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Campaign pain: Joe Biden talks about Charlottesville a lot. Charlottesville isn’t sure he’s listening.

Area activists wonder why Joe Biden, who’s made Charlottesville a central part of his campaign, hasn’t visited the city. PC: Gage Skidmore

When Joe Biden announced last year that he was running for president, the first words he uttered were “Charlottesville, Virginia.” The campaign video that followed featured footage of the Unite the Right rally overlaid with a voiceover from Biden, responding to President Trump’s infamous comment: “[You] had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

Throughout his campaign, Biden has continued to bring up the events of August 11 and 12, 2017, most notably during his first debate with President Trump—yet he has not visited Charlottesville, or reached out to city residents since announcing his presidential bid. Those who were closest to the violence have noticed.

“Don’t use us as a prop,” says activist and deacon Don Gathers. “[The rally] is a very sore spot for many of us. It’s painful reliving that weekend.”

After neo-Nazi James Fields rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, “I stood there on the corner and watched the [EMTs] feverishly working on Heather…I literally saw life leave her body,” he says. “You just can’t get that sort of thing out of your head.”

Though Gathers will be voting for Biden, he believes the former VP still owes Charlottesville a visit, even if it’s after Election Day.

“He needs to have a public forum with some of the activists here,” Gathers says. “He needs to hear how we feel…We have got to make people [know] that we are more than a hashtag, more than just a blip on the troubled racial history of this country. We deserve better than that.”

UVA library employee Tyler Magill was also frustrated with Biden for using the rally as a talking point, but now tries to not let it bother him too much.

“When he first mentioned Charlottesville, I was originally very angry…but it’s going to happen,” says Magill. “The powerful will use my trauma…It is another thing that is taken from me, that is taken from us.”

Magill attended the August 11 torch-lit rally on the UVA Lawn just to observe. But after seeing the crowd of white supremacists and neo-Nazis surround and attack a group of student counterprotesters, he stepped in to support them. Magill was threatened, doused in gasoline, and hit on the neck with a torch, which damaged his carotid artery. A few days later he suffered a stroke.

Though Magill has largely recovered from his injuries, he still has a small blind spot, and a “difficult time having new memories stick,” explains his wife, Charlottesville Vice Mayor Sena Magill. “We’re still dealing with PTSD. He gets triggered all of the time.”

“I wouldn’t not do what I did,” says Tyler Magill, “but there are days I feel it has ruined my life.”

Like Gathers, Tyler Magill will be voting for Biden, but wishes the former VP had reached out to rally victims, as well as Black Charlottesville activists and residents.

“It would be nice if people would come to us,” he says. “Don’t say you fucking care…if you’re not asking people.”

While Sena Magill does not like seeing Charlottesville continuously brought up as a symbol of hate, she believes it’s important to note why Biden talks about Unite the Right so much. The rally is a crystal-clear example of Trump’s repeated failure to condemn white supremacy.

“The fact that hundreds of people thought…that they could have a Klan rally in 2017, and the president of the United States did not 100 percent disavow and say how horrendous that was…We have to use that to change,” says Sena Magill.

If not for the death of his son Beau and the pandemic, Magill believes Biden would have paid a visit to Charlottesville before the election. “We need to give the man a little more grace for that, for not coming here in 2017 and 2018,” says the city councilor.

UVA alumna Alexis Gravely doesn’t think there is a reason for any political candidates to use Charlottesville as a part of their campaign, unless they personally experienced it. As a reporter for The Cavalier Daily, Gravely trailed the neo-Nazis and white supremacists during the torch-lit rally on the Lawn, and witnessed their violent clashes with counterprotesters on the Downtown Mall.

“There were very few public figures, if any, who came to Charlottesville, and offered support to those who’ve been affected and the community,” says Gravely, speaking solely for herself. “So for me, anytime Charlottesville comes up in politics, it’s very disingenuous…They had nothing to do with that day, [or] picking up the pieces in the months and years afterwards.”

“Three years later, August 11 and 12, that whole week is a very difficult week for me,” she says. “To have to constantly relive it, just because I am tuned into politics, it’s not that great of a feeling.”

“Regardless of your party, Charlottesville isn’t a talking point,” she adds. “It’s a real event that happened.”

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In brief: No pipeline, name game, and more

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.” 

