Beginning October 1, guns will be prohibited at government buildings like City Hall, as well as in parks and recreation and community centers, and near permitted events. PC: Skyclad Aerial
In June, the Virginia General Assembly passed a slew of gun control bills, including one that allows cities and counties to prohibit guns on public property. Localities across the state, like Newport News and Alexandria, have since enacted such a ban—and last week, Charlottesville followed suit.
Beginning October 1, guns will be prohibited in parks, buildings, and recreational or community centers owned by the city. They’ll also be banned on public streets or rights-of-way used for—or adjacent to—a permitted event, according to an ordinance unanimously passed by City Council on September 8.
What might have seemed like a straightforward progressive reform has, in fact, stirred controversy.
Anti-racist activist Brad Slocum fears the ordinance will be selectively enforced, pointing to the infamous Unite the Right rally, during which Charlottesville and state police officers stood by as white supremacists attacked counterprotesters.
“There’s ample recent and historical evidence that these kinds of ordinances…are not usually enforced against groups or individuals that are perceived as friendly to the police or the state, [like] militias, white supremacists, and similar types,” says Slocum, who supports defunding the police. “Whereas they do seem historically to be enforced against Black, left-wing, or otherwise non- or anti-establishment groups and individuals, sometimes severely.”
City resident Sean Reid also believes the law will disproportionately impact Black people, citing CPD’s long history of racism and overpolicing. According to Charlottesville Open Data, about 54 percent of people arrested by CPD since 2015 have been Black, even though the city is only about 18 percent Black.
Police officers are also not going to be posted at every city property, leaving many without a way to defend themselves or a sense of safety, says UVA grad student Ben (who asked that we not use his last name).
Though he views gun violence as a “non-issue” in the places where the city has now banned guns, Ben, who is a gun owner, also questions whether the law will be an effective way to prevent it, pointing to shootings that have occurred in places where guns were banned.
(Due to the varying definitions of “mass shooting” and “gun-free zone,” research remains unclear on whether shootings occur at increased rates in gun-free zones.)
Speaking only for herself, City Councilor Sena Magill says she too worries about the “unintended consequences” the ordinance could have, but feels that it is “the right way forward,” specifically because of the violence and trauma surrounding Unite the Right.
“If this ordinance had been in place on August 12, 2017, hundreds of people would not have been able to legally gather on park property and intimidate and threaten my friends and family,” she says. “I [also] don’t want someone to be able to walk into City Hall with a gun on their hip…and be able to intimidate the City Hall staff.”
“We’ve seen extremists exploit lax gun laws to terrorize the public,” adds Mike Fox, legislative lead for the Crozet chapter of gun control advocacy group Moms Demand Action. “We saw it with Unite the Right in Charlottesville, earlier this year when armed demonstrators descended upon Richmond, [and] we’ve seen it across the state, where you have armed citizens showing up at government meetings, intimidating lawmakers [and] voters.”
According to spokesman Tyler Hawn, CPD is creating an educational and awareness campaign on the ordinance “to ensure understanding and compliance.” It will alert the public of where they can and cannot legally carry a gun, and the consequences that can come with violating the ordinance, a Class 1 misdemeanor: up to a year in jail, and a fine of up to $2,500.
Updated 9/16 to clarify the racial disparity in arrests made by CPD
Joslyn Grimes (center) poses for a picture with her family after graduating at Albemarle High School on Saturday, May 23, 2020. Students filtered into the parking lot in five-minute intervals to experience the modified ceremony due to social distancing guidelines. PC: Zack Wajsgras
Rad grads
Charlottesville’s 2020 high school graduates imagined they’d be walking across a grand stage right about now, with “Pomp and Circumstance” blaring as an auditorium applauded. That’s gone, of course, but the virus hasn’t stopped our schools from showing love for their seniors. Districts around town have held variations on the traditional graduation ceremony, providing graduates with a chance to do more than just fling their caps toward the family’s living room ceiling.
Although school was originally scheduled to run through June 5, county schools decided to end “remote learning” on May 22, and held graduation events this week. At Albemarle High, students could make an appointment to walk across a tented, outdoor stage and receive a diploma while families and photographers looked on.
In the city, where lessons are (at least theoretically) continuing for the next two weeks, Charlottesville High put on a “victory lap” event—students donned their caps and gowns and drove around the school with their families, while teachers and staff stood by the roadside hollering congratulations and holding signs. The lap concluded at the front of the school, where graduates walked across the “stage” and received their diplomas. On the originally scheduled graduation day, the school will stream a congratulatory video, featuring footage from the victory laps.
In the past, most of the area’s public high schools have held their ceremonies at the John Paul Jones Arena. This year’s celebrations are far less grand, but they show the creativity, resilience, and sense of humor required in this moment—and they’re certainly as memorable as a valedictory address.
______________________
Quote of the Week
“I’ll tell you what—I think it’s been a spectacular success.”
—Virginia Beach Mayor Bobby Dyer on Memorial Day weekend. According to the city’s police, there were no major social distancing
violations on the area’s jam-packed beaches.
______________________
In brief
Pay up
The neo-Nazis who helped organize Unite the Right have, unsurprisingly, behaved poorly throughout the ensuing court case against them. On Monday, three defendants in Sines v. Kessler were ordered to pay $41,300 as a penalty for violating orders to turn over evidence related to the case, reports Integrity First for America, the organization backing the suit. Earlier this year, defendant Elliot Kline was charged with contempt of court and faced jail time as a result. The case is ongoing.
In the hole
After furloughing more than 600 employees with little notice, UVA Health System executives provided staff with more information on the institution’s deficit of $85 million per month. In a virtual meeting between School of Medicine faculty and Executive Vice President for Health Affairs Dr. Craig Kent earlier this month, Kent explained that the health system had a budget margin for this past year “of essentially zero” and had low reserves compared to other institutions, reported The Daily Progress. Naming several other money troubles, Kent admitted the institution hasn’t “run very efficiently over the years,” and promised it would make major financial changes.
Goodbye generals?
Years of debate (and violence) over the city’s infamous Confederate statues could soon come to an end. Four days after Governor Ralph Northam signed bills allowing localities to remove or alter Confederate monuments last month, Charlottesville City Manager Tarron Richardson told City Council via email that he would like to hold 2-2-1 meetings to discuss the removal of the Lee and Jackson statues, reported The Daily Progress. Richardson asked for the meetings, which would not have to be open to the public, to be held after council approves the city’s fiscal 2021 budget, which is expected to happen next month.
Hydroxy hoax
In a Sunday interview with “Full Measure,” President Trump admitted he was no longer taking daily doses of hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug he claimed could prevent or treat coronavirus, despite mounting scientific evidence to the contrary. Just last week, he dismissed the findings of a study funded by the National Institutes of Health and UVA, which concluded that the drug had a higher overall mortality rate for coronavirus patients in Veterans Administration hospitals, calling it “a Trump enemy statement.” Trump has yet to apologize for those remarks, still claiming in the interview that “hydroxy” has had “tremendous, rave reviews.”
Respectful distance
With social-distancing regulations in place, traditional ceremonies were off limits this Memorial Day, but some locals still found ways to commemorate the holiday. An enormous American flag floated over the 250 Bypass, thanks to the fire department, and residents showed up at the Dogwood Vietnam Memorial to pay their respects throughout the day, including a trumpet player who joined in a nationally coordinated playing of “Taps.”
Frozen out
Laid off workers looking for a new position amidst the ongoing coronavirus pandemic won’t have an easy time of it, as several of the city’s major employers—including the City of Charlottesville, the University of Virginia, and Albemarle County Public Schools— have announced hiring freezes. Among the positions on hold in city government are the heads of the departments of Parks & Recreation and Public Works (both currently being run by interim directors), along with traffic supervisor, centralized safety coordinator, and others.
As mayor of Charlottesville during the violent white supremacist invasion in 2017 that killed Heather Heyer and injured dozens, Mike Signer earned a place in the city’s history, and in the national spotlight.
Now, Signer has turned his leadership during the Summer of Hate into a book—one that, like the Charlottesville book written by former governor Terry McAuliffe, will not be launched in Charlottesville. (According to his publisher’s website, a book launch was planned for Richmond on March 10. The ensuing book tour does not include Charlottesville, though Signer says an event is tentatively planned at UVA law school.)
