Jalane Schmidt, director of UVA’s Memory Project, hopes a student research team can get through Albemarle County’s records for sales of enslaved people by summer’s end. Photo: Eze Amos
It’s been over two years since a local resident threw the Court Square slave auction marker into the James River, and Charlottesville is slowly—yet surely—moving toward erecting a new memorial. Since 2020, the city’s Historic Resources Committee has met with several dozen descendants, gathering their input on how to properly memorialize the thousands of enslaved people who were bought and sold downtown.
On Tuesday, SUNY Binghamton history professor Anne Bailey, an expert on slavery in the United States, met with local descendants before giving a talk at the Central Library on memorializing the victims of slave auctions and healing from Charlottesville’s painful history. A recording of the event is available to watch on the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society Facebook page.
“[The descendants] are just going to meet with her and talk about commemorative events, and kind of explain what’s been going on here for the past several years in Charlottesville,” explained committee member Jalane Schmidt during an April 8 HRC meeting. “Dr. Bailey works with descendants of the Butler plantation sale [in Savannah, Georgia], and they’ve been gaining some traction with commemorative events in the last several years.”
Schmidt said she would ask participants to share notes from their meeting with Bailey, so the committee can use them to further guide descendant engagement. “It’s a balance between wanting to give them space, and also wanting that to inform the process.”
Last month, a small group of descendants also met with University of Virginia graduate students Jake Calhoun and MaDeja Leverett, who have been searching Albemarle County’s chancery records for sales of enslaved people for several months. So far, they have identified the names of over a dozen enslaved people who were sold on the courthouse steps.
It’s been more than two years since the Court Square slave auction marker was stolen and thrown in the James River. Photo: City of Charlottesville
Schmidt, director of UVA’s Memory Project, said during the HRC meeting that she may add another student to the research team, so they can try to get through all of the sale records by the end of this summer. However, the time-consuming project may not be completed until next year.
In February, the committee sent a progress report to City Council, detailing the descendant engagement process and requesting up to $1 million for the new memorial, which could be erected at a variety of possible locations, including Court Square, Court Square Park, adjacent to Number Nothing, or in front of the Albemarle County Courthouse—either in place of the old Monticello sign, or where the Confederate Johnny Reb statue stood. It remains unclear when council will allocate funding for the long-anticipated project.
“There is an expectation that one of the future projects is a significant physical memorial, likely in Court Square,” reads the report. “The second desire is an educational component that interprets the chattel slavery system throughout antebellum Albemarle County.”
“We do not anticipate that only one action or construction will be created, but rather a collection of projects serving unique but related purposes,” the report continues. “We anticipate that these projects will cost from $500K to $1M, [covering] locations throughout Charlottesville and Albemarle.”
During last week’s meeting, the committee also briefly discussed the draft of the downtown walking tour map, which is still being edited. Since 2020, a city subcommittee, including HRC members, has been working to revamp the antiquated map.
Member Dede Smith explained that the new map will move away from “broad themes” and highlight about 14 sites in Court Square, on Water and Market streets, in Vinegar Hill, and on the Downtown Mall. “We’re still grappling with what content to include and how to be inclusive,” said Smith.
“I know there’s been continual concern over the progress of this, but we really are trying to do something that is very different,” added chair Phil Varner. “Once we get there, it will be something that is hopefully used for a very long time, that is useful for people, and more representative of the area.”
The city continues to work on creating a memorial to replace the Court Square slave auction block plaque, which was stolen last year.
After over a year of debate surrounding Charlottesville’s stolen slave auction marker, the Historic Resources Committee began meeting with descendants of enslaved laborers, seeking their input on how to best pay tribute to the thousands of enslaved people bought and sold in Court Square.
The memorial’s story serves as an example of the process of creating new public monuments. And as Charlottesville continues to reevaluate its physical public spaces, stories like this will become more and more common.
At the beginning of the month, committee member and UVA history professor Jalane Schmidt, joined by city planner Robert Watkins, met virtually with nine descendants, including DeTeasa Gathers, Myra Anderson, Calvin Jefferson, Bertha French, and Diane Brown Townes. While most attendees have recent connections to the Charlottesville area, several live outside of Virginia.
During a May 14 committee meeting, Schmidt shared that the descendants urged them to be patient and not rush the descendant engagement process. “The process itself is just as important as what any eventual memorial might look like,” she said.
City Councilor Heather Hill asked if the descendants wanted the city to erect a temporary marker while the committee works on a permanent memorial, referencing the city residents who have placed homemade markers in Court Square since the plaque was stolen last year.
