Tag: Zyahna Bryant

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Speaking out: UVA prof Jalane Schmidt offers thoughts on public engagement, defamation lawsuit

Jalane Schmidt, a community activist and professor of religious studies at UVA, was recently sued for defamation for a comment she made in a C-VILLE Weekly article. PC: Eze Amos

On a chilly Thursday evening last week, several dozen people gathered at the Central Library  for a talk on “the risks and rewards of public engagement” by someone who knows them all too well. 

Jalane Schmidt, a community activist and professor of religious studies at UVA, was recently sued for a comment she made in a C-VILLE Weekly article about the plaintiffs suing the city to stop it from moving its Confederate statues. One of those plaintiffs, Edward Dickinson Tayloe II, objected to the story’s mention of his family’s history of slaveholding, and to Schmidt’s observation that the family had been “roiling the lives of black people” for generations. He sued Schmidt, this paper, and former news editor Lisa Provence for defamation, seeking $1.7 million. The lawsuit was dismissed October 28. 

Schmidt’s case highlights current threats to academic freedom and public engagement, says Herbert Tucker, president of the UVA chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which sponsored the event. “If she is at risk,” he wrote in an email to C-VILLE, “in pursuing a call to community engagement that UVA now expressly encourages, and speaking her mind on a topic of public urgency that she has extensively studied, then all of us are at risk.”

In the McIntire Room, named for the man who commissioned the Lee statue, Schmidt began her speech with a deep dive into her background. She became passionate about “participatory cultural work” while conducting research in Cuba, where “learning was often conducted in the streets, or other open air spaces, or public forums,” she said.

After receiving tenure at UVA in 2015, Schmidt began teaching critical whiteness studies, which, in turn, piqued her interest in Zyahna Bryant’s petition to remove the city’s Robert E. Lee statue. In 2016, she started going to meetings of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces, which the city created to consider the issue. She was disappointed that, of the few people who attended, most were in favor of keeping the Confederate statues. 

Wanting to “step up” her game about Civil War history, she did more research and connected with historians on Twitter, leading her to the work of respected Civil War scholars. 

“It was from Ervin Jordan that I learned…that 52 percent of the local population was enslaved [before emancipation,]” Schmidt said. “Because this was such a compelling fact, I began to mention it every time I spoke to the BRC…if 52 percent of the population was enslaved, then those statues are lying to us.”

She, along with several other community activists, encouraged more people to attend BRC meetings and speak out against the statues. Before the commission’s final meeting, they handed out T-shirts saying, “I stand with the 52%.”

Following the release of the BRC’s report, City Council voted in February 2017 to relocate the Lee statue, and the announcement of the Unite the Right rally soon followed.

“It was not an option for those of us who oppose white supremacy to allow these groups to appear in public spaces unopposed,” Schmidt said. “That is what happened in the 1920s when the Klan crested here. I have not found any record in all of my research of any white people standing up to the Klan.”

Schmidt helped to organize counterprotests and publicized the Klan’s 1921 gift to UVA. Though she was “shell-shocked” after witnessing the violence of the rally first-hand, she continued to voice her opposition to the monuments, including by leading popular tours, with Andrea Douglas of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, that aim to provide a more complete story about the Confederate statues.  

Of the lawsuit filed against her, Schmidt said she stands by her statements about Tayloe’s family, one of the largest slave-holding dynasties in Virginia. She called the lawsuit a “textbook case of white fragility” and an attempt to silence her.

Though the case was dismissed, with Judge Claude Worrell ruling that it had no legal basis to proceed, Schmidt remains displeased with way UVA handled the lawsuit. Virginia’s Office of Risk Management turned down her case, and the university did not ask the Virginia attorney general to overturn that decision. 

Instead, the ACLU represented Schmidt and covered all of her legal fees. 

“UVA has been encouraging [professors], especially as of late, to do public engagement scholarship,” she said. “But then the institution has not yet figured out what that means.” 

Despite the risks, especially for those who do not have tenure, Schmidt encouraged more professors to speak to the press and be publicly engaged. 

“Not everybody needs to be out in the barricades. There’s a whole lot of infrastructure that…supports the people who are,” she said, offering the example of making food for an activist group, babysitting kids during a protest, or supporting activists in court. 

“There’s so many ways to be supportive that don’t require actual physical presence in the line of fire.”

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McAuliffe’s take: Book avoids blacks, activists in account of August 12

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.