Signer’s arc in the mayorship—from a triumphant declaration of the city as the “capital of the resistance” in January 2017, to decamping from the infamous “Blood on your hands” council meeting post-Unite the Right and being called to task by his fellow city councilors that August—provided a trajectory previously unseen on City Council, one worthy of a flawed hero in a Greek tragedy.
Indeed, the title of his first-person account, Cry Havoc, comes from Marc Antony’s battle cry of “havoc” in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The reference to classical tragedy continues in the book’s preface, which lists a cast of major characters from the Summer of Hate.
Signer, who faced a barrage of invective at almost every council meeting during his term from 2016 to 2019 and a parody Twitter account that describes him as “Founder, Capital of the Resistance & really important guy,” has his share of local detractors, some of whom will see his account as self-serving.
His response: “I think they should read the book. I try to be extremely honest and self-reflecting about my mistakes. I talk about the dangers of scapegoating. I talk about how I was tempted to scapegoat others. That certainly wasn’t the aim of the book.”
His intention, he says, was to provide “a useful first-person account from my perspective of this event, which it seems clear is going to be among modern American history’s touchstone events,” like Selma or Hurricane Katrina or Kent State.
He says, “I had a really unique perspective on this.”
And Signer was in the unique position of feeling the hate from both sides. He received enough anti-Semitic trolling from white nationalists that the Anti-Defamation League contacted him and reported it had compiled a file with 800 attacks. From critics on the left, he was dubbed “neo-fascist” and “Hitler’s best friend.”
What happened in Charlottesville, he says, is a microcosm of “democracy under siege” during the Trump era. “I have really deep feelings about Trumpism across the country,” adds Signer, who also authored 2009’s Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies.
In Cry Havoc, he explains some of the “more risky” actions he took as mayor, such as declaring the city the capital of the resistance during a giant press conference that drew hundreds, but also put the city in an awkward position because he didn’t obtain a permit, which made it difficult to cite Richard Spencer for his unpermitted tiki-torch rally later in Lee Park, according to the Heaphy Report.
Among the things he’d do differently now is explain more frequently the limitations of the mayor in Charlottesville’s city-manager-as-CEO form of government, he says.
He doesn’t deny pushing the bounds of the weak-mayor system, and when he blamed then-city manager Maurice Jones and former police chief Al Thomas in a Facebook post for the failures of August 12, he faced censure by his colleagues on council.
In the book, Signer calls most of their complaints “petty or plain false.” He chose to apologize rather than put the city through further turmoil by fighting the disciplinary action, he writes, and he agreed to conditions, such as not meeting with staff alone or making pronouncements as mayor without another councilor with him. However, in the footnotes, he points out that he ended up ignoring most of the restrictions placed on him.
He reconsiders the city’s attempts to discourage counterprotesters from showing up when the KKK came to town July 8, 2017, and the suggestion that locals should “not take the bait.” That could have been cast differently to acknowledge the people who wanted to bear witness to hate, says Signer.
His leap in front of the LOVE sign on the Downtown Mall August 17 is another wince-inducing incident. “It was totally tone deaf,” he concedes.
The book reveals previously unknown details—although not without contradiction. Signer alleges that Bellamy called him after the August 12 debacle to say both Jones and Thomas should be fired. Bellamy denies that he ever said that.
According to Signer, the Virginia Municipal League threatened to cancel the city’s liability insurance after he took aim at Jones and Thomas on Facebook. It also demanded the independent review that became known as the Heaphy Report not be released to the public.
“Thus I was put in a virtual straitjacket,” writes Signer. “I was told in no uncertain terms not to say anything further about the failures that had occurred, lest I expose myself personally to the cost of defending claims.”
One of the biggest struggles from the three white supremacist events of 2017—Spencer’s tiki-torch march around the Lee statue in May, the KKK in July, and Unite the Right in August—was “wrestling with the First Amendment,” says Signer.
He was repeatedly confronted with “First Amendment absolutism,” an interpretation by federal courts that he says made it almost impossible for state and local governments to limit potentially violent events. In his book, he introduces little-known 20th-century Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who argued for more practical restrictions in the face of “planned imminent incitement.”
Signer, who’s currently vice president and general counsel at local digital product developer WillowTree, defends council’s attempts to move the rally to McIntire Park because of public safety concerns. “I worked with City Council to override the city manager, police chief, and city attorney,” he says, hiring an outside law firm to inform Jason Kessler his permit would be granted for McIntire Park.
Not surprisingly, Kessler sued, and on the night of August 11, just before Kessler’s neo-Nazi cohorts marched through UVA grounds with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” a federal judge ruled the rally would stay in then-called Emancipation Park.
After the attack on UVA students standing in counterprotest around the Thomas Jefferson statue in front of the Rotunda, Signer says he got a text from then-UVA president Teresa Sullivan, asking the city to file a “motion for reconsideration based on new evidence”—the violence that had just occurred. But it was too late.
In his penultimate chapter, “Overcoming Extremism,” Signer details some of the lessons learned from Charlottesville’s experience. One of those is to separate antagonistic groups, which didn’t happen here and which “we wanted to do at McIntire Park,” says Signer.
When Governor Ralph Northam banned weapons from the Capitol grounds at the January 20 Second Amendment rally, Signer believes it was because of lessons learned from Charlottesville.
History and conflict are complicated and rarely play out in black and white. The best learning comes from the gray areas, he says, not from Hallmark or Hollywood treatments that neatly tie up events. “There’s a tradition that you see the truth and the learning in the honest account of the messy parts,” he says.
And one of the most valuable lessons of 2017 was it “showed the country how violent the alt-right is.”
At the first City Council meeting after the violence of Unite the Right, on August 21, 2017, furious protesters took over the dais and called for Signer’s resignation. Photo: Eze Amos
‘What is Mike Signer saying?’
“The Hon. Michael Signer” (as he’s identified on his book jacket) says he has tried to be “extremely honest and self-reflecting” in his new book. But it may take more than that to rehab our former mayor’s reputation here in Charlottesville.
In the fallout from the white nationalist rallies in the summer of 2017, complaints weren’t limited to the fellow city councilors who officially censured him or to the residents calling for him to resign. As newly unearthed public records indicate, local Democratic mega-donor Sonjia Smith, whose daughter was assaulted at the rally, also criticized his performance after Unite the Right.
“I’ll add my voice to the voices of many saying, ‘Why did the police stand by and do nothing?’ and, ‘What is Mike Signer saying?’” Smith wrote in an email to public relations specialist Susan Payne.
“Mike is not doing himself any favors in his discussion of the police response,” she added. “I listen to him, and I realize that I will do everything in my power to stop him from being in a position of authority over me and the people I love.”
Payne forwarded the response to Signer, who replied, “This is a problem.”
Chris Wayne and Brian Lambert, the two men previously arrested for attempting to remove tarps from the Confederate stautes, showed up outside the courthouse on Wednesday in support of the monuments.
A judge has ruled that Charlottesville can’t remove the two Confederate statues that stand downtown, saying Wednesday that doing so would be in violation of a Virginia historical preservation law.
On the first day of a three-day trial, Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Richard Moore issued a permanent injunction that essentially demolished the defendants’ last argument and decided the outcome of the two-and-a-half-year case that followed City Council’s 2017 votes to remove the Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson statues.
Moore sided with the interpretation of the plaintiffs— the Monument Fund, Sons of Confederate Veterans, and 11 individuals—about the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, arguing that it wouldn’t be legally sound to say the Virginia law that protects war monuments was created with racial prejudice—even if there’s “reasonable suspicion” that it was. He also cited the fact that the law was amended multiple times, explaining that the way it’s applied today doesn’t fall in line with racially discriminatory views.
“Statues do speak, if at all, about history…even history we don’t like,” Moore said.
Meanwhile, a shouting match erupted outside the courthouse between two men holding a Confederate flag and a man and a woman who arrived after with a flag bearing the antifa logo.
Charlottesville and Albemarle County police officers stood by watching as the individuals shouted profanity-laced insults across Park Street and cars drove by honking their support for either side. The two men holding the Confederate flag were Chris Wayne and Brian Lambert, who were convicted of trespassing and destruction of property after they attempted to remove the tarps from the Lee and Jackson statues multiple times before the judge ordered the covering removed in February 2018.
