Tag: John Edwin Mason

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Grappling with the past: Historical society struggles to find its way

The historical society receives a subsidized lease from the city for its space in the former McIntire Library, across from Market Street Park. For the next three years, the society will pay $9,000 a year for the building, whose market value is estimated at $114,000 a year. PC: Staff Photo

By Ben Hitchcock

“I feel like I’ve been training for this one job for 30 years,” said Coy Barefoot when he took over as executive director of the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society in April of 2018. In an interview with ilovecville.com, the local author and media personality expressed his desire to rebrand the organization and create “a whole constellation of museums that will offer really rich experiences.”

Eighteen months later, Barefoot had resigned from the position. The society released a statement on October 12 thanking him for his work as executive director over the last year and a half.

Multiple members of the society’s board of directors declined to comment directly on Barefoot’s resignation, citing a policy that forbids discussing personnel decisions, and Barefoot did not respond to multiple requests for comment. He told at least one person, who later described the conversation to C-VILLE, that his pay was being cut amid fundraising difficulties.

Barefoot’s departure is the latest shake-up at an institution with a tumultuous recent past.

In 2017, the historical society found itself in an unwelcome spotlight when UVA professor Jalane Schmidt, hoping to conduct research in advance of the June Ku Klux Klan gathering in Charlottesville, was stymied in her request to view a collection of KKK robes and membership certificates owned by the society. “Just a few days before the Klan was coming, these people were so recalcitrant,” she recalls.

The society declined to reveal the names of the owners of the robes in its collection (they were finally revealed in May of this year). And it came under more criticism for failing to respond to the August Unite the Right rally that happened right outside its front door.   

At around the same time, the society was seeking to renew its lease. Since the 1990s, the organization has been given a deal on rent at 200 Second St. NE, a column-fronted hall (formerly a whites-only library) owned by the city, just a few yards from the statue of Robert E. Lee. ACHS’ rent is well below market rates, and that generous lease raises the stakes for everything that happens at the society.

The increased scrutiny over the lease renewal revealed years of dysfunction and declining membership. At a City Council meeting that September, Councilor Kathy Galvin called the nonprofit “an absolute mess,” and a local historian accused the society of having an antagonistic relationship with the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.

“It’s a shame that we basically have a black historical society and a white historical society, but that’s the way it’s played out,” former ACHS executive director Douglas Day later told C-VILLE, referring to the Jefferson School and ACHS.

The ACHS “just served as a genealogical society for white people, that’s what it seemed like,” Schmidt says.

Director Steven Meeks abruptly resigned in February 2018, and Barefoot was hired that April.

Under Barefoot, the historical society met nine of 10 goals set for it by City Council, and in February of this year agreed to a three-year lease with two one-year renewal options.

The market value for the building is estimated at around $114,000 per year. The historical society will pay just $9,000.

The current physical condition of the premises reflects an institution in transition. A recent visit revealed an empty exhibition room, maintenance equipment scattered around the main hall, and a cart of stackable plastic chairs in the middle of the lobby. The artifacts on display include a rusty cavalry spur from the Civil War skirmish at Rio Hill and a 1920s doll owned by a girl who died of pneumonia.

That collection doesn’t stand out in Charlottesville’s crowded historical tourism landscape. Shelley Murphy, who was elected chair of the board six months ago, conceded that it has been difficult for the society to attract visitors and philanthropy dollars. “Not that it’s competitive, but it is competitive,” Murphy says. “There’s I think 800 or more nonprofits in the area. For people coming in from out of town or even local, you have Monticello here, you’ve got Montpelier here, and you also have Highland.”

Despite these problems, there are reasons to believe that the organization can be turned around. The last two years have seen a near-total overhaul of the society’s board of directors. In addition to Meeks’ resignation, notable departures include Ken Wallenborn, a retired doctor who spent years arguing that Thomas Jefferson did not father the children of Sally Hemings.

“There seem to be more bona fide historians being asked to be involved, like Phyllis Leffler, Shelley Murphy…Certainly more women and people of color,” Schmidt says of the recent changes.

UVA history professor John Edwin Mason says he’s been “unofficially invited” to join the board. “I think that the society can play an important role in the reexamination of our history—something that’s happening in many places right now,” he says. “There’s tremendous energy out there at the moment.”