“We have heard from some facets of the community that would like to see something done sooner versus later,” Hill said.
Watkins and Schmidt explained that the descendants did not provide a definite answer, but were not anxious to put up something temporary.
“The thing I kept hearing was don’t feel pressured to move too fast, and to be listening to people into the process,” said Schmidt. “I did not hear from them, ‘yeah get something up there right away, that needs to be in place.’”
Committee co-chair Phil Varner questioned which descendants should have the most say in the creation of the memorial.
“It’s this huge spectrum of voices in this conversation,” he said. “How do we determine who we should listen to the most?”
“It seems to be that we should be prioritizing those who can trace their ancestry to Albemarle County, especially since this is the county courthouse,” responded Schmidt, pointing out that before emancipation, over half of the county’s population was enslaved.
Moving forward, Schmidt said she will meet again with the leaders of Descendants of Enslaved Communities at UVA, and ask them to help get more descendants involved.
“Fortunately, there’s been some really important work done by [genealogist] Shelley Murphy in tracking down people,” she said. “They’ve steadily built a database of names of descendants.”
Committee member Kay Slaughter also suggested reaching out to the Central Virginia History Researchers, which has engaged with descendants from the area.
Before next month’s committee meeting, Schmidt and Watkins plan to do one or two more virtual descendant engagement sessions. And as more people get vaccinated, the group hopes to host in-person meetings with descendants at Washington Park over the summer.
Tony Albert's "You Wreck Me 9" uses printed photographs and vintage Captain Cook ephemera on archival paper. Image Courtesy of Tony Albert and Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney.
Breaking walls: Miley Cyrus, watch out: multidisciplinary Australian artist Tony Albert comes in swinging with his latest work, Like A Wrecking Ball: Using Art and Humor to Confront Racist Statues in Australia and the USA. Scholar-activist Jalane Schmidt will moderate as Albert and Native American artist Nicholas Galanin address problematic colonial legacies. The virtual workshop is presented by the Kluge-Ruhe Aborginal Art Collection of UVA and The Fralin Museum of Art.
Thursday11/19, Free, 7pm. Registration and Zoom required. Kluge-ruhe.org.
In June, two blocks of 16th Street in Washington, D.C., were renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza. PC: Wikipedia User BDWARD3
Want to take a walk down Black History Pathway? Or maybe Waneeshee Way? Or even Tony Bennett Drive? Soon, you might be able to. These are among the honorary street names that area residents have submitted to the city in recent months.
After debating the issue late into the night during several meetings, Charlottesville City Council decided in September to send nearly a dozen honorary street name proposals to the Historic Resources Committee, seeking guidance on the evaluation process.
During its November 13 virtual meeting, the committee decided to completely revamp the honorary street naming policy before tackling the applications.
Until recently, the city rarely received new street name proposals. But around the country, people and governments have sought to commemorate the year’s events by redesignating their physical environment. In Washington, D.C., for example, two blocks of 16th Street were transformed into Black Lives Matter Plaza, with huge yellow letters painted on the pavement.
Charlottesville currently has a dozen honorary street names. Recent designations include Heather Heyer Way, honoring the victim of the 2017 white supremacist attack, and Winneba Way, named for our sister city in Ghana.
“Up until now this process has been very ad hoc,” said committee member Phil Varner. “We’re really trying to nail down [how] exactly should we do this…what exactly are the policy criteria, and what does the application actually look like for it [and] mean?”
Under the current policy, proposals are limited to individuals, organizations, entities, events, or something of local significance. While the committee agreed to keep these broad categories, it suggested that some honorary streets could be temporary, while others could be permanent, depending on the will of the nominator.
“Especially in a small city like this, [rotating] can be beneficial if there are this many people that should be honored,” said member Sally Duncan.
Committee member Jalane Schmidt expressed concern over the sunset period, and how it may lead to individuals “who’ve been excluded from conventional historical narratives” to only be recognized for a few years, while many city streets have had the names of racists for over a century.
After member Dede Smith pointed out that the city’s current honorary markers offer no information about who or what they’re named after, committee chair Rachel Lloyd suggested the creation of a website with a detailed history about each street name, as well as including them on the updated historic walking tour.
Smith also stressed the importance of street names being near the geographic location of the person or thing they are honoring. For instance, a portion of Avon Street is currently named after the late Franklin Delano Gibson, a celebrated philanthropist who owned a grocery store on the street for more than 40 years.