Over the next two days, Moore will hear arguments on the amount of damages to award to the plaintiffs, who say they were emotionally impacted by the statues being covered with black tarps for 188 days after the Unite the Right rally. City Council had voted to shroud the statues in response to the violence and the murder of Heather Heyer and death of two state police officers.
Eight of the plaintiffs testified, detailing their distress in instances when they passed by the covered monuments but were unable to see them. Jock Yellott, executive director of the Monument Fund, teared up when talking about how Lee’s memory has been “slandered” by City Council.
Each plaintiff is seeking $500 in damages, but most have signed documents say they’ll donate any money received to either the Monument Fund or the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The plaintiffs’ legal counsel is seeking $600,000 in attorneys’ fees as well.
Although the case won’t officially be decided until Friday, the plaintiffs are celebrating a victory as Charlottesville will not be moving the statues anytime in the foreseeable future.
“We have prevailed in the action against the city,” says Charles “Buddy” Weber, one of the plaintiffs. “I’m proud of our efforts here.”
His advice to those who want the monuments removed: Go to Richmond and lobby the General Assembly to change the state law that prohibits localities from removing Civil War memorials.
Terry McAuliffe signs his new book, Beyond Charlottesville: Taking a Stand Against White Nationalism, at the National Press Club in Washington.
Natalie Jacobsen
Former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe had a rocky start to his book tour at Washington, D.C., bookstore Politics and Prose on August 1, when survivors of the August 12, 2017, Fourth Street car attack showed up to denounce his account of that weekend. But he found plaudits and praise among fans at the National Press Club a few days later.
Beyond Charlottesville: Taking a Stand Against White Nationalism has received mixed reviews, and McAuliffe has gotten a potpourri of reactions ranging from exasperation and anger to admiration over his “take” on white nationalism.
Civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis wrote the forward, setting the tragedy in Charlottesville in the context of the movement against white supremacy. But McAuliffe’s opening page has no fewer than five “I” statements. The book, critics say, is not about activism, the struggle of black lives in Virginia under remnant shadows of the Confederacy, or even about August 11 and 12, 2017, in Charlottesville—it’s about McAuliffe.
At his book tour stop at the National Press Club on August 6, McAuliffe was charismatic, lifting his greatest hits in fighting for equality straight from his resumé.
An enthusiastic audience celebrated him taking the Confederate flag off Virginia license plates, giving 200,000 former felons voting rights, and his “F” rating by the NRA.
Attendee Heather Cronk, an activist and survivor of August 12, was not as charmed by his casual jokes and verbal tackles of President Trump. “[McAuliffe] thinks he’s the one who discovered racism,” she says. “But it’s blacks—black activists—who for over 300 years have known and experienced it in—most in shackles. And it’s clear he still doesn’t get it.”
McAuliffe describes many incidents that took place in Charlottesville on August 11 and 12 from a first-person perspective, as if he was at ground zero from the night the violent weekend began, though he reportedly arrived Saturday. “Hundreds of torches coming up over the mountain on UVA…such evil,” he said.
Some of the book’s firsthand accounts were even taken from those who were there without their knowledge. “I found out from Twitter,” says activist Emily Gorcenski about her multiple quotes in McAuliffe’s book. “He has not reached out to me, and he did not seek my permission.”
McAuliffe weaves a soliloquy about how he “got the rally shut down before it even started. I chased them out—I told them to leave our state, leave us alone, and the Nazis left,” he recounts—although Charlottesville citizens don’t remember it quite like McAuliffe does.
He waited to declare a state of emergency until after neo-Nazis clashed with counterprotesters in the streets, injuring many, including Cronk. One later rammed his car into a crowd of dozens, killing Heather Heyer.
“I needed to balance the First Amendment, so the key was to keep them separate, then they started fighting, and I had to stop it,” he recounted at the press club. This reporter has sued Virginia State Police for the release of the August 12 operations plan under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act, and McAuliffe said he thinks “it should be released for everyone to see.”
In discussing the deadly summer weekend in 2017, McAuliffe failed to mention its origin: a petition to the city from then-Charlottesville high school student, Zyahna Bryant, seeking to take down the Confederate statues. A recent story by the Daily Progress’ Allison Wrabel said the book “includes factual errors and omits important context.”
In fact, for a book touting a focus on race relations, there are stark voids in the conversation: black people, black names, and black activism.
“It’s hard. People who have been here, who have been involved, are not surprised,” Bryant says. Earlier this year, the incoming UVA freshman published her own book, Reclaim, about the realities of being a black activist, and living in Charlottesville.
“He should be saying our names,” says Bryant. “He needs to remember, he wouldn’t have ever been in office without us and white people doing the anti-racist work out here. Black women show up the strongest in Virginia voting polls, and yet, here he is, erasing us, harming us.”
Bryant says the voices of black activists are still marginalized, and “like in so many historical excerpts, the narrative has been whitewashed and romanticized by someone who wasn’t even present.”
McAuliffe said book proceeds would go to the Heather Heyer Foundation and the Virginia State Police Association. The backlash he faced for supporting police prompted him to say he’d donate to survivors, too—when proceeds come in.
“He’s published a book. He’s accumulated a national platform, he could now use it to make this right. But that’s not the decision he’s made,” says Cronk. “He’s never met with survivors.”
Brendan Wolfe with Heal Charlottesville says he can confirm that McAuliffe has committed one-third of the book’s proceeds to the fund.
Nearing the end of the talk, McAuliffe declared “the white nationalist movement is over.” It was a curious statement given the slew of white supremacy-based violence and terrorism that has risen over the past two years, most recently in El Paso.
Gorcenski says, “The white supremacist movements were harmed in part, helped in part, by what happened on and after A11/A12…Terry seems to not understand that the roots of white supremacy do in fact rely on civility, the state, and the ‘both sides-ism’ that we see coming from too many Democratic candidates.”
McAuliffe has more stops on his book tour—but none in Charlottesville, and activists aren’t holding their breath.
“I don’t expect anything more from him,” says Bryant.
The "Inside Out: Charlottesville" mural features photos of 120 local activists, along the wall of the Violet Crown on Second St. Photo: Eze Amos
It’s been two years since the “Summer of Hate,” and Charlottesville, to the larger world, is still shorthand for white supremacist violence. As we approach the second anniversary of August 11 and 12, 2017, we reached out to a wide range of community leaders and residents to talk about what, if anything, has changed since that fateful weekend, and how we can move forward.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
What do you think of how Charlottesville, as a city, has responded in the aftermath of A12? What’s changed? What hasn’t?
It’s hard to say what’s changed in Charlottesville. Once heralded as America’s most ideal city, we’ve been outed as a place that is just as flawed as any other town. Having been forced to enter a conversation that has no easy solution, it feels like a collective healing from August 11 and 12 and its aftermath is going to take much longer than any of us want to believe. It’s a humbling and sober thought. That’s not to say there isn’t reason to hope—there certainly is—but I think that the pace of change—real, lasting change—is glacial. I think there’s a way to press on for a better future while extending grace to ourselves and each other.
—Sam Bush, music minister at Christ Episcopal Church and co-founder of The Garage art space
Charlene Green. Photo: Devon Ericksen
I think the way we tried to respond last year, from a law enforcement perspective, I think it was one of safety, we were definitely trying to assure the residents that no one was going to get hurt in the same way.
I think this year, the planning of Unity Days has definitely given community members a whole new opportunity to figure out how to be engaged about this, how to acknowledge the anniversary, and I think so far it has been a pretty successful effort.
It’s about constantly educating folks about what Charlottesville is all about, because we’re not a one-story town.
–Charlene Green, manager of the Charlottesville Office of Human Rights
I still think it’s a plantation, not a city. I feel that we should be going further with having transparency in the community to be able to work together.
The city hasn’t done anything besides make themselves look good, writing books, getting all these different recognitions for themselves, but nothing for the community.
[A lot of] the activists that were hurt…and that have been the true fighters for Charlottesville, are gone. And then you have some of us who are still left here, but I’m willing to leave, because I’m tired. Because this hasn’t just been going on for me since 2017, this has been going on for me for 13 years now. So I’m tired, because it’s like the more you’re fighting, it’s like it’s not changing.