In order to survive, the historical society will need to shed its image as an insular and inaccessible club.

Barefoot made motions towards that end, renaming the institution the Charlottesville Center for History and Culture and launching a new website. But the site’s featured blog has not been updated since October 2018, and the sign in front of the building, as well as the Facebook page, still say Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society.

Board chair Murphy says Barefoot “started that change movement” and the society will build from there. “My hope coming in to the future is that we’re building local community partnerships,” she says. “We don’t want to just be sitting here and not serving.”

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Windfall blowback: UVA donation spurs backlash

Despite glowing coverage, many locals bristled at Jaffray Woodriff’s $120 million donation for a new School of Data Science at UVA. Photo by Eze Amos

UVA announced the biggest donation in its history, from hedge fund quant Jaffray Woodriff, with much pomp and circumstance, including an appearance by Governor Ralph Northam. But not everyone was happy with the McIntire alum’s decision to spend $120 million on a School of Data Science.

Some feel Woodriff’s donation could have served better causes. “One of the most important steps that @UVA can take to repair its relationship with black Charlottesville is to pay everyone who works for the university a living wage,” John Edwin Mason, associate professor of history at UVA, wrote on Twitter.

“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with a $120 million gift or school for data science,” Mason says in a follow-up conversation. “But UVA has been one of primary drivers of racial inequality, prospering off the impoverishment and displacement of African Americans. And here comes a new school of data science announced as if it’s oblivious to this much more urgent conversation.”

When asked about the criticism, William Foshay, executive director of the private foundation through which Woodriff and his wife made the donation, said Woodriff “is a domain expert of data science, and he pursues philanthropy in the area he knows the most about.”

Michael Payne, a Democratic candidate for City Council, says the donation “should start a conversation about the role UVA plays in the community.” And he’s critical of Woodriff’s plans to remake the western end of the Downtown Mall. “He purchased the Main Street Arena, which had an ice rink, and Escafe, which was a big space for LGBTQ community for many years, so he could make room for office space for startups he’s invested in,” Payne says.

Some UVA students expressed frustration as well.

Veena Ramesh, a second-year computer science student, worries the school could overwhelm existing programs. “The [new data science] school will have to heavily rely on the statistics and computer science departments,” she says in an email. Since “these two departments are underfunded and stretched too thin, having an entire school rely on the expertise these professors have is an insane request.”

Other critics have framed Woodriff’s donation as the latest in a series of contributions that ultimately benefit him or people of similar status. Referring to tax filings from the Quantitative Foundation, Matthew Gillikin points out on Twitter that most of Woodriff’s charitable giving has gone towards private schools, squash facilities, and UVA.

“All educational organizations the foundation has contributed to have personal connections with the family,” says Foshay. “Merrill is an educator, so she focuses on educational philanthropy.”

Woodriff previously attracted controversy in 2013 after donating $12.4 million to UVA to build a squash center at the Boar’s Head Sports Club. Although the resort is owned by UVA and grants students open access, its three-mile distance from Grounds has effectively limited the court to UVA’s official squash team, which is almost entirely composed of white students from affluent areas of the Northeast.

Cory Runkel, a third-year economics student, confronted then-UVA executive VP and chief operating officer Pat Hogan about the squash donation in a private meeting held by the Living Wage Campaign at UVA on April 16, 2018. “Hogan said the university had asked if the $12 million grant could be used for another purpose, but the donor was adamant that it be used for the squash center,” says Runkel.

“Squash is Woodriff’s avocation,” says Foshay.

Runkel, the current treasurer of the Living Wage Campaign at UVA, says, “If you have $120 million, it’s up to you to spend it. I would hope you don’t spend it making new consultants.”

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Re-righting history: Katie Couric documents what divides us

When Katie Couric came to town to talk to Zyahna Bryant, the CHS student who started a petition to remove Confederate statues, she didn’t realize the August 12 events would end in death. Photo: National Geographic/Tom Daly

During her 15-year tenure as NBC “Today Show” co-anchor, UVA alum and journalist Katie Couric was known as America’s Sweetheart. These days, she’s way past that chipper morning news persona, and having finished a six-part series delving into the most contentious issues facing the country today, she says she’s exhausted.