That won’t always be possible, though. “Because one of the reasons we’re doing this is out of equity concerns, there may be people who aren’t permanently associated with a distinct geography,” said co-chair Genevieve Keller. “We would need to memorialize and honor them anyway [and] find the most appropriate place.”
While some preferred that the street proposals be submitted by city residents, people who live on the street, or family members of the individual being honored, the committee decided to leave the applications open to anyone in the larger Charlottesville area.
However, a public notice will be sent to residents living on the streets with name proposals, so they can provide input on the decision.
The committee also decided to scrap the 500-word essay on the current application, and replace it with a series of short, direct questions about the street proposal.
After deciding on the policy changes, the committee briefly discussed the applications submitted to the city over the summer. Several seek to honor notable Black figures, like activist Wyatt Johnson and enslaved laborer Henry Martin, and historical events, like the razing of Vinegar Hill, while other proposals cover a variety of categories, including two in honor of UVA men’s basketball coach Tony Bennett.
In September, before turning to the HRC, City Council approved two of the original 13 applications. One renames a section of Grady Avenue after the late Reverend C.H. Brown, who built 12th Street’s Holy Temple Church of God In Christ in 1947. Behind the church, Brown also constructed several homes, helping the area to become a thriving Black neighborhood.
The other approved request honors the ongoing movement against police violence and systemic racism, recognizing Market Street between First Street Northeast and Ninth Street Northeast as Black Lives Matter Boulevard. It was proposed by community activist Don Gathers.
At its next meeting, the committee will officially vote on the naming policy changes, and decide which of the remaining 11 applications it should recommend for council’s approval, using the newly established guidelines.
A crew removes Johnny Reb from his pedestal. PC: Eze Amos
One down
Johnny Reb, the bronze Confederate soldier who has stood, musket in hand, outside the Albemarle County Courthouse since 1909, has been replaced by a patch of hay.
After the Unite the Right rally accelerated the national debate over Confederate monuments, Charlottesville finally took down one of our own. The Albemarle Board of Supervisors voted to remove Johnny Reb, officially known as “At Ready,” earlier this summer, and on Saturday morning a truck arrived to haul off the Lost Cause relic. A small crowd gathered to watch as the crew’s yellow ropes slowly lowered Johnny Reb off his pedestal.
The removal revealed a time capsule encased in concrete below the statue’s concrete plinth. Charlottesville Tomorrow found an old Daily Progress clipping in which the monument’s erectors declared that the capsule shall remain untouched “until the angel Gabriel shall put one foot on the land and one in the sea, and proclaim that ‘time shall be no more.’” Those plans went awry sometime in the course of the last 111 years—the capsule was breached by groundwater long ago, and when the Confederate relics contained within finally saw the light of day, they were so waterlogged as to be almost unrecognizable.
The time capsule buried below the “At Ready” statue is in bad shape after more than 100 years underground. PC: Eze Amos
UVA religious studies professor Jalane Schmidt, who has spent years researching Johnny Reb and lobbying for his removal, says “it was a relief” to see the statue come down. “It’s gratifying to see public opinion shift, especially among elected leaders,” she says.
Still, Schmidt has serious concerns about the monument’s future. As per the new law, these Confederate statues must be offered to a museum rather than just melted down. A dubious list of organizations volunteered to take Johnny Reb, including the Sons of Confederate Veterans. In the end, the Albemarle Board of Supervisors voted to send him to the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, a New Market-based public history organization with a checkered record: In February, C-VILLE wrote a story about the foundation’s (unsuccessful) attempt to secure state funding for a Black history museum, despite the all-white board neglecting to consult any Black people about it. Last year, the foundation actually installed a new Confederate monument on a Winchester battlefield.
Schmidt says we’ve “disposed of our toxic waste” elsewhere, but that plan “doesn’t bode well for the disrupting of the transmission of Lost Cause narratives.”
__________________
Quote of the week
“Our work is not done…The forces of destruction who didn’t want him to go are alive and well and in our midst.”
—UVA professor and activist Larycia Hawkins, at a ceremony held to cleanse and reclaim the former site of the Johnny Reb statue
__________________
In brief
Richardson rolls out
City Manager Tarron Richardson, the most powerful individual in Charlottesville’s municipal government, resigned Friday afternoon. The move won’t come as a surprise to those who have followed his tenure here. Richardson, City Council, and other city officials have repeatedly clashed during budget discussions and in the course of regular business. After helming the city government for 16 months, Richardson’s severance package includes a year’s salary: $205,000. City Attorney John Blair will step in as interim while a search is conducted.