–Rosia Parker, community activist and Police Civilian Review Board member
Rev. Seth Wispelwey and other clergy marched to oppose the KKK in July 2017. Photo: Eze Amos
It’s difficult to answer, because what people make of that weekend, whether they experienced it directly or not, is up to them, and relies so much on the stories we told about ourselves beforehand.
As a co-creator of Congregate, in our weeks of training, we always emphasized that it was about using the weekend of August 11th and 12th as a pivot point to the long, deep, hard, life-giving work we all can be a part of in dismantling white supremacy. So some people took up that call, and have continued to run with it, learning and growing along the way, and others covered their ears, and wanted to believe that this had nothing to do with Charlottesville or our collective responsibility to one another. And then still others were somewhere in the middle, believing that their ongoing efforts were sufficient, that the status quo was naturally going to lead to some sort of evolutionary progress. We’re a very self-satisfied progressive city.
I think it’s no secret that governing authorities, from City Council to the police force, in the summer of 2017 made choices that left our community vulnerable and exposed and suffering from violence. What hasn’t changed is there still has been little to no accountability for that, and so while people have undertaken their own healing processes, I still believe, even two years on, there’s a tremendous trust deficit between members of the community who saw the violent threat for what it was, and our ostensible leadership, who by and large prescribed ignoring it and left people to be beaten, and then prosecuted some people who defended themselves.
And again we saw that on the first-year anniversary, the over-militarized response. Treating the community and activists as the enemy has been the wrong direction so far. And I don’t think it would take much to repair that trust deficit. “I’m sorry” is free. But that’s going to take some work, and I haven’t seen changes there from city leadership.”
–Reverend Seth Wispelwey, former minister at Restoration Village Arts and co-founder of Congregate Charlottesville
I think in the aftermath of A12, we’ve seen a tremendous increase in civic engagement. More and more people are paying close attention to City Council and getting involved with local community groups. People are trying to understand where we’re at as a community, and how we can create real, lasting change.
The conversation around race and equity has completely changed and there’s an unprecedented level of awareness about local economic and racial inequalities. But we haven’t yet created the level of institutional change needed to fundamentally shift the balance of political and economic power within Charlottesville. We’ve planted the seeds of change, but we have a lot of work left to do when it comes to changing outcomes.
–Michael Payne, housing activist and City Council candidate
Everything and nothing. We’re still very much a city divided. There have been some efforts made…but I don’t think there’s been any real substantive change. We elected Nikuyah, but I’d like to think that that would have happened whether August the 12th ever did or not.
The city’s done a great job with the Unity Days events and that’s a huge start. But we’ve still got such a long way to go.
–Don Gathers, community activist and former Chair of The Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces
Photo: Amy and Jackson Smith
“I was still new to Charlottesville when A11/12 happened; I had only been here about eight months, so I don’t have a great deal of perspective on Charlottesville before that time. The changes that I have seen, though, I would characterize as a greater urgency around the conversations that Charlottesville and the country as a whole must engage in—conversations around systemic and institutionalized racism, equity, and the historical inequalities that continue to resonate locally and nationally.
One of the things that worries me in the community is that I continue to hear people say things along the lines of, “they (meaning the white nationalists) weren’t from here…” True, some did come from other places, but I think it is dangerous not to acknowledge fully that this is our problem, too.”
—Matthew McLendon, Ph.D., director of The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA
In terms of where we are this year—with no active threat of more violence and a plan for less police presence, I do want to emphasize that there is increased possibility for the beginning of a healing journey, both at the individual and the community level. It was very hard to begin that process that year, as so many people felt unsafe around the anniversary, so that feels to me very different this year.
Mental health-wise, reflecting on the changes over the past few years, there are many more therapists and other people in our community who are prepared to respond to traumatic experiences and to facilitate healing—in particular the establishment of the Central Virginia Clinicians of Color Network.
Obviously, trauma is historical and something we’re still grappling with. On the positive side, our community is looking very explicitly at health disparity and in particular racial inequity around health outcomes for the first time. Everyone’s coming together in our community health needs assessment to say our number one priority is to address inequity in health outcomes. So I think that is a positive change. Has that disparity changed yet? No. So we have a lot of work to do, but awareness is the first step.”
—Elizabeth Irvin, executive director of The Women’s Initiative
Susan Bro. Photo: Eze Amos
I think Charlottesville is working to bring awareness to the citizens and change its image. There have been intensified efforts to shed light on the truth of the past. That’s a good beginning. But the racial divides in housing and education seem to still be just as bad as before. None of us at the Heather Heyer Foundation actually live in town or even Albemarle County. So we are on the outside, looking in.
—Susan Bro, mother of Heather Heyer and president of the Heather Heyer Foundation
It is always a challenge in the aftermath of a traumatic event, like A12, to move from the initial reactive state to a long-term adaptive state. The city, local businesses, organizations, and citizens responded to the events with a great deal of energy and attention. When we realized that many of us had turned a blind eye to the racism in our community, our leaders took on new initiatives and made demands for change with gusto. But the real trick is what happens in the next 5-10 years.
—Bree Luck, producing artistic director, Live Arts
What do you think the city needs to do to move forward?
One huge step would be to visibly and viably take ownership for that weekend and what happened, and the role that they actually played in it. It’s still very much a point of contention that the folks who directly lost their jobs were two men of color.
The council, whatever it may look like on the first of the year, they’ve got a huge task on their hands. The new buzzword of course is civility, and I think that we’ve got to become comfortable in the incivility for a while, because this was so very painful and hurtful for so many people. Now I’m not saying that 10 years down the road folks still should be shutting down meetings because of it. I don’t see the necessity of that. But if something triggers a person…I think we have to allow space for that, and understand it.
They’ve got to figure out how to bring about some level of trust between the city and the community and the police department. Because that’s what’s sorely lacking right now. And figuring out how to do that, that’s the E=MC squared equation.What it looks like and then how to make it happen. That’s something that’s vital to the renaissance, if you will, of Charlottesville, and getting us to a point where we’re not recognized as just a hashtag.
—Don Gathers
We certainly have issues in this community that we’re working on, but there’s also a lot of great things that are happening. The Chamber of Commerce is in a great position to help with that.
It’s not surprising that the business community [and tourism have] taken some hits from the events that happened in the last couple years. Nobody wants to minimize some of the tough conversations and hard work that’s going on here to build equity, but you can work on those things and also highlight the things that are going really well-—companies that are launching and doing world-class work here, opportunities that are opening up for new careers, that’s the piece that the business community thinks needs to be out there more.
It would be helpful if there was cooperation between elected officials and the business community and others, trying to get toward some shared goals.
—Elizabeth Cromwell, President & CEO, Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce
We have to commit ourselves to the work of making Charlottesville a more equitable city, not just in word but in deed. And we have to hold space to celebrate and document who we are as community and what we’ve accomplished. Fundamentally, we care about this community because we love the people in it. We can’t be afraid of acknowledging that.
—Michael Payne
I was fortunate to hear Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, speak earlier this year, and I was moved by his insistence on the need for “proximity.” He stressed that we must be close to, and by extension listen to, those who are not like us.
The Fralin Museum of Art joined the larger national conversation on social justice by participating in the “For Freedoms” project with “Signs of Change: Charlottesville.” Working with our community partners, most importantly Charlene Green from the Office of Human Rights, we convened a series of workshops to bring people together to first learn about the histories of marginalized people in Charlottesville and then talk about ways we could help to stop history from repeating itself. There must be continued opportunities for proximity, education, and dialogue.
—Matthew McLendon
What the City of Charlottesville I believe needs to do in its various official capacities is apologize and take ownership for the exposure and violence that came. At its root, it was a failure to take the inherent violence of white supremacy seriously: these were terrorist groups who threatened violence, the city was adequately warned, and we know for a fact that the police were more interested in what “antifa” was going to do, or [suggested] that we should just ignore them. No one can tell me that if this had been an ISIS free speech rally that it wouldn’t have been shut down immediately. So it starts with that.
Honest and sincere apologies are not weakness, they’re a sign of strength, and I think what Charlottesville is fighting to do and what the city could help do is stop continuing to gaslight people and say yeah, we were wrong, we will take the threat of white supremacy seriously, and I think the temperature would cool across the board.