Couric was in Charlottesville April 4 to screen at the Culbreth and Paramount theaters “Re-righting History,” the first episode of the National Geographic series she’s made called “America Inside Out.” The Virginia Film Festival sponsored the event.

She was already working on the legacy of Confederate monuments and names on public buildings before she came here for the August 12 weekend. A high school friend of her daughter’s was going to Yale, and Couric wondered what it was like for an African-American to live in a dorm called Calhoun College, named for a slavery-advocating U.S. vice president.

And then the Lawn where Couric lived as a student was flooded with tiki torch-carrying white supremacists and neo-Nazis chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

“Little did we know what happened in Charlottesville would take a young woman’s life and change Charlottesville forever,” she said before the screening to a packed house at the Paramount.

Her documentary calls August 11 and 12 “one of the most savage displays of hate America has seen.”

Locals Zyahna Bryant, the then 15-year-old Charlottesville High student who started the petition to remove the Lee statue, activist Don Gathers and Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler, who says the rally’s purpose was to prevent the ethnic “cleansing of white people,” appear in the 47-minute episode that took Couric to New Orleans and Montgomery, Alabama, to explore how the Lost Cause rewriting of history came about and still impacts us today.

The August 12 clashes on the screen “look like the civil rights era all over again,” narrates Couric, and images of the July Ku Klux Klan rally here are interspersed with archival footage of the KKK in its heyday.

The Paramount audience, many of whom were present at the white supremacist invasions, booed when President Donald Trump came on the screen to denounce the hatred and bigotry “on many sides.”

Couric interviewed Confederate heritage defenders, descendants of slave owners now shamed by their ancestors and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who described how he came to remove the Big Easy’s monuments after his friend, Wynton Marsalis, told him what it was like to see them through his eyes.

Historians described how the spike in Confederate monuments came around the beginning of the 20th century as Jim Crowe and lynchings reasserted white supremacy, and the Lost Cause narrative sanitized slavery and the Civil War. “Gone with the Wind did more to shape the history than anything I’ve taught,” said UVA Civil War expert Gary Gallagher.

The landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision also led to a spike in naming schools after Confederate generals, a background of which many whites, like actress Julianne Moore, were unaware. Moore, who went to J.E.B. Stuart High School in Fairfax, led a petition to rename the school, whose moniker she now calls “shameful.”

“Why do we have such a hard time coming to grips with our past?” asked Couric.

After the screening, UVA’s Larry Sabato led a panel discussion with Couric, Bryant, Gathers, Gallagher, UVA historian John Mason and religious leader Seth Wispelwey.

Historian Gallagher doesn’t want a rush to remove statues, instead suggesting there’s more history that can be memorialized, such as the 250 black men from Albemarle who “put on blue uniforms” of the Union.

“People of color often have to put our trauma on the back-burner at the expense of teaching other people about white supremacy,” said Bryant.

And Gathers said, “If a monument to a slave owner is necessary to teach history, it’s time to change the curriculum.”

Thomas Jefferson came up as a prime example of America’s complicated past, and Mason suggested the TJ statue in front of the Rotunda be shrouded at least one week a year in recognition of the less-laudable aspects of the Declaration of Independence’s author, whom Mason called the “godfather of scientific racism.”

Mason also pointed out that many race-based issues, like stop and frisks, gentrification and education, were issues in Charlottesville before August 12. “We’re a very self-congratulatory city,”  he said.

Other current events were part of the discussion. Wispelwey called out Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania for prosecuting the three black men charged August 12. He also mentioned City Council’s decision a few days earlier to approve West2nd and asserted that its nearly 100 luxury condos and the 16 affordable units will not help with wealth inequality, with West2nd developer Keith Woodard sitting a few feet away in the audience.

Couric had the last word, and she called for continuing the oft-difficult conversations in which she admitted, “I find myself feeling uncomfortable.” But she said the more she talks to people, the more she’s convinced “people want to do the right thing.”

When Sabato asked what she would change, she said, “I wish we were in a place where there would be a little less harsh judgment.” And she cited the wisdom of her mother, who said, “You get more flies with honey.”

The series premieres at 10pm Wednesday, April 11, on the National Geographic channel.

Clarification April 11: Zhayna Bryant’s comment about African American’s trauma being put on the back burner specifically addressed teaching others about white supremacy.

