Tag: white supremacy

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Monuments men: It was never about a statue, say Landrieu and Bellamy

Former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu and City Councilor Wes Bellamy discuss how Confederate statues are symbols of institutional racism with which this country still grapples. Staff photo

Former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu and Charlottesville City Councilor Wes Bellamy have a lot in common. They’re both Southerners who, as elected officials, have gotten death threats for daring to say it’s time for Confederate monuments to go.

And they’ve both written books on the topic, which brought them to the same Jefferson School African American Heritage Center stage March 20 for the Virginia Festival of the Book.

Bellamy, who signaled he was going to run for a second term on City Council, talked about the toll his 2016 call to remove the statue of General Robert E. Lee has taken on him and his family. His therapist suggested he write about it, and he wrote what became Monumental: It Was Never about a Statue to tell his side of the story and get it off his chest, with little concern about whether it ever got published.

“Deep down I was hurting,” he says.

A lot of people blamed him for bringing white supremacists to Charlottesville, he says. He had to grow up publicly following what he calls “Tweetgate,” when earlier offensive tweets were unearthed and he lost his job with Albemarle schools. And there was the unrelenting stream of “vile” threats.

“If it was about a statue, people wouldn’t tell me they’re going to hang me from a tree or harm my wife and children,” he says.

Landrieu says he also got hate mail, typically in a white envelope with red ink, that his wife hid from him.

The statue issue is “about race in America,” he says. “It’s about institutional racism.”

Landrieu, who wrote In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History, never thought too much about the Confederate monuments when he was growing up in the Big Easy. Then a friend, jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, “popped” him on the head and asked, “Have you looked at it from my perspective?”

In May 2017, Landrieu made a landmark speech about his decision to remove four Confederate statues. In Charlottesville, he referred to one of its points, a scenario in which an African American parent has to answer a child’s question about a statue of Lee, in which the girl asks, “Wasn’t that the side that wanted to keep me a slave?”

As Southerner and as a white man, Landrieu holds no truck with the “heritage not hate” argument often posited by Lost Cause adherents. He lists historic facts that some whites have a hard time with.

“The Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity,” he says. The Civil War “was fought for the cause of slavery.” And that needs to be acknowledged to get to the point where the country can heal, he says.

Even though progress has been made, there are a lot of people in the country who are afraid and there’s a lot of dehumanization. “Donald Trump is not the cause of it but he’s an accelerant,” says Landrieu. “White nationalism and white supremacy are having a field day,”

Bellamy expounded on why he’s called on Governor Ralph Northam, “a personal friend,” to resign. “It’s not his place to believe he can lead a discussion about race and equity after what has transpired.”

The worst for Bellamy was the day after Northam apologized for wearing blackface, when he attempted to moonwalk. Northam didn’t understand how offensive and degrading minstrel shows are, says Bellamy. And when Northam followed the press conference by calling the first African slaves “indentured servants,” says Bellamy, “That shows me you don’t get it.”

He did suggest ways the governor could use his position and privilege to redeem himself: by funding “historically underfunded” black colleges, by reforming marijuana laws and the criminal justice system, and by talking to his conservative friends in the General Assembly “who block the legislation we need to move the statues.”

Those, notes Landrieu, are “institutional racism.”

While Landrieu called for having those painful conversations on race, Bellamy seemed talked out when such engagement results in no action. “You shed a couple of tears and you go home.” he says of those privileged to live in nice homes while most in poverty are black and don’t have the same luxuries. “That is not equity,” he says. “I’m the bad guy for saying that.”

Both men believe it’s necessary to repair the damage that’s been done by racism. “There can be no repair and reconciliation without the redistribution of resources,” says Bellamy. “If you mess something up, you fix it.”

He also touched on civility, which he describes as “almost synonymous with comfortable.” People were yelling at City Council meetings because they’ve been ignored for years and it was an expression of their rage, says Bellamy.

He thinks that’s had an effect. “We got your attention,” he says. More resources have been allocated to affordable housing and the county banned Confederate images in schools. “You think that came from being civil?” he asks. “Pffft.”

With the Democratic primary deadline looming March 28, Bellamy says he’s still debating whether to run again for City Council, but indicated he was likely to because to change policy, “the best way to do that is through elected office.”