—Rev. Seth Wispelwey
Rosia Parker outside the courtroom after the James Fields verdict, in December. Photo: Eze Amos
One, you gotta listen to the community. Don’t just listen at the community, listen to the community. [Be] willing to be transparent, willing to create ideas together, that will make a thriving community.
—Rosia Parker
As a city, I think we have an obligation to help provide opportunities for folks to be engaged and for people to see that we’re trying very hard to walk the talk. At the Office of Human Rights, if we say that equity and social justice are important for residents, then we need to show it.
—Charlene Green
Photo: UVA
Moments of adversity and heartbreak sometimes give us an opportunity for collaboration and progress. Since August 2017, UVA and the local community have been working together in unprecedented ways. The UVA-Community Working Group that came together last fall identified the most pressing issues that we can begin to work on together—jobs and wages, affordable housing, public health care, and youth education—and efforts are under way now to address those issues through UVA-community partnerships grounded in equity and mutual respect.
So many of us love Charlottesville. I think the best way we can express that love, and the best way we can move forward after August 2017, is by working together to make our community stronger, more united, and more resilient than it’s ever been before
—Jim Ryan, president of the University of Virginia
We need to continue our efforts to rebuild the bonds that unite all of us, with the understanding that a community dedicated to issues of social justice and racial equality is a place that we can be proud to call home, and a place that more people will want to come visit.
—Adam Healey, former interim director of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau
Addressing racism at the structural and institutional level remains the highest priority. In particular being able to give the mike to people of color, black people in particular, who have historically not had a voice, would be at the top of that list. From a mental health perspective that’s important because healing can’t occur without first acknowledging the trauma of people who’ve experienced this, and I think we still have a lot of work to do. Some of these events of Unity Days are beginning to give voice to that, and I think there’s a lot more room to do more.
—Elizabeth Irvin
My heart goes out to the city officials since they’re the ones who are publicly shouldering what is actually each of ours to carry. I hope that they will continue to serve humbly, to keeping listening and asking questions. I’ve found that bringing small groups of people from different backgrounds together can be an effective way to get people to speak honestly and calmly in a way that inspires others to listen.
—Sam Bush
Someone besides me to say what we need to do to move forward. People like me who have been in leadership positions for many years ought to create the space for other people living and leading quietly in our community to say what needs to happen.
—Erika Viccellio, executive director of The Fountain Fund
Don Gathers and others at the official unveiling of the Inside Out: Charlottesville mural. Photo: Eze Amos
What do individual people need to do to move the community forward?
If you see a need, don’t wring your hands and hope someone does something about it. Step up to see what you can do to move things forward. And then actually do it. Don’t play armchair quarterback. Put feet to your intentions and get involved. If you don’t step up and out, who will?#StepUpStepOut.
—Susan Bro
I’m not sure the public speaking platforms of our age are as effective as we think they are. Many of us are speaking to people who already agree with us which, in turn, merely helps us feel better about ourselves while vilifying those who disagree with us. As a result, we seem quick to anger and slow to listen. The alternative, I think, is much more difficult but more effective. I think we’d each be better off by getting to know someone who couldn’t be more different from us and then befriending them. Easier said than done, of course.
—Sam Bush
There’s no magic pill here that’ll fix this. We’ve got to begin to have those tough and difficult and hard conversations. And we’ve got to stop talking about race and start talking about racism. We can’t just talk about white supremacy, we’ve got to actually have the difficult conversations about white privilege and white advantage. And once we embrace those conversations…then we can move forward and start talking about unification.
I’m not sure there’s a mediator or moderator in the world that could handle that, because in so many instances we’re still talking at each other instead of to each other. We’re still talking about each other instead of trying to handle and solve the problem as it presents itself. How it’s handled, what it looks like, I’m still trying to envision it, but I know that it’s got to happen in order for us to move that needle.
—Don Gathers
Lisa Woolfork and members of the Hate-Free Schools Coalition of Albemarle County, who fought for a ban on Confederate imagery in county schools. Photo: Eze Amos
People can support community members who are already doing the work to build a better Charlottesville. City councilors need to respect and support Mayor Walker’s leadership. Voters need to vote for strong racial justice supporters. School administrators need to respond with deep policy changes to address concerns about racial equity raised by students and families. We need to stop protecting Confederates and their white supremacist legacy. We can create a brighter future if we do the difficult, sometimes uncomfortable, yet necessary work of liberation, learning and unlearning.
—Lisa Woolfork, UVA professor and community activist
Listen! We are each, as individuals, responsible for change. I am clear that as a white male, I need to listen to people of color and other marginalized communities with lived experiences different from mine. By listening we can understand what we need to do to be active allies. My fear for our whole society is that far too many people want to speak and too few have the self-discipline or awareness to listen.
—Matthew McLendon
Choose to live in community. In an age of climate change, neoliberalism, and tech-mediated communication, we are encouraged to remain fearful and isolated. To paraphrase bell hooks’ essay “Love as the Practice of Freedom”, the road to healing our wounded body politic is through a commitment to collective liberation that moves beyond resistance to transformation. We all have a positive role to play in healing and transforming our community. Yes, that means you too!
–Michael Payne
As individuals we just need to get involved, and stay aware. Because we can’t depend on one agency or one entity to handle it all; we need to all step up as a community, and in whatever way you feel the most comfortable. Hopefully you’re able to push yourself out of your comfort zone. It’s when we stay in our little circles of comfort that we tend to perpetuate stereotypes and assumptions about people in different groups. So to push ourselves to get involved and be challenged, and to challenge each other, I think are some of the things we can do.
–Charlene Green
Photo: Nick Strocchia
First and foremost is that self-reflection and working around issues of race and privilege. And within that, being willing to take care of ourselves and recognize what we need to do around our stress and anxiety so we can continue to have uncomfortable conversations and meaningful dialogue, but also continue to challenge ourselves moving forward.
Relative to the traumatic aspect of the anniversary itself, people who were more directly impacted still may be experiencing a lot of traumatic stress, so I just encourage those people in particular to reach out for support.
—Elizabeth Irvin
My own perspective shift came from new and growing relationships in Charlottesville, thanks to a lot of grace and space afforded to me by people who have been working on anti-racist advocacy for a long time here.
The truth is we all have space and grace to grow forward, and so what individuals can continue to do, and I’m talking about cis-hetero white individuals particularly, is not just listen to voices and perspectives that are threatened and crushed by white supremacy, but start to foreground their asks and desires. It will be costly for a lot of the privilege we carry, but it’s a cost that liberates, and is really life-giving in the end.
We can’t all be responsible for all the things all the time, or we’ll burn out, so get plugged in and focus where you feel most called and led. There’s a multitude of opportunities, but life’s too short and racism is too strong in this country to not try a bit harder to show up in embodied solidarity, somewhere.
—Seth Wispelwey
For those of us who weren’t born and raised here I think we need to be committed to better understanding the community we live in. It is only recently that I started regularly attending events and tours at the African American Heritage Center. I have a new, and essential, emerging understanding of the community I’ve been “serving” all these years.
—Erika Viccellio
One thing that we can do as individuals is to extirpate the systemic racism that plagues our culture. At Live Arts…we have begun to explore the systemic barriers to [theater] participation, including obvious issues like cost and content representation—and not-so-apparent barriers like architecture, language, food, and transportation. With the help of community partners this year, Live Arts offered more “pay what you can” tickets and scholarships than ever before. Also, we are diversifying representation on our stages by making more stories written and directed by and about persons of color and women.
Education is the key to effecting change. At Live Arts, we discussed micro-aggressions, unconscious bias, and workplace discrimination each month in board and staff meetings. This summer, we invited volunteer directors to join a diversity, equity, and inclusion workshop so that our creative teams have the tools to create a safe space to work and play.
We are far from perfect. But the aim is not to create a utopian society where we all say and do the right thing. Instead, the goal is to have an equitable culture of belonging, prosperity, community, and creative exploration.
This Dodge Challenger, seen here in June, is part of CPD's fleet.
Whether you were on Fourth Street that afternoon or not, you know the car: the low-slung gray muscle car with the distinctive brake lights that James Fields used to murder Heather Heyer and injure dozens of others on August 12, 2017.