Clark conquered
UVA’s Board of Visitors voted this week to remove the statue of George Rogers Clark from the Corner. The monument, which shows Clark and his men attacking Native Americans, has been the site of several protests this summer—one activist even tried to saw Clark’s head off, but couldn’t make it through the metal neck. The BOV also agreed to strip the names of slaveholders Curry and Withers from university buildings and “contextualize” the Jefferson statue outside the Rotunda.
Voting begins
Early voting in Virginia begins this Friday, September 18. Get registered online or at the registrar’s office, grab your ID, and make your way to the polls as soon as possible. This is the big one, folks.
In an ongoing effort to atone for its racist history, the University of Virginia could provide scholarships to descendants of enslaved laborers as soon as 2022. PC: Stephen Barling
Elijah. Julia. Sam. I took in every name, and let each resonate within me, as I quietly examined the granite slabs. I saw the name of my brother, then I saw it several more times. If he had been born just over 150 years ago, he could have been enslaved at the University of Virginia, alongside the rest of our family.
But what struck me even more were the unnamed. Of the 4,000 deep gashes inscribed into the memorial walls—each representing a person enslaved at the university—only 578 have names resting above them. Because they were viewed as property, and treated as such, the identities of more than 3,000 men, women, and children remain lost to history, and may never be discovered.
With its compelling symbolism and innovative design, the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers urges its visitors to confront these cruel realities of slavery, and honor the countless contributions enslaved people made to UVA, left unacknowledged for nearly two centuries. It is a site for learning, mourning, and remembering, as the university works to heal from its violent past.
As recent protests against systemic racism held at the memorial show, it also serves as a call for change. The painful effects of slavery can still be felt and seen around UVA today, and the school has a long way to go to achieve racial equity. But for many, paying respect to the Black people who built the university is the first step in the right direction, and offers a glimpse of a better future.
Long time coming
In 1619, the White Lion landed in Point Comfort, Virginia. The “20 and odd” Angolans aboard the ship were sold to Governor Sir George Yeardley, and brought to Jamestown—becoming the first enslaved Africans in England’s colonies in the Americas.
Nearly 400 years later, in 2007, the Virginia General Assembly issued an apology for the state’s role in the institution of slavery. UVA’s Board of Visitors followed suittwo months later, expressing “profound regret” for the university’s use of enslaved people.
Earlier that year, the board also voted to place a small gray stone marker in the ground near the Rotunda, honoring the “several hundred women and men, both free and enslaved, whose labor between 1817 and 1826 helped to realize Thomas Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia.”
Marcus Martin PC: Dan Addison/UVA Communications
“Most people step over it all of the time,” says Marcus Martin, MD, former vice president and chief officer for diversity and equity at UVA. The low stone “falls short in that it’s not very visible, and only talks about the period of 1817 to 1826. …Slavery didn’t end until 1865, and there were more than several hundred free and enslaved men and women [who] helped erect the university and maintain it.”
“The university, at that point, didn’t have the tradition of telling the full story about its history. Everything was focused on Jefferson,” says UVA history professor and associate dean Kirt von Daacke. “There was sort of a sense that Jefferson’s hand was in everything—he built it, he designed it. That was a vague myth.”
In 2010, two students—one an intern for University and Community Action for Racial Equity, the other a co-chair of the Student Council Diversity Initiatives Committee—took the controversy surrounding the marker as a chance to raise greater awareness about slavery at UVA, forming a group called Memorial to Enslaved Laborers.
The group organized community discussions on the creation of a memorial, among other initiatives. And the following year, it held a design competition.
“There were some neat concepts, but they were not of the quality to withstand the environment and test of time, [and] to be approved and erected on Grounds,” says Martin.
Accompanied by his assistant Meghan Faulkner and IDEA Fund chair Tierney Fairchild, as well as student leaders, Martin met with then-president Teresa Sullivan’s cabinet in 2013, proposing the university create a commission entirely dedicated to studying the university’s history of slavery, and recommending ways to commemorate the contributions of enslaved people—including a memorial.
According to von Daacke, it was not easy getting everyone on the Board of Visitors to agree to build the memorial “sooner rather than later.”
“When you start with projects like this, running counter to how you’ve done things before, there’s often a sort of fear-based perspective about it. That if we do this, it will bring protests. …That it’s talking about an unpleasant reality of the university’s past, and will be bad for the university, ” he explains.
“Our job [as the PCSU] was to convince everybody that no that’s not true. …Embracing difficult history is beneficial to us in a multitude of ways,” he says. “That takes some time. You have to do the research and public talks, where everyone gets used to hearing these stories, and you have to talk to people one-on-one. [But] protests aren’t going to come unless you do nothing.”