 

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Uninvited callers: Activists confront United Daughters of the Confederacy

Hat-wearing protesters gathered in front of the United Daughters of the Confederacy headquarters in Richmond to ask them to take back the monuments the organization planted throughout the South. Eze Amos

As the United Daughters of the Confederacy gathered in Richmond last week for its annual convention, members were met with some unexpected visitors.

Around four dozen demonstrators from Charlottesville and Richmond, many of them wearing hats, pearls, and white gloves, stood outside the UDC’s mausoleum-like headquarters on the BoulevardNovember 4. They came to accuse the bastion of genteel Southern womanhood of perpetuating white supremacy through the Lost Cause narrative in textbooks, Confederate monuments, and an early alliance with the Ku Klux Klan.

The ladies were scheduled to convene at their headquarters to dedicate a flagpole and plaque, but they canceled the event when they got word that activists—”outside agitators” is how Virginia Flaggers describe them—planned to show up.

Protesters carried signs that read, “Even white people are tired of white supremacy,” “UDC: Take back your statues and your booKKKs,” and “No shrines to white supremacy. Take ‘em down now.”

A demonstrator holds a sign with an image of a book extolling the KKK written by one of the Daughters of the Confederacy. Eze Amos

The United Daughters of the Confederacy erected hundreds of Confederate monuments across the South, including the recently toppled Silent Sam in Chapel Hill and one of a soldier—the “Johnny Reb” statue— in Charlottesville’s Court Square in 1909, which the city and Albemarle jointly funded along with the local chapter, according to the Encyclopedia Virginia. A petition is circulating now to remove that statue.

And they’ve been known to sue when localities try to remove them. The Daughters’ Shreveport, Louisiana, chapter filed suit when the parish tried to remove a statue in front of the courthouse after last year’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. And the UDC sued Vanderbilt University in 2002 when it wanted to rename a dorm called Confederate Memorial Hall.

“The UDC are the ladies behind the Lost Causelie,” says activist and UVA religious studies professor Jalane Schmidt. They are the ones who “littered the landscape” with hundreds of Confederate statues—and who sue if localities try to remove them. They got textbooks into schools that “poisoned the minds of generations of white Southerners,” she says, and normalized “white supremacy as ‘heritage.’”

Protester and Charlottesvillian Anne Garland Mahler, dressed in a peach dress with hat and white gloves, says, “We’re taking our Southern heritage back.”

The UDC was founded in 1894—almost 30 years after the Civil War had ended. Reconstruction was over and Jim Crow laws were reasserting white supremacy. The organization’s members say its mission is to honor the memory of those who fell during the “War Between the States,” as proponents of the Lost Cause narrative prefer to dub the Civil War, as well as historical, educational, benevolent, and patriotic efforts.

But activists say the group quietly has done more to spread white supremacy than other more flagrantly racist organizations with its recasting the history of the war the South lost into a noble Lost Cause myth. In 1914, one of its members, Laura Martin Rose, aka Mrs. S.E.F. Rose, praised the KKK in her book, The Ku Klux Klan or Invisible Empire. Schmidt brought copies of that tome to return to the UDC.

On Sunday, three Daughters of the Confederacy braved the crowd to check out the demonstrators, and one asked who the organizer was. Another proclaimed, “I’ve never encountered such hatred.”

A few Daughters of the Confederacy emerged from their headquarters to check out the demonstration, and were “mad as heck about it,” according to Richmond Democratic Socialist Trey Peters. Eze Amos

UDC member Peggy Palmer from South Carolina declared, “It’s a bunch of bullcrap,” and said the demonstrators didn’t know their history.

But she seemed unaware of a 1926 UDC plaque honoring the KKK outside Charlotte, North Carolina, that was reported in a Daily Beast article—”Time to expose the women still celebrating the Confederacy”—that ran the same day, and she asked a reporter and a couple of protesters where the plaque was.

Trey Peters with the Richmond chapter of Democratic Socialists of America talked to Palmer, and he describes the reaction of the Daughters as one of “indignation. They were very unhappy with our demonstration.”

The ladies recently got into a feud with Virginia Humanities’ Encyclopedia Virginia about its entry on the UDC that documents its role in white supremacy. Ginger Stephens, the president of the Virginia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, urged members to write the encyclopedia to correct its “negative article” on the organization.