From video footage and the shocking photograph that won local photographer Ryan Kelly a Pulitzer Prize, the car, a Dodge Challenger, became deeply associated with the terror of that day. Which is why one of our reporters was startled to see a strikingly similar car—another gray Dodge Challenger—with a Charlottesville Police Department decal, on a local street in June.
Police department spokesperson Tyler Hawn confirmed the car is part of the department’s fleet, adding that it was acquired well before August 2017.
Activist Rosia Parker says that when she saw the car, in the police department garage, it “gave me triggers” back to the attack. She raised the issue at a City Council meeting on July 16, 2018, but says she received no response.
A year later, on the way to James Fields’ sentencing, survivor Marcus Martin, who is pictured flying over the back of the car in Kelly’s photograph, said he had seen a similar car on the way to the courtroom and “it all came back.”
In reply to C-VILLE’s questions, Police Chief RaShall Brackney noted that the police department’s car is branded with the logo for the Special Olympics of Virginia Law Enforcement Torch Run and Polar Plunge events, and “this symbolic gesture is appreciated my many members of the local and state community.” Police participate in the events to raise money for athletes with special needs.
In addition to the Special Olympics logo, the roof of the car is emblazoned with what appears to be “thin blue line” iconography, which is commonly used to show support for law enforcement, but which some have argued is meant to show opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement. A thin blue line flag was among the flags carried by Unite the Right protesters at the August 12 rally.
“If the community feels threatened by the presence of this car, and request it be removed from our fleet, we would work toward an amicable solution,” Brackney said.
In almost six years of living in Charlottesville, I’ve had two noteworthy encounters with the police.
The first time was several years ago, when I left my wallet on the curb in Woolen Mills (don’t ask). A CPD officer not only noticed it and picked it up, he found my email address online and then delivered the wallet to my front door that night. He saved me a trip to the station and both of us the hassle of paperwork, and waved away my effusive thanks.
The second time was August 12, 2017, when I watched a gang of white supremacists attack a woman standing near me on the sidewalk in front of the Methodist church, and ran to the nearest cop for help. It was 9 in the morning, and the church’s parking lot was supposed to be a safe space.
“Aren’t you going to do something?” I asked, panicked. “I’m not getting involved in that,”the female officer told me, shaking her head. “There’s guys down there,” she added, indicating the heavily-outfitted Virginia State Police massed at the end of the block. “They’ll handle it.”
They didn’t. When the young men in the white T-shirts pulled away, the woman was on the ground with blood pouring from her head. The attackers bounded off through the parking lot, practically skipping, exultant and gleeful. Nobody stopped them.
“I can see where the department or law enforcement may not have lived up to the expectations of the community,” Charlottesville Police Chief RaShall Brackney tells us about August 12.
She didn’t work here then, and she’s not to blame for what happened. But she is responsible for repairing the trust that the department lost that day. One of the most basic places to start is the Police Civilian Review Board, but Brackney says she doesn’t understand the need for the board, and her relationship with it has been contentious.
Bridging the gap between my two stories, between two very different images of the police, may be an impossible task, and the verbal abuse Brackney has suffered as the public face of the department would be hard for anyone to deal with. But until the police show real accountability for their failures and a real willingness to listen to those who have been hurt, that public anger isn’t likely to go away.
Former mayor Maurice Cox, on a recent visit to Charlottesville Photo: Eze Amos
Former Charlottesville mayor Maurice Cox, now Detroit’s director of planning and development, talks about managing growth, recovering from a crisis, and the power of telling the right story.
There was a time when Maurice Cox couldn’t escape being recognized in Charlottesville. In August 2012, almost a decade after he served as mayor, he sat with a reporter at a restaurant on the Downtown Mall, on the eve of his departure to New Orleans to become dean of community engagement at Tulane University School of Architecture.
“The Honorable Maurice Cox!” a passerby yelled, and Cox responded with a wave and a smile. “Once a mayor, always a mayor here,” he said. “I’m going to miss that.”
More recently, the man who served as Charlottesville’s mayor from 2002 to 2004 again joined a reporter for lunch on the mall. No one called out to him, and Cox enjoyed a bacon cheeseburger in quiet anonymity. But if brilliant city planners commanded the cultural pull of movie stars, the paparazzi would have been swarming.
Now the director of planning and development in Detroit, Cox was in town for final reviews of students’ work at the UVA School of Architecture, where he was an assistant professor from 1993 to 2012. Cox, who received his degree in architecture from New York’s Cooper Union in 1983, has also been design director at the National Endowment for the Arts, spent six years teaching architecture in Florence, Italy, as part of Syracuse University’s Italian program, and, while in New Orleans, was director of Tulane City Center. Architect Magazine has noted that Cox “is considered to be a phenomenon within urban planning circles: smart, passionate, and inspiring.”
Given all of this, and Cox’s record as a public official in Charlottesville, we were eager to get his take on how our city has evolved—and dealt with adversity—since he left.
He knows dire situations. He arrived in New Orleans while the city was still reeling, albeit years later, from Hurricane Katrina. And he answered the call in Detroit in the wake of its historic population decline and declaration of bankruptcy.
Cox also faced a major crisis when he was in office in Charlottesville. In fact, if he and a group of fellow activists hadn’t stepped up, the city may have become a town in Albemarle County as part of a “reversion” movement. But Cox not only prevailed in the face of that existential threat, he laid the groundwork for Charlottesville to develop a dense urban core, become navigable on foot and by bicycle (his trademark form of transportation to this day), and combat sprawl and displacement of city residents.
The latter is still a challenge, and some of his projects (like his quest for a trolley along Main Street) never came through. But to the extent that Charlottesville exudes a sense of “urbanity” (his word) it can be traced back to Cox.
A skilled multitasker, the pin-thin former mayor, dressed in a slim gray suit and bright green shirt on a sunny day in May, managed to share his views of Charlottesville while also polishing off that fist-sized cheeseburger.
C-VILLE Weekly: Among the issues you faced as city councilor and mayor was reversion—the idea that Charlottesville would revert back to being part of Albemarle County. Why do you consider that a crisis moment?
Maurice Cox: It was ultimately an excuse to sprawl. We recognized that moment and saw an opportunity to think about how we grow in our own footprint.
The city needed to replenish its tax base. Housing, middle-class housing, was just nonexistent. So, reversion was a way of annexing effectively all of the commercial property that is the sprawl of Route 29. But it wasn’t going to address the sprawl, per se, or create urbanity—to have Charlottesville grow up.
We started looking at our commercial corridors and zoning ordinances, and we said, You know what? Let’s throw the sucker out if it’s not going to produce the kind of city we want, and look strategically at where we can absorb density.
The density you speak of is arriving on West Main Street now. Is that what you envisioned?
At the time, the goal was to give West Main Street enough density to support transit and a vibrant public realm. So, yes, the emerging density is consistent with what we had envisioned. But the goal was also to promote a density sensitive to its immediate context. Any misgivings I have today pertain to the scale of the development and the architecture of many of the new buildings.
In his time on council, Cox pushed for more density on West Main (pictured at left in 2011). Now, much of that development has materialized, but Cox has misgivings over the scale and architecture of some of the new buildings. Photos: Steve Trumbull (left); Skyclad Aerial (right).
For example?
The architecture developing towards the university hospital end of West Main appears to be of good quality and scaled for pedestrian use. The new construction beginning to intermingle with the existing buildings between the Amtrak station and Ridge McIntire Road also looks extremely promising—in large part because there was enough historical context for the architects to respond to. That end seems to be producing what I call “gentle density,” which is sensitive to its context and pedestrian in scale.
On the other hand, The Standard and The Flats are completely generic, architecturally dated, and insensitive to the scale of the neighborhoods to the north and south, Fifeville and Westhaven. The monolithic nature of The Standard effectively—and intentionally, I believe—creates a wall denying residents of Westhaven pedestrian access to West Main, and should never have been allowed to happen. The Flats student housing, which was supposed to transition down to the single-family neighborhood of Fifeville, according to the zoning, does the opposite, growing taller towards the neighborhood.
This happened because special density variances were granted, and I’m sure the council that approved the exception wishes today that they had followed their own rules. Just proves that it’s possible to get the density right and the form and the scale completely wrong.