Kirt von Daacke PC: Supplied photo
In 2016, after years of lobbying, the BOV finally commissioned the memorial, and put together a design team: architecture firm Höweler + Yoon; alumna and architectural historian Dr. Mabel O. Wilson; landscape architect and professor Gregg Bleam; polymedia Nigerian-American artist Eto Otitigbe, and community facilitator Dr. Frank Dukes, co-founder of University and Community Action for Racial Equity and past director of the Institute for Environmental Negotiation at the UVA School of Architecture.
The design team immediately sought input from the community, sending out surveys and hosting public forums for students, staff, faculty, alumni, local residents, and descendants of the enslaved both inside and outside of Charlottesville, with the support of the PCSU.
In 2017, the BOV approved a final design and location for the memorial, and allocated funding toward its $7 million price tag the next year, alongside private donations.
After about a year of construction, the project was completed this April. Though its dedication ceremony had to be rescheduled for next April—during Black Alumni Weekend—due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the memorial is now open, “demanding you pay attention and interact with it,” says von Daacke.
The memorial “is really a reflection of the community in Charlottesville,” says Otitigbe, who is based in Brooklyn, New York. “[We] had a lot of interesting conversations with different community members and descendants…I am really thankful they all welcomed me and allowed me to do this, because I was essentially working with, in some way, the remains of their ancestors.”
Stone and symbols
The memorial’s stone was quarried nearby—it’s a variety of granite called Virginia Mist. The name fits: The memorial’s designers hope this stone can provide a physical representation of a murky and poorly documented past.
PC: Stephen Barling
“One of the first things we heard [from the community] was you can’t build a memorial that is meant to humanize the enslaved without picturing humanity in some way,” says von Daacke. “This was sometimes interpreted as a call for a figurative sculpture of an enslaved person,” like Isabella Gibbons, who was enslaved at UVA and became an educator in Charlottesville after emancipation, he explains.
“But of course at UVA, we can’t do that. We have no images of enslaved people at UVA. We have post-emancipation photos, [which are] probably not good images to use to capture what life was like in slavery,” he adds. “Or there are pictures of people who continued to work for the university during Jim Crow, and were treated by white Charlottesville and UVA as the faithful slave. Their picture and story were told by [whites], and is not reflective of who these people were.”
Instead, architectural historian Wilson proposed a more abstract, circular structure for the memorial, symbolizing the broken chains of slavery. It’s also a nod to the ring shout, a dance rooted in West African traditions celebrating spiritual liberation practiced by enslaved people, during which they clapped, prayed aloud, sang hymns, and shuffled their feet in a counterclockwise direction. The ring is 80 feet in diameter—the same as the Rotunda.
“It’s nice that [the memorial is] visible from town and not within the enclosure of the university, on the Lawn or on Grounds, where these people were forced to work,” says Jalane Schmidt, a UVA religious studies professor and community activist. “They had complete lives. They did not define themselves solely as laborers. …They were members of a community.”
The design team says the horizontal slashes that are spread across the interior wall of the memorial’s larger ring are reminiscent of scars from brutal whippings that once covered the enslaved peoples’ bodies. After years of examining historical records, researchers were able to find the names of 578 people enslaved at the university to add to the wall above the memory marks, along with 311 people known by their occupation or kinship relation. However, the rest of the marks remain nameless, laying bare the violent dehumanization of slavery.
PC: Stephen Barling
This wall “extends the narrative about who this African American community is…[and] allows us to have distinct conversations about what their service looked like,” says Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, and a member of the PCSU. “It really gives a better agency to people who were at some point largely dismissed.”
Every inch of the memorial was designed purposefully, and every detail is symbolic.
The eyes of Isabella Gibbons are inscribed on the outside of the wall. Otitigbe used a post-Emancipation photo of her to lightly carve her eyes into the rough-hewn granite, so they are only clearly discernible in early morning or late day.
“Her eyes are looking out to the community, and that can represent many things,” says Dukes. “To me, it’s asking ‘What are you doing? We’re here—what are you doing about it?’”
A second, smaller ring inside the larger circle contains a shallow water fixture, symbolizing the rivers used as pathways to freedom, as well as African libation rituals, baptismal ceremonies, and the Middle Passage. Once the fixture is turned on, water will flow over a historical timeline etched into the ring detailing the everyday experiences of enslaved people at UVA, beginning with the first enslaved Africans arriving in Virginia in 1619 and concluding with Gibbons’ death in 1889.