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Skeletons in the closet: Historical society displays KKK robes, keeps owners secret

Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society president Steven Meeks points out details in the emblem on a 1920s KKK robe to onlookers Wes Bellamy, Jalane Schmidt and Jane Smith. Photo Eze Amos

 

After several weeks of prodding by a UVA researcher, the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society produced two of the 26 Ku Klux Klan robes in its collection, but its president refused to reveal which of the city’s citizens wore those robes in the 1920s.

The yellowed robes were stretched out in the exhibit hall of the historical society July 6 for a private viewing that included the media, UVA researchers and members of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces.

Two of the 26 KKK robes in the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society’s museum collection saw the light of day two days before the Loyal White Knights of the KKK hit Charlottesville. Photo Eze Amos

The robes were discovered in a shed in the eastern part of the city in 1993, according to the historical society. The Klan apparel was stored in a crate and had been exposed to dirt, heat, humidity and wear.

The resident who discovered and donated the robes did not request that his or her identity be concealed, nor did the donor request that the original owners of the robes remain anonymous, says historical society president Steven Meeks.

“Due to the sensitive nature of these artifacts, and in the interest of protecting the privacy of the descendants of both the donors and the original owners of the artifacts, at this time the society is not disclosing the address where the artifacts were found, nor the identity of the donor or the names of the two Klan members associated with this collections,” says Meeks.

Along with the robes was a KKK certificate of knighthood dated June 1, 1926. A facsimile of the certificate was enlarged and the name of the Klansman was redacted.

Meeks did not attempt to contact the donors, he says. He cited the impending visit of the Loyal Knights of the KKK as the reason for protecting the owners and their descendant

That decision caused some concern among the historians and members of the blue ribbon commission present.

UVA Associate Professor Jalane Schmidt, who is researching UVA’s ties to the KKK, which donated $1,000 to Memorial Gym in 1921, says she filed a research request with the historical society in mid-June to view the robes and received no response.

UVA prof Jalane Schmidt compared seeing the robes to going to a funeral, where you know someone died, but there’s still a heaviness in actually seeing the casket. Photo Eze Amos

She believes the robes should be displayed and the owners revealed. “This is not good practice for a historical society,” she says.

John Edwin Mason is a UVA history professor who served on the blue ribbon commission. If the historical society displays the robes, as Meeks suggested it might, to understand them fully, its job would be to interpret the artifacts, says Mason, “You can’t do your job as a historical society without the provenance being attached to the display of this archive. It just can’t be done.”

Mason questioned protecting the identity of owners “who are long since dead.” Knowing who wore the robes “is essential to understanding the role of the Ku Klux Klan in Charlottesville society,” he says.

Meeks did say the wearers of the two robes displayed “were neither one prominent members of the town.”

Steven Meeks. Photo Eze Amos

But a June 28, 1921, Daily Progress article on the newly organized Klan chapter and its inaugural cross-burning at Monticello says the event was attended by “hundreds of Charlottesville’s leading business and professional men.”

And a 1922 Progress story notes that robed and masked Klan members showed up with a floral tribute with three Ks spelled out in white flowers at the funeral of Albemarle Sheriff C.M. Thomas.

“I think [Meeks] is being overly cautious when it comes to the people who at the time were associated with the Klan,” says Mason. He says he’s much less bothered with keeping the names of the donors secret.

But Don Gathers, who chaired the blue ribbon commission, says what the Klan members stood for is “morally wrong,” and the fact that the donors did not request anonymity “raises the question why” Meeks would take that stance.

Doug Day, former executive director of the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, says he displayed the robes in 2005 or 2006. “At the time, the provenance was already smudged,” he says. The garments were found in Belmont when someone bought a house there, he adds.

Day says he would have “real reservations” about releasing the names of the owners and donors. “Why expose them? To what end?” he asks. “It’s perfectly in the purview of the historical society to withhold the names.

Attorney and lifelong Charlottesville resident Lewis Martin says Meeks discussed the issue with him. “It wasn’t so much a legal decision as about where we are now,” says Martin. “The historical society didn’t want to expose any descendants” of Klan members, nor discourage anyone who might want to donate artifacts to the organization.

 

 

 

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Teaching moment: Renaissance tradition v. Title IX

Critics say this panel of Lincoln Perry’s mural in Old Cabell Hall is inappropriate. Art historians say it’s part of a long classical tradition, and should be seen in the context of the whole work. Staff photo

While Charlottesville debates a petition to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, a quieter controversy has been ongoing at UVA about a prominent work of art.