Editor Brendan Wolfe responded with an article titled “United Daughters of the Confederacy & White Supremacy” to explain how the ladies’ seemingly benevolent work to care for Confederate widows, raise funds for monuments, and sponsor essay contests for white students turned the Lost Cause narrative into a “nostalgic elevation of a society the foundation of which was the violent enslavement of other human beings.”

Under the Lost Cause, the Civil War was not about slavery, but about states’ rights. African Americans wrenched from their families and homeland in chains were portrayed as better off as slaves under well-meaning masters who introduced them to Christianity.

“By asserting that slavery was not that bad and that white people had always acted honorably and in the best interests of blacks, the Lost Cause became an argument for a society in which white people belonged at the top of the order and blacks at the bottom,” writes Wolfe.

“That’s white supremacy.”

Stephens did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did four other Daughters of the Confederacy contacted by C-VILLE.

Several of the demonstrators also are descended from Confederates—and they weren’t celebrating that legacy. Richmonder Pat Bjork and her sister, Martha Wright, carried signs noting their great-grandfather was a Confederate doctor. “Honoring Confederates is not ‘history,’ it’s wrong,” says Wright’s sign, and both urged resistance to white supremacy.

Some descendants of Confederates aren’t proud of a heritage the enslaved African Americans, like sisters Pat Bjork and Martha Wright. Staff photo

Schmidt considered the Daughters’ cancellation of their dedication a success for the demonstrators. “The Lost Cause needs to be lost once and for all.” she says.

 

 

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Still here: White supremacy strikes again

North Downtown residents found fliers proclaiming that "it's okay to be white" on their front lawns this morning. Photo courtesy of Gail South

“It’s okay to be white.”

The sentence that first started popping up on high school and university campuses in November is the same one that was plastered onto dozens of fliers, folded into a neat square, stuffed into a sandwich bag with a rock in it and tossed on the lawns of North Downtown residents last night.

Neighbors on Cargil Lane, Marshall and Hazel streets and Locust and Watson avenues were some of many who awoke to find such a message on April 18.

“I think it’s supposed to be intimidating,” says Gail South, whose husband found their note around 7am. “Why on earth would someone do this?”

But Reverend Phil Woodson says it came as no surprise, because there have been almost 40 overt actions or events involving white supremacists in town since August of last year.

“One of the narratives that people like to think is that on August 12, we were invaded, that people came from somewhere else,” he says. “But the reality is that there’s still a large number of white supremacists who live in and around Charlottesville.”

He points to local cars that have since been spray painted with racial slurs, white supremacists who have interrupted City Council meetings and an enormous Confederate flag recently raised on the side of Interstate 64 in Louisa.

Charlottesville has been the target of racist fliers before, and the Winchester Star reports the KKK distributed 22 similar fliers-in-a-baggie in Frederick County April 8.

Flyering is activity that only takes one person, says Carla Hill at the Center for Extremism.

On Monday morning, Reverend Woodson arrived at the First United Methodist Church to find its nearby telephone poles stapled with similar fliers, and with one caught in the netting of the church’s scaffolding.

This flier was a Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson quote that read, “The time for war has not yet come, but it will come, and that soon; and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.”

Quotes on fliers stapled to nearby telephone poles were attributed to Charlottesville’s beloved Thomas Jefferson, though Monticello’s website says Plato, Felix Frankfurter and Anton Menger have been credited with the same quote: “There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal men.”

Though members of the First United Methodist Church have been very vocal in their opposition to white supremacy, Woodson says he doesn’t believe the messages were directed toward them.

“I really think it was due to the high traffic that would have been downtown for the Tom Tom Festival,” he says. “Any time there’s going to be a large gathering of people, it presents an opportunity for these white supremacists to spread their discord and hatred.”

He adds that local residents should be aware of what’s happening, and that white supremacy doesn’t always look like a man marching down Market Street with a swastika flag in tow.

“We can’t seem to get the vast majority of the community to understand that this is still happening and it’s going to take every single person to get involved in order to make a difference,” the reverend says.

Woodson nods to the Concert for Charlottesville, the free night of “music and unity” that drew Dave Matthews, Justin Timberlake, Ariana Grande and other stars to town in the wake of August 12.

“How many thousands of people showed up to a Dave Matthews Band concert at the UVA football stadium, and how many of those people are actually engaged in confronting white supremacy?”