PC: Stephen Barling
Stepping stones adjacent to the memorial point to the North Star, which led enslaved people to freedom. And the brick walkway visitors use to enter the memorial will align with sunset on March 3, or Liberation and Freedom Day, when Union troops emancipated enslaved people in Charlottesville at the close of the Civil War.
The smaller ring encircles a fresh cut lawn, a space for gatherings, celebrations, performances, classes, and protests centered around topics of racial justice.
An excerpt of one of Gibbon’s writings from 1867 appears at end of the timeline: “Can we forget the crack of the whip, cowhide, whipping-post, the auction-block, the hand-cuffs, the spaniels, the iron collar, the negro-trader tearing the young child from its mother’s breast as a whelp from the lioness? … No, we have not, or ever will.”
In view
Douglas arrived at UVA as a graduate student in the ’90s. Confederate flags flapped from fraternity house windows, and students regularly popped up at parties wearing blackface. (Those things still happen, but with a little less frequency.)
Andrea Douglas PC: Eze Amos
“White supremacy was very much inculcated into the culture of the school,” she says. “Going to a university with that much blatant anti-Black racism, to have this [memorial] as prominent as it is [and] know there is a movement towards a kind of respect for the community the university sits in…It feels much different from when I got here.”
For activist Don Gathers, seeing the names—or lack of names—on the memorial for the first time was “incredibly powerful,” bringing him to tears, he says.
“To stand there and take it all in—it speaks volumes to you. You realize the struggle and sacrifice that those individuals made, and were forced to make, to bring us to the point we are now.”
Though the memorial is effective, Gathers believes the location could have been better chosen.
“Where it is, it still has the semblance of…the Rotunda and Jefferson himself looking down upon the enslaved,” he says.
“Community members told us that they don’t go on Grounds,” explains Dukes. “We don’t feel welcome. So if you build it on the Grounds…we’re not going to come. It’s not going to be for us.”
Third-year Black student activist Sarandon Elliott believes the location of the memorial makes it much more visible, especially to students.
“When people walk towards UVA, they’re going to have to see that. And I also like that it’s near the Corner, a really busy area. People walking past it can stop and reflect upon it,” says Elliott, president of the school’s Young Democratic Socialists of America.
It remains to be seen if the memorial’s current location—technically off Grounds but still very much amidst the UVA bubble, tucked between the hospital and the Rotunda, just across the street from the student-swarmed Corner—will attract a lot of Charlottesville residents.
Though it’s just about impossible to identify every enslaved person, von Daacke and other researchers continue to search for names, occupations, and kinships to engrave on the monument’s inner wall. (A handful have already been found since it was completed, he says.)
Jalane Schmidt PC: Eze Amos
Last year, UVA also began discovering the names of enslaved people through its new descendant outreach project, spearheaded by renowned genealogist Shelley Murphy, which will continue for at least the next two years.
The descendants have formed a leadership group, but are still getting themselves organized, according to UVA employee and descendant DeTeasa Gathers. They plan to conduct educational tours and talks at the memorial, when the pandemic finally comes to an end.
“We consider this very vital, because the history books in Virginia are not inclusive and not very detailed [on] the quandary of slavery,” says Cauline Yates, who is also a descendant. “[Students] are our up-and-coming leaders of the future. We’re trying to make sure that they understand what even happened in their very own backyard.”
“This is not completely about us. This is more about telling the unvarnished truth about what happened going forward,” says DeTeasa Gathers. “We see this memorial as people who were enslaved…but it did last for generations past. It’s important to not forget the generations behind it who have been affected.”
Structural change
Shortly after the murder of George Floyd, dozens of UVA Health employees gathered at the memorial, kneeling for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the amount of time Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin dug his knee into Floyd’s neck.
In addition to raising awareness about police violence against Black people, the group called attention to systemic inequality and racism in the health care system—bringing a crucial purpose of the memorial to fruition.
PC: Stephen Barling
Now that the memorial is finished, the university needs to answer its call to action, and implement real changes, says Schmidt.
The Memorial to Enslaved Laborers “is the sculptural, African American version of institutions’ spoken indigenous land acknowledgments, both now made with fanfare and solemnity: It’s a nice gesture,” she says. “But absent concrete material actions of repair, it remains just a gesture.”
Martin echoes Schmidt’s calls for sweeping structural change, pointing to the detailed list of recommendations the PCSU made in its final report to Teresa Sullivan in 2018.
For Martin, one of the most crucial issues facing UVA is its small population of Black students. While the state of Virginia is nearly 20 percent Black, only about 7 percent—a little over 1,000—of the university’s undergraduate students are Black.