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Credit check: UVA students protest new grading policy

Rachel Hightman worries that graduate schools will assume UVA students did poorly in a class if they chose to not receive a letter grade PC: Eze Amos

With courses moved online for a significant portion of the spring semester, colleges across the country have had to decide on the fairest way to grade students in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. While some institutions, like Yale and Columbia, have opted for mandatory pass/fail policies, others, like the University of Virginia, have implemented a credit/general credit/no credit system, with the option to receive a letter grade. However, students had to choose between the credit and letter grade for each course by the last day of classes, April 28—before most final exams.

Since UVA Provost Liz Magill sent out a university-wide email announcing the policy on March 18, hundreds of students have protested against it on a variety of platforms, from Twitter to The Cavalier Daily, citing the numerous ways in which it puts certain students—particularly those of low socioeconomic status—at a disadvantage.

After reading about the challenges some students have experienced taking online classes, second-year Zaki Panjsheeri wrote an article for the Virginia Review of Politics advocating for a universal credit/no credit policy.

“There are some privileged students who can go home to a very safe living environment—like my own—who don’t have to work, are more or less safe financially, and can comfortably sit in their childhood bedroom and get a GPA boost…while there are other students who are fighting for their financial lives,” he says. It’s also important to consider “students’ mental health…lots of them are going into unstable family environments [and] abusive households.”

And on April 28, “many professors didn’t have grades updated at all,” he adds. “So you had no idea what kind of grade you were going to get.”

Second-year Tatiana Kennedy, who created a petition advocating for a universal credit/no credit policy, has many friends who are first-generation, low-income students on the pre-med track, some currently working as EMTs. Choosing between the credit and letter grade option was very stressful for them, she says, as “medical schools require you to have grades for all of your classes, if your school permits you to have [them].”

Even if a graduate school accepts courses receiving a credit versus a letter grade, “they are going to automatically assume that you did worse in those classes,” adds second-year Rachel Hightman, who identifies as a first-generation low-income student.

Third-year Summer Stewart, a first-generation and transfer student from a lower-middle class background, ultimately felt that she had no choice but to opt in to letter grades, because she intends to go to grad school, and is unable to take any more extra credits at community college.

“I definitely am jealous of other schools that are letting students make the decision after getting their final grades,” says Stewart, who has had to deal with spotty WiFi in her rural home, as well as other issues that impacted her learning experience. “I understand they are trying to put emphasis on how well you did amidst the pandemic…[but] it’s really making us all take a gamble.”

UVA is not the only school in Charlottesville that’s implemented such a policy. Piedmont Virginia Community College gave students until May 4, the last day of classes, to choose between receiving a pass/fail/incomplete or a letter grade for each of their courses. Sophomore Tyler Tinsley, who plans to transfer to a four-year university, believes the deadline was “kind of unfair,” as many students still have to take their final exams, which usually make up a significant portion of their grade.

“My worry is that if I take a P…maybe universities don’t want to see [that],”he adds. “It’s transferable, but it’s still up to the [university] whether they do or do not accept you.”

In response to student backlash, Magill released a statement April 25 explaining UVA’s rationale for the new grading policy. The university decided to have students choose their grading option before final exams because it did not want the credit option to be “understood as shorthand for receiving an undesirable grade.” However, it would include on all students’ transcripts that CR/GC/NC was the default grading option for the semester.

Before making this decision, “school deans and other academic leaders sought the input of faculty, students, and staff at the university and at peer institutions,” she added. “I heard from dozens of students advocating passionately for mandatory CR/NC, and dozens of students advocating just as passionately for their desire to have the ability to choose a grade for a course.”

But to Panjsheeri, the “dozens of students” Magill heard from do not compare to the hundreds who’ve signed Kennedy’s petition, as well as the nearly 1,400 students who’ve responded to UVA Student Council’s survey on the grading policy.

According to the survey’s preliminary data, about 50 percent of respondents preferred the current CR/GC/NC grading system with the option to receive a letter grade, while about 30 percent preferred it without any letter grades. However, 90 percent disagreed with the university’s deadline to opt in to letter grades, believing that students should have been able to see their final grades first. And 45 percent felt that the university did not adequately consult with students before making grading policy changes.

Per Magill’s latest statement, UVA will not make any more changes to its grading policy. In that case, the university has “a responsibility to collaborate with other universities, graduate programs, and medical programs,” Kennedy says. It “needs to insure that if a student decided to take [credit], it won’t impact their future.”