One day after Rolling Stone came out with its now discredited “A Rape on Campus” on November 19, 2014, the Cavalier Daily wrote about artist Lincoln Perry’s acclaimed mural in Old Cabell Hall, “The Student’s Progress,” which depicts fictitious student Shannon’s journey through the university.

“Props to the University for knowing how to take a joke,” said the Cavalier Daily about one wall on the left staircase depicting partying students.

Subsequent coverage of the mural was not so amused.

Less than a week later, UVA music professor Bonnie Gordon took aim at the mural in a piece she wrote for Slate titled, “The UVA gang rape allegations are awful, horrifying and not shocking at all.”

Wrote Gordon, “The mural depicts, among other scenes of daily life at the University of Virginia, a male faculty member standing on a porch and tossing a mostly naked student her bra as his beleaguered wife comes up the stairs.”

That panel is in an alcove also on the stairs, and Gordon says undergrads who pass it are bothered and she’s seen parents shaking their heads at the painting. Nor is she a fan of the scene of the male student duct-taped to a column at the Rotunda in which a presumably drunk girl is being dragged off.

“I don’t want that mural in a teaching space or in a student space,” says Gordon. Nor is it the UVA experience she wants her children to experience, she says.

A committee was formed to examine the mural in January 2015, and it submitted more than one recommendation to the university administration, according to UVA spokesperson Anthony de Bruyn. A decision has not been made, he says.

The mural was commissioned in 1996, funded by a prominent group of donors. Perry worked on the piece for 16 years, and the final panels were unveiled in 2012, including the ones Gordon finds objectionable. “It would be different to me if it were in an art museum,” she says.

“Museums are teaching facilities,” says Richard Guy Wilson, who is chair of the university’s public art committee and a mural benefactor. Old Cabell Hall is a “preeminent art building” and Perry’s mural plays off the copy of Raphael’s “The School of Athens” there, he says.

“We will become the laughing stock of the country” if the mural is removed, he says.

Perry is “arguably the best mural painter in the country,” says Paul Barolsky, who teaches Italian Renaissance art and literature at UVA. “He’s a superb draftsman and storyteller and he painted an allegory of UVA.” The idea of removing the panel, says Barolsky, is “preposterous” and sets “a dangerous precedent.”

He asked his students to look at the mural. “They just shrugged their shoulders,” he says. “It’s not obvious. One thought it was streaking.”

He says, “If you start to cover up paintings that offend one person or another, where do you draw the line? Should I not teach Italian masters because of nude figures?”

Perry’s mural is a contemporary reinterpretation of the classical theme of the virtues and vices, which comes from a long tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle and which may make some people uncomfortable, explains Lyn Warren, who owns Les Yeux du Monde gallery and who sells Perry’s works.

The artist is not trying just to paint some salacious scene, she says, and he balances good and evil, conflict and harmony. “That’s why it stays interesting,” she says. The mural is full of references to philosophy, literature and art, recreated in the context of Jefferson’s university, she says.

“It’s a masterpiece,” says Warren. “After Monticello and the Lawn, it’s one of the most important art works in this area. It’s one of the university’s greatest treasures.”

History professor John Mason is a fan of the mural and particularly likes the way it “mashes through the gentility that is UVA.” He likes the bacchanalia scene because “UVA can be uptight. It’s a feast for the eyes.” And he likes the satire in the work.

However, like Gordon, he finds the panel with the “professor and young woman clearly interrupted in hanky-panky” inappropriate. Where once, in what he calls “the ‘Mad Men’ era,” a university professor may have considered attractive female students a “perk,” he says, now there’s no faster way for a faculty member to lose his job.

“We shouldn’t smirk at it any more,” he says. “If it came today, no one would allow that panel. Times change, sometimes very quickly.”

Mason says he doesn’t have an answer about what should be done. “I’m not saying it should be painted over,” he says. “Do you offer the painter a chance to redo it? Do you make it a teaching moment?”

That’s a debate that remains ongoing. And while Perry declined to comment for this article, in a 2005 interview conducted by his wife, Ann Beattie, he said, “I was glad if people brought their own interpretations to my work.”