UVA doesn’t just need to admit more Black students, but figure out how to attract and keep them here, explains Martin. He says the university offers admission to around 1,000 Black students each year, but only 35 percent of them accept.
A solution, he says, would be to offer more scholarships through the Ridley Scholarship Fund, minimizing the student debt for a demographic that statistically already has less wealth. The university could also explore ways to create a need-based scholarship fund for descendants of its enslaved laborers through the fund.
Martin also calls for the creation of more fellowships related to Black studies, so the school can attract more Black faculty—4 percent of the faculty of the state’s flagship university is Black.
Schmidt is all for more scholarships, but she believes UVA needs to include reparations in its admissions practices, like Georgetown University, which, since 2016, has given preferred admissions, or “legacy” status, to the descendants of those enslaved there.
UVA should not just aim to get more Black students, but also make them feel included and valued once they are on Grounds, says Elliott. This includes following up on the range ofrecommendations issued by the university’s Racial Equity Task Force last month, and removing racist symbols and names—from Alderman Library to the George Rogers Clark statue.
UVA student activist Sarandon Elliott believes the memorial must be accompanied by structural reforms. PC: John Robinson
“If we are not actively fighting racial and economic inequity, we are not properly honoring enslaved peoples,” she adds.
After spending an hour or so at the memorial, I left feeling pained. Black people at UVA, in Charlottesville, and across the country have endured so much violence and oppression. The memorial is here, but the violence has yet to cease.
But I also left with a sense of hope. Now more than ever, radical student leaders and activists of color like Elliott are holding the university accountable for its racism—without the initial push from students, it’s likely the memorial wouldn’t exist today. Through their efforts, and the efforts of the next generation, and the next, UVA may someday atone for its troubled past.
Activists in Buckingham have been fighting the pipeline since 2014. On Sunday, they won.
PC: Friends of Buckingham
Pipeline defeated
The Atlantic Coast Pipeline is history. In a surprise announcement on Sunday afternoon, Dominion Power called off the 600-mile natural gas pipeline that would have run from West Virginia to North Carolina. “VICTORY!” declared the website of the Southern Environmental Law Center.
The news is a major win for a wide variety of environmental advocacy groups and grassroots activists, who have been fighting the pipeline on all fronts since the project was started in 2014. The pipeline would have required a 50-yard-wide clear-cut path through protected Appalachian forest, and also disrupted a historically black community in rural Buckingham County.
Dominion won a Supreme Court case earlier this month, but that wasn’t enough to outweigh the “increasing legal uncertainty that overhangs large-scale energy and industrial infrastructure development in the United States,” says the energy giant’s press release.
Litigation from the Southern Environmental Law Center dragged the pipeline’s construction to a halt. Gas was supposed to be flowing by 2019, but less than 6 percent of the pipe ever made it in the ground.
The ACP had the backing of the Trump administration, and U.S. Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette blamed the “obstructionist environmental lobby” for the pipeline’s demise.
“I felt like it was the best day of my life,” says Ella Rose, a Friends of Buckingham member, in a celebratory email. “I feel that all the hard work that all of us have done was finally for good. I feel like I have my life back. I can now sleep better without the worries that threatened my life for so long.”
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Quote of the week
“It is past time. As the capital city of Virginia, we have needed to turn this page for decades. And today, we will.”
—Richmond mayor Levar Stoney on the city’s removal of its Stonewall Jackson and Matthew Fontaine Maury statues
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In brief
Loan-ly at the top
On Monday, the government released a list of companies that accepted loans through the federal Paycheck Protection Program, designed to keep workers employed during COVID’s economic slowdown. A variety of Charlottesville businesses accepted loans of $2-5 million, including Red Light Management, St. Anne’s-Belfield, and Tiger Fuel.
Renaming re-do
An advisory committee recommended last week that recently merged Murray High and Community Charter schools be renamed Rose Hill Community School, but this suggestion immediately raised eyebrows: Rose Hill was the name of a plantation that later became a neighborhood. The committee will reconvene to discuss options for a new moniker.
City hangs back
Charlottesville is one of a handful of localities that have pushed back against Governor Ralph Northam’s order to move to Phase 3 of reopening. While some of the state has moved forward,City Manager Tarron Richardson has decided to keep the city government’s facilities operating in accordance with Phase 2 requirements and restrictions. As stated on its website, this decision was made in order to “ensure the health and safety of staff and the public.”