The most obvious recent crisis the city has faced was brought on by the Unite the Right rally and its fallout. What is your opinion of how the city has handled that?
It was an enormous opportunity. But the statues are still standing, which suggests that we haven’t dealt with the crisis.
But it’s part of a larger issue that Charlottesville has dealt with for many, many years. Monticello, anyone?
It’s fascinating, because during the ’90s, the first thing Monticello had to address was the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. At first, they didn’t embrace this, but the evidence was so compelling that they had to acknowledge it. And it’s become a part of the incremental recasting of Monticello as a plantation, as opposed to a presidential retreat.
It is incremental, as you say.
On my way here, I walked past the memorial being built about UVA and its relationship to slavery. That’s another incremental step—the university coming to grips with that legacy. But the bigger issue right now is the city itself. And I think that until the city constructs another narrative, it is going to be known for that day in August.
In Detroit, the popular press wrote the narrative for 50 years. And it’s only through the force of a collective will that a new narrative is starting to emerge. I can take some ownership of that, but it does require a kind of collective courage. Individual courage, no, because you don’t do these things alone.
I presume that the narrative for Detroit is that the comeback is real. But people have heard that story before. Why is it different now?
When I arrived [in 2015], the city had just gone through bankruptcy. Without having gotten rid of that debt, I don’t think we would be able to attract the investment that’s being attracted now. We have an administration that can actually perform the duties expected of government, like getting lights to come on at night, picking up trash, demolishing burnt-down houses, getting emergency vehicles to arrive. That’s been the precursor to my being able to engage residents in a conversation about the future, because the present was being tended to.
We’ve had hundreds of meetings with residents. We’re listening, and we’re talking about the character of their neighborhoods, and what the future should look like. It’s a very empowering experience, for anyone who was normally preoccupied with the basics, to have enough mental space to talk about the future, and have some hope.
So what else could Charlottesville do?
You think about what other generations did, how they used civil disobedience. They got arrested for things they believed in. This notion that the courts, the Virginia courts, would cart our city council off to jail if they defied the order that the monuments could not be removed—I’d be curious to test that. I think it would be a national story. It’d be an international story.
There are other cities that removed the statues, and they did not face the legal impediments that Charlottesville has faced. But you don’t deal with these issues by soft-pedaling. That’s where civil disobedience comes in. I’m afraid that ultimately that’s what it’s going to take. Every day [the statues] sit there on the plaza is a reminder of unfinished business.
Let’s return to the issue of development in Charlottesville. Is what you’re seeing now a fulfillment of your ideas? Where do you think we stand?
We clearly made the argument that there are places that could and should absorb higher density that would create a kind of context for a pedestrian-oriented development with character. And so, the density is landing in the right places, but the character is questionable.
There’s also the challenge of unintended consequences. When you create the density that could potentially support transit and walkability, you make something of value that can create displacement, which has happened. The question is, how do you offset the fact that you created something of value? The answer is generally in the realm of affordable housing.
In Detroit, the city has made a commitment to 20 percent affordable housing in any development that receives public resources, and a commitment to retain 10,000 units of federally regulated housing. That includes Section 8 housing like Friendship Court in Charlottesville. Affordable housing has to be grafted onto the market-rate housing.
You invest in the public realm, and you protect the existing inventory of affordable housing so that people don’t get displaced. You do one without the other, then you’re going to get displacement, and that seems to be the challenge that Charlottesville faces. Put in the density and investment in the public realm, but also don’t forget to put in the policies and mechanisms for robust pushback in the area of affordability.
What we’re talking about for Detroit is a growth strategy. It stems from the basic notions that everyone who stuck it out with the city through thick and thin deserves to benefit from the opportunity that growth presents, and that the city should follow public policy that assures it’ll happen.
We were talking earlier about sprawl. Have you noticed the development along Route 29, out Fifth Street Extended, along Route 20?
Yeah, there’s a lot of it.
What does that signal? For most people those places are not affordable.
It’s all feeding off of the success of the urban core and the proximity to a thriving urban center. It’s a symptom of the city’s success that the county sprawl may be a little more tidy, but the quality is really, really low. Maybe in 50 years we’ll look back and [the new developments] will have provided the massive amounts of affordable housing that we need—that’s what it’s going to become, because quality has not been a factor in its development.
There is also the issue of public transportation. What are your observations about that in Charlottesville?
It’s still a fundamentally car-dependent region that’s not pushing hard enough on the alternative transit options. This is where the governmental structure inhibits the kind of regional cooperation that you need for transit. There’ve been fits and starts, but mostly fits and stalls.
That’s not unlike other areas that have a divide between the city and county. We always said, ‘Well, let’s try to jumpstart a pedestrian-oriented, transit-oriented core.’ And that’s where a streetcar down Main Street was a very viable scenario. It would have been an important demonstration that we can weave other modes of transportation into this small city.
Maurice Cox in 2006. Photo: Jen Farielo
Is it really any different in Detroit?
There’s a similar reluctance to embrace alternative modes of transportation in Detroit, the Motor City. But we’re pushing hard by making protected bike lanes a part of all the street improvements. Detroit is wonderfully flat and the streets are wonderfully wide, and you can get a lot of different modes of transportation in them. Detroit laid more protected bike lanes, which are the ones up against the curb with a buffer, than any city in America last year.
What else is Detroit doing to support alternative transportation?
We’ve identified 30 different areas where we can make Main Streets, slow the traffic down, integrate more modes of transportation, and create a public ground. We call them micro-districts. What we’re going for is not unlike the ambiance here on the mall, where you can shop and recreate within a 20-minute walk of your house.
Charlottesville is a great example to consider, because the mall is only eight blocks long. This is about as far as you are probably willing to walk for a couple of restaurants and your favorite coffee. And so, most of the micro-districts we are conceiving of in Detroit are no more than six, eight blocks long. But can you create that kind of mixed-use, retail Main Street in every single one of the neighborhoods? We think you can in some, and that’s more or less what’s happening.
It also involves increasing density, but it’s much more gentle density than even what we’re seeing here. Most of the buildings are three or four stories, maximum six, and we’re conferring with the public to set the tone and address the question of quality. We’re not just letting the market do what it wants to do, which is to be kind of status quo and mediocre. We want excellence. We’re pushing publicly commissioned work to an extreme, and then asking the private sector, can you top it?
Given the sheer size of Detroit— 139 square miles, as opposed to Charlottesville’s 10.4 square miles —is there an acknowledgment that some parts, and perhaps even some very large parts, are going
to have to be fallow?
Or that some parts are going to have to wait, which is what interests me about Detroit. It’s a laboratory for slow, sustainable urban growth. We’re experimenting with what it’s like to create an urban environment where you can walk and bike, but at the same time, we recognize that the same set of tools won’t work in neighborhoods that have lost significant populations.
We are now getting to those neighborhoods where you have to have a different maintenance strategy for vacant land. It might be a reforestation effort. It might be intersecting reforestation with commercial nurseries, tree nurseries. We are testing that idea. It might be hundreds of flowering meadows, and we have a place where we’re testing that idea, too. We acknowledge that you’re going to have to shift to a landscape-based strategy in areas that feel more rural, so it would be a mistake to try to force them to be urban.
You get that cross-section of neighborhood types in Detroit to explore. It’s a wicked problem. Every day we attempt to address it. I see why no other city in America that went through extreme population decline has succeeded. But we do have an appetite for experimentation. We acknowledge that one size doesn’t fit all. And so, the exact opposite of uniformity is what’s going on in Detroit.
Speaking of empty space, was City Yards an issue when you were mayor? How would you deal with it, with the benefit of hindsight?
I think with City Yards and a few other places near downtown, you could afford to do some unconventional experimentation. I don’t think it’s about high-density development. It’s probably about landscape as a framework. Yeah, I think it’s too valuable to stay fallow, but it’s too big and difficult to use a conventional set of tools. And there’s no shortage of fantastic landscape thinkers right here in Charlottesville. A very intentional bridge has to be made between city government and the academy, and it can be figured out.
Of the problems that you saw and addressed when you were here, which ones still exist, and how should they be handled?
