple of more were formed during 2016. Mayor Mike Signer declared Charlottesville the “capital of the resistance” at a January 31 rally, and it’s hard to keep up with the ongoing protests.
“I see resistance as a broad spectrum, ranging from making donations to organizations that stand for American values to joining a protest to calling a congressman to changing a friend’s mind to supporting a lawsuit to embracing a member of a vulnerable and victimized population,” says Signer.“What’s happening in Charlottesville at this very moment encompasses this whole spectrum,” he says.
From women’s rights to immigrant rights to racial justice to health care, there’s one or more groups focusing on the issue and they’ve all come to a boil since Trump’s inauguration. And that’s on top of longstanding, local re-energized groups like Charlottesville NOW, Virginia Organizing and Legal Aid Justice Center.
The left has the bulk of the new groups, but there’s also resistance from the far, so-called “alt-right,” which many local activists call white nationalists.
“Of course this is unprecedented,” says the Center for Politics’ Larry Sabato. “But, then again, we’ve never had a president like Trump.”
Sabato says it usually takes years for opposition to build to a significant level, as it did for President Herbert Hoover once America had suffered through years of the Great Depression, or LBJ because of the Vietnam War. President Richard Nixon, who took office in January 1969, didn’t see a big anti-war rally until October of that year.
“The largest demonstrations were for civil rights in the 1960s,” says Sabato, and were not directed against any president. Also huge were the anti-war demonstrations following Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in May 1970, he says.
“I expect that these activities will evolve as the threats evolve,” says Signer. “I’m incredibly proud to be a member of a community with so much resistance happening on so many levels.”
Who’s protesting what? Here’s C-VILLE Weekly’s guide to the resistance.—with additional reporting by Samantha Baars
Together Cville has weekly potlucks at IX Art Park. Photo by Eze Amos
Together Cville
Issue: Make sure the vulnerable in our community are safe with access to resources
Motto: Keep strong and fight together
Event: Weekly potluck on Sundays from 5:30-7pm at IX Art Park
Supporters: 670 on e-mail list; 60 to 100 at potlucks
Info: togethercville.net
Quote:“Our goal is to resist the current regime’s agenda. The promise of America is the freedom to pursue flourishing lives.”—Nathan Moore
Together Cville started the day after the election as a way of “channeling the anger and disappointment into something useful,” says Moore. The group takes a multipronged approach, he says, and is in touch with other groups. It also has produced a calendar of local activist events. And the Sunday potlucks, he says, are “rejuvenating.”
Together Cville Women’s Group
Origin: Pantsuit Nation
Issue: Meeting place to gather volunteers,
learn about protests
Event: Monthly first Saturday meeting from 4-6pm at the Friends Quaker Meeting House, 1104 Forest St.
Supporters: 200 followers on Facebook; works with other groups such as Together Cville
Quote: “I think a lot of us got to the point it was overwhelming, there were so many issues, so now we help find your passion.”—Dianne Bearinger
Bearinger, who grew up in the ’60s and has been an activist all her life, says, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Activism “hasn’t felt like a choice to me because so much I care about is threatened.” She lists the environment and seeing rising sea levels where she grew up in New Jersey, friends in the Islamic community who feel threatened, friends
raising black sons and feeling vulnerable, and the Affordable Care Act, which Bearinger depends on for health care.
Indivisible Charlottesville members are weekly regulars at the Berkmar Crossing office of Congressman Tom Garrett. Photo by Eze Amos
Indivisible Charlottesville
Origin: Indivisible Guide written by former congressional staffers
Issue: Get Congress to listen to a vocal minority
Strategy: Protest style borrows from the
Tea Party playbook
Event: Weekly Tuesday protests from noon-1:30pm at U.S. Representative Tom Garrett’s office at Berkmar Crossing, and the group held a town hall meeting February 26 without Garrett, who was in Germany
Supporters: 3,500 on Facebook; 1,600 on e-mail list; 200-250 people at weekly protests
Info: facebook.com/indivisiblecharlottesville
Quote: “We had a lot of people at the beginning who can organize and people who can volunteer 10 hours a week. We’re figuring out how to channel that volunteer energy.”—David Singerman
Indivisible Charlottesville reserved a room at the Central Library January 28, expecting 100 people might show up, says Singerman. Instead, about 500 showed up, the event moved to The Haven and “the roller coaster began,” he says. While Garrett has been a vocal Trump supporter, he isn’t the only one in Congress the group is pressuring. Virginia’s two Democratic senators have also heard from Indivisible, says Singerman. “Trump has thrown unexpected curveballs,” he says. “There won’t be any shortage of issues.”
Charlottesville Democratic Socialists of America
Inspired by: The Bern
Issues: Living wage, affordable housing,
universal health care
Strategy: Going to public meetings and
voicing opinions
Supporters: 30 to 40 at the group’s first public meeting February 15
Info: facebook.com/CvilleDSA
Quote: “It’s a political ideology focusing on the importance of social and economic equities,
collective decision-making and ownership.”—Lewis Savarese
The national Democratic Socialists of America organization started in 1982, but the socialist tradition in the U.S. goes back to the early 20th century, when Eugene Debs ran for president five times. More recently, Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign reignited interest in democratic socialism and the local group hopes to tap into that energy. “Currently the system panders to certain interest groups, like corporations,” says Savarese. “We believe we can bring more people into the political process.”