Soldier shut in
Since at least the beginning of July, the gates of UVA’s Confederate cemetery, where a statue of a Confederate soldier stands, have been barricaded, reports the Cavalier Daily. A university spokesman says the school locked the cemetery because protesters elsewhere in the state have been injured by falling statues. Or maybe, as UVA professor Jalane Schmidt suggested on Twitter, “they’re tryna keep the dead from escaping.”
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.”
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.
Jalane Schmidt, a community activist and professor of religious studies at UVA, was recently sued for defamation for a comment she made in a C-VILLE Weekly article. PC: Eze Amos
On a chilly Thursday evening last week, several dozen people gathered at the Central Library for a talk on “the risks and rewards of public engagement” by someone who knows them all too well.
Jalane Schmidt, a community activist and professor of religious studies at UVA, was recently sued for a comment she made in a C-VILLE Weekly article about the plaintiffs suing the city to stop it from moving its Confederate statues. One of those plaintiffs, Edward Dickinson Tayloe II, objected to the story’s mention of his family’s history of slaveholding, and to Schmidt’s observation that the family had been “roiling the lives of black people” for generations. He sued Schmidt, this paper, and former news editor Lisa Provence for defamation, seeking $1.7 million. The lawsuit was dismissed October 28.
Schmidt’s case highlights current threats to academic freedom and public engagement, says Herbert Tucker, president of the UVA chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which sponsored the event. “If she is at risk,” he wrote in an email to C-VILLE, “in pursuing a call to community engagement that UVA now expressly encourages, and speaking her mind on a topic of public urgency that she has extensively studied, then all of us are at risk.”
In the McIntire Room, named for the man who commissioned the Lee statue, Schmidt began her speech with a deep dive into her background. She became passionate about “participatory cultural work” while conducting research in Cuba, where “learning was often conducted in the streets, or other open air spaces, or public forums,” she said.
After receiving tenure at UVA in 2015, Schmidt began teaching critical whiteness studies, which, in turn, piqued her interest in Zyahna Bryant’s petition to remove the city’s Robert E. Lee statue. In 2016, she started going to meetings of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces, which the city created to consider the issue. She was disappointed that, of the few people who attended, most were in favor of keeping the Confederate statues.
Wanting to “step up” her game about Civil War history, she did more research and connected with historians on Twitter, leading her to the work of respected Civil War scholars.
“It was from Ervin Jordan that I learned…that 52 percent of the local population was enslaved [before emancipation,]” Schmidt said. “Because this was such a compelling fact, I began to mention it every time I spoke to the BRC…if 52 percent of the population was enslaved, then those statues are lying to us.”
She, along with several other community activists, encouraged more people to attend BRC meetings and speak out against the statues. Before the commission’s final meeting, they handed out T-shirts saying, “I stand with the 52%.”
Following the release of the BRC’s report, City Council voted in February 2017 to relocate the Lee statue, and the announcement of the Unite the Right rally soon followed.
“It was not an option for those of us who oppose white supremacy to allow these groups to appear in public spaces unopposed,” Schmidt said. “That is what happened in the 1920s when the Klan crested here. I have not found any record in all of my research of any white people standing up to the Klan.”
Schmidt helped to organize counterprotests and publicized the Klan’s 1921 gift to UVA. Though she was “shell-shocked” after witnessing the violence of the rally first-hand, she continued to voice her opposition to the monuments, including by leading popular tours, with Andrea Douglas of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, that aim to provide a more complete story about the Confederate statues.
Of the lawsuit filed against her, Schmidt said she stands by her statements about Tayloe’s family, one of the largest slave-holding dynasties in Virginia. She called the lawsuit a “textbook case of white fragility” and an attempt to silence her.
Though the case was dismissed, with Judge Claude Worrell ruling that it had no legal basis to proceed, Schmidt remains displeased with way UVA handled the lawsuit. Virginia’s Office of Risk Management turned down her case, and the university did not ask the Virginia attorney general to overturn that decision.
Instead, the ACLU represented Schmidt and covered all of her legal fees.
“UVA has been encouraging [professors], especially as of late, to do public engagement scholarship,” she said. “But then the institution has not yet figured out what that means.”
Despite the risks, especially for those who do not have tenure, Schmidt encouraged more professors to speak to the press and be publicly engaged.
“Not everybody needs to be out in the barricades. There’s a whole lot of infrastructure that…supports the people who are,” she said, offering the example of making food for an activist group, babysitting kids during a protest, or supporting activists in court.
“There’s so many ways to be supportive that don’t require actual physical presence in the line of fire.”