These things can’t be approached in the abstract. Racism exists. Where does it exist? Does it exist in our housing policy? Does it exist in the economic opportunity given to entrepreneurs? It has to be grafted onto something real. So getting together for a kumbaya conversation about racism, while it may temporarily make you feel good, produces very little lasting impact. When you say we’re going to address the displacement of people by changing our housing policy, that’s tangible. When you say we’re going to build a cultural center to make sure that the history and the legacy of urban renewal is forever understood, like the Jefferson Center, that’s a tangible example of addressing an issue.
Even an effort to have minority businesses on the mall would be a good start. In Detroit, we have a program that matches entrepreneurs to real estate opportunities—and everything from business planning to getting the bricks and mortar—to open up a shop. Sixty-five percent of the people who receive grants are women, 70 percent are people of color. That’s a direct answer to, will economic opportunity on these Main Streets that we’re creating look and feel like the communities they exist in?
Where does your experience in architecture come in?
The power of design is its ability to convene people around a project, not an abstraction, and that is one of the reasons why design is so engaging even for the laypeople. At the end of it, there’s something standing there that’s a built environment, that’s a natural environment as a result of your hours and hours and hours of meeting. I think those are tangible ways to address issues of equity and inclusion. That’s been a mainstay. At least it’s been a mainstay in my career to use the imperative to build, to shape, as a way to have a larger conversation about what kind of community we want, who belongs in it, and how do we all get access to it.
In Detroit, we do it by culturally tagging infrastructure that is unifying the city. The Joe Louis Greenway, which unites dozens of neighborhoods, was purposefully named so that for the next hundred years people will think of this iconic sports figure as someone who unites the city. Or we do a park, and we bring a renowned African American artist, Hubert Massey, to work in the infrastructure of art, in this case a 160 foot-long mosaic tile wall that turns into a community build with kids and adults. It’s also in a park named after Ella Fitzgerald, another cultural icon. And so, these are ways to bring in a creative impulse that tells people…that this belongs to them.
So, you’re still commuting by bicycle in Detroit, as you did here?
I am. I live a commutable distance from work. I’ve always insisted on biking, and hiking and walking, ever since Charlottesville. I can see the city with all of my senses, and it helps you pay attention to detail and to the feel and the character of a place. It’s my way of doing some research even in the most banal act of going from home to work.
Do you think Detroit will ultimately be a success story?
Well, in some ways it already is. Let’s not forget that it’s also the largest African American city in America. So when a black city builds more protected bike lanes than a city like Portland, that in and of itself is newsworthy, and what does that mean? I’m always mindful that it’s not like we’re just doing this in any city. We’re doing this in the blackest city in America. Majority African-American cities have long been equated with dysfunctionality, corruption, and poverty. We have a chance to defy that stereotype and write a different narrative about a progressive, exploratory, inclusive, African American-majority city.
We are mindful that it’s a narrative that is very, very powerful. And that’s what I mean by Charlottesville has to find a way to snatch back its public narrative. Detroit did it with an onslaught of positive, affirming, forward-looking, progressive stories.
All of a sudden people feel like we’ve cured something. But we still have poverty. We still struggle with vacant land and home abandonment. But the counter-narrative is so compelling that people are not writing exclusively about Detroit’s decay and decline. I’ve seen that happen in a matter of four or five years, so I know that Charlottesville can do that.
It’s not going to happen just by the passage of time. People are not just going to forget, and I think that’s the issue: What willful actions can your public leaders and civic leaders take to snatch back the narrative of Charlottesville?
Highway blues: losing the battle for McIntire Park
When Maurice Cox was elected to the City Council in 2000, debate over the proposed road then known as the Meadowcreek Parkway had ground on for decades. The road, eventually christened the John W. Warner Parkway, is now a reality, but it looks the way it does (“a beautiful parkway rather than a highway,” as Cox puts it) in large part because of efforts by Cox and other local activists.
After decades of debate, the John W. Warner Parkway, which connects East Rio Road to McIntire Road at the U.S. 250 Bypass, finally opened in January 2015. Photo: Skyclad Aerial
The parkway, first proposed in the 1960s, aimed to connect East Rio Road with McIntire Road, easing traffic on Rio and Park Street, and providing more direct entry into the city of Charlottesville from suburban northern Albemarle County neighborhoods.
“I was convinced then and still believe today that the Meadowcreek Parkway was Charlottesville’s greatest gift to Albemarle County,” Cox says. “Charlottesville sacrificed the city’s largest park, McIntire Park, in order to relieve traffic pressures from the county’s out-of-control growth along 29 North.”
Plans were coalescing by the time Cox was elected, but opponents, who challenged the then-prevalent idea that building more roads would ease traffic on existing ones, had laid out a set of demands for keeping it circumscribed. Among other concerns, they sought to ban truck traffic, limit speeds, and reduce the number of travel lanes from four to two.
“We never had the votes to kill the darn thing,” says Cox, “so instead I spent eight years of my political career trying to ‘defang’ a four-lane divided highway, aimed straight through the heart of downtown.”
Cox fought successfully for design restrictions that kept its interchange with the U.S. 250 Bypass relatively compact and its footprint narrow, so future leaders wouldn’t easily be able to widen it.
“Being a designer, I figured if you couldn’t kill it then perhaps I could use the power of design to resize the threat and remake it into one of the best two-lane parkways Virginia has built in a generation.”
But he adds, “we shouldn’t forget that we lost out on a great opportunity to gift to the next generations a world-class McIntire Park.”
Two men convicted of malicious wounding for attacking DeAndre Harris in a downtown parking garage on August 12, 2017, are appealing their convictions, and the Virginia Attorney General’s office will now prosecute their cases.
Jacob Goodwin and Alex Ramos were sentenced to eight and six years in prison, respectively, for their part in the brutal Market Street Parking Garage beating that Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Rick Moore has repeatedly called one of the worst he’s ever seen.
While the Court of Appeals of Virginia has yet to hear the cases, a single judge granted the petitions to appeal without hearing any argument. Legal analyst Dave Heilberg says, “It’s not unusual, but it’s not what usually happens.”
He adds, “They tend not to give appeals without a good reason.”
Anthony Martin, who represents Goodwin, claims there was insufficient evidence to convict his client of malicious wounding.
“The only actions [Goodwin] had taken towards DeAndre Harris was at the most two kicks,” says the petition for appeal, which notes that Harris had a laceration to his head and an arm fracture, but that there’s no evidence that Goodwin caused harm to Harris’ head or arm. “The only conceivable areas of the body that [Goodwin] touched were Harris’ buttocks or bottom.”
To win an appeal on a claim of insufficiency of evidence is “rare,” according to Heilberg. During appellate review, the court will look at all of the evidence in the light most favorable to the commonwealth. “If there’s some evidence to support the conviction that was given, then it stands.”
Martin also argues that the court erred by denying motions to strike four potential jurors from serving on the panel that convicted Goodwin, including two who admitted to participating in Black Lives Matter rallies.
Jake Joyce represents Ramos—who went to trial the day after Goodwin’s conviction. Joyce alleges the jury pool could have been tainted if potential jurors saw media coverage of Goodwin’s trial.
“Ramos would have a stronger case than Goodwin,” suggests Heilberg, adding that the scheduling of their back-to-back trials could be unprecedented.
Joyce believes the trial should never have happened in Charlottesville.
“The danger was not just that jurors would harbor bias against the Unite the Righters who came to their city and caused a riot,” he wrote in the petition. “There is also danger that the circumstances surrounding the trial and the fear of fallout about their verdict might cause local jurors to decide their verdict on something other than the merits of the case.”
All motions to move August 12-related cases out of Charlottesville have been denied, and Heilberg says there’s a slim chance of winning an appeal on that grounds.
Lastly, Joyce argues that Ramos’ malicious wounding charge should have been reduced to a lesser form of assault, because it’s undisputed that he threw only one punch at the back of Harris’ head. But, says Heilberg, the jury made a factual determination based on the evidence it was given, and “if Ramos and Goodwin are acting in concert…one is as guilty as the other.”
A date has not been set for a full briefing or oral arguments in Richmond.
“Appellate review of criminal proceedings plays an important role in ensuring that defendants were treated fairly and afforded due process of law,” says Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania, who prosecuted the cases alongside assistant prosecutor Nina Antony. “This office welcomes and is confident in that process.”