A demonstration got loud February 11 when candidate for governor Corey Stewart showed up to denounce City Council’s vote to remove the state of General Robert E. Lee from Lee Park, and members of SURJ showed up in counterprotest. Photo by Eze Amos
Showing Up for Racial Justice
Inspired by: Last July’s police shootings of unarmed black men Philando Castile and Alton Sterling
Issue: Getting more white people to focus on racial justice
Strategy: Mobilize quickly and use a diversity of tactics to show zero-tolerance for white supremacists
Event: SURJ members were in former Trump campaign Virginia chair/GOP gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart’s face when he came to Charlottesville February 11 to denounce City Council’s vote to remove the General Robert E. Lee statue.
Supporters: 980 Facebook followers; 350 on e-mail list
Info: facebook.com/surjcville
Quote: “It’s white people’s job to undermine white supremacists.”—Pam Starsia
Protests are not SURJ’s only way of combating racism. The group co-sponsored a February 21 workshop on gentrification, zoning and form-based code with the local NAACP, Legal Aid Justice Center and Public Housing Association of Residents. And SURJ admonished the local media not to normalize fringe racist groups who call themselves “alt-right” without defining them as white supremacists or white nationalists.
heARTful Action
Issue: How to do the activism thing and do it in a healthy way
Event: Monthly workshops on aspects of activism and self-care on the last Saturday of the month from 3-5pm at Friends Quaker Meeting House
Supporters: 200 on Facebook; connected to Together Cville, Together Cville Women’s Group and Indivisible Charlottesville
Info: focuspocusnow.com/category/heartful-action
Quote: “It feels like this time we can’t think our way out of it. We need to feel in our bones what we want to create and that requires integration of body and mind.”—Susan McCulley
McCulley and two friends were already thinking about small workshops on art and mindfulness. “Then the election happened,” she says. HeARTful Action wants to help people navigate the new landscape in a way that is creative and mindful.
Charlottesville Gathers
Issue: Active bystander intervention
Event: Rally to support the Women’s March on Washington January 21 at IX Art Park
Supporters: The rally brought more than 2,000 pussy cap-wearing attendees
Info: facebook.com/CharlottesvilleGathers
Quote: “We intend to be a convener of training and inspirational events to equip Charlottesville and its citizens to be the capital of the resistance.”—Gail Hyder Wiley
Wiley joined up with teacher Jill Williams to organize the rally. At this point, she says it’s pretty much just her, but she’s ready to provide support to other groups.
Cville Rising
Issue: Clean energy implementation, pipelines
Current action: Working closely with Buckingham County’s Union Hill community and activist group Friends of Buckingham to prevent the construction of a noisy compressor station, which is being proposed in tandem with the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
Allies: Friends of Nelson, Friends
of Buckingham, Friends of
Augusta, EPIC, Together Cville
Supporters: 30 frequent volunteers; 300-person e-mail list
Info: cvillerising.com
Though the group didn’t officially form until the end of last year—after the
presidential election of a man who
supports the construction of major fracked gas pipelines, though a spokesperson says it was unrelated—Cville Rising has been operating under the radar for a year and a half. Its mission is to bring awareness and connect Charlottesville to the environmental woes in surrounding counties.
Equity and Progress in Charlottesville
Inspired by: Again, Bernie
Issue: Elect local candidates to make bold changes to eliminate racial and economic
disparities
Event: Held second meeting February 27 to find and support candidates to run for office
Supporters: About 150 showed up at first meeting
Info: epiccville.org
Quote: “We aimed exclusively at local issues and changing the power relationship.”—Jeff Fogel
EPIC was already in the works before the election, but “I think the response we’ve gotten is in large part a function of the election,” says Fogel, who is the group’s first candidate and is running for commonwealth’s attorney. EPIC boasts former city officials, including former mayor Dave Norris and former councilor Dede Smith, who are ready to support candidates who traditionally haven’t been part of the political process.
Mayor Mike Signer held a rally January 31 and declared Charlottesville the capital of the resistance. Unity and Security for America’s Jason Kessler held his own vocal counter-demonstration at the same event. Photo by Eze Amos
Unity and Security for America
Issue: Defending Western civilization while dismantling cultural Marxism
Events: Meetings every Wednesday at 7pm at the Central Library
Supporters:At least two [Its president, Jason Kessler, did not respond to requests for information.]
Mascot: Pepe the frog
Info: usactionpac.org
Quote: “[Wes Bellamy] then proceeded to attack the Robert E. Lee monument, which is of ethnic significance to Southern white people.”—Jason Kessler
Kessler, whose claim to fame is unearthing Bellamy’s vulgar tweets and petitioning to have him removed from office because of the tweets and his call to relocate Confederate statues, has attracted statewide white heritage protectors, including former Trump state campaign manager and candidate for governor Corey Stewart.