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Controlling the narrative: Panel looks at black Charlottesville’s stories

Claudrena Harold, Tanesha Hudson, and  Zyahna Bryant discuss how white supremacy was in Charlottesville long before August 12 at a UVA panel moderated by UVA vice-provost Louis Nelson. staff photo

Why Charlottesville was targeted by a white supremacist rally, ostensibly to protest the removal of a Confederate statue, has led to several theories. That was the starting point for a panel sponsored by the UVA library August 12, two years after the Unite the Right rally.

“Beyond the statues: The invisibility of black Charlottesville” began in the Harrison/Small auditorium with a moment of silence—then a discussion on whether Charlottesville became a target for white supremacists because of the absence of a counternarrative of truth telling on white supremacy and black activism.

It was a premise moderator Louis Nelson, a UVA vice-provost, admitted he didn’t necessarily buy. But he also questioned the “prevailing mythology” that white supremacy came from outside, and Charlottesville really wasn’t like that..

Charlottesville native and soon-to-be UVA first-year Zyahna Bryant challenged the out-of-towners narrative of August 12 and reminded that the man who organized the Unite the Right rally was a graduate of UVA. “Really, people just came out of their houses and came out from their basements into the street and started displaying their ideology,” she said.

In Charlottesville, black people have always had stories about building community, she said. “They just haven’t had those same platforms as white people.”

Activist Tanesha Hudson said, “When narratives are controlled by masses that have the power and the resources, you’re never going to get the truth. You can’t tell our truths if we’re not in the room.”

She’s making a documentary on black Charlottesville, “mainly because the story hadn’t really been told from a black perspective.”

Negative stories about black people perpetuate a system of racism, she said. “You never see the people rising up against white supremacy.” For instance, the story of Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion, was one she did not learn in Charlottesville schools, she said.

“One thing I loved about separate but equal,” said Hudson, were the black newspapers like the Reflector and the Tribune, which did provide news about what was going on in the black community.

Bryant pointed out how African Americans like Toni Morrison have contributed to American culture. “She was writing to and for black women,” said Bryant. “We created our own culture. I’m fascinated with how we can be so oppressed and so great at the same time. It fills me up.”

Claudrena Harold is a UVA history professor who co-edited Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity with Nelson and has made films on the history of black student activism at UVA. “I wanted to capture the beauty and texture of everyday life,” and how black students in the ‘60s and ‘70s created a culture, she said. “I wanted to visually tell that.”

Nelson asked the panelists about the most pressing systems and structures that need to be addressed.

A living wage and union representation, said Harold. “When people talk about the university as a plantation, they’re not talking about its architectural design.”

Hudson listed health care and justice, while Bryant said public education. She described how her guidance counselor tried to steer her away from applying to UVA and she realized she was the only one of 30 black students at Charlottesville High who applied. 

“UVA is not actually accessible to black students in Charlottesville,” said Bryant. “Most of their parents have worked for the university.” 

Bryant also warned about “the dangers of free speech,” which shut down city schools for two days when a teenager made a threat on social media. In school during conversations about history, she said, “Young white boys feel emboldened to be like, ‘I don’t like black people,’ and feel the classroom is a safe space to say that, and then we wonder who’s doing the mass shootings in school. Do we not see any level of connectedness there?”

 

 

 

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Racist threat reverberates: Schools closed, teens arrested, students protest

More than 100 students and community allies joined the Charlottesville High School Black Student Union in its walkout for racial justice on Monday, March 25. eze amos

As thousands were celebrating literature at the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, a less-exalted missive from the nether regions of the internet, threatening “ethnic cleansing” at Charlottesville High, closed all city schools last Thursday and Friday. It also prompted CHS’ Black Student Union to lead a walkout for racial justice on Monday.

More than 100 students and community allies gathered at McIntire Park, where they marched past the skate park and up to the guard rails abutting the U.S. 250 Bypass.

“When black lives are under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back,” they chanted, waving protest signs toward the oncoming traffic, and cheering when drivers honked in solidarity.

Black Student Union president Zyahna Bryant read a list of 10 demands for the school system, including hiring more black teachers for core classes. “We have one black teacher that teaches an AP class at CHS,” she said.

The group also wants the school to give more weight to African American history, and for school resource officers to have racial bias and cultural sensitivity training.

Senior Althea Laughon-Worrell said CHS administration tried to keep students in school. ”It wasn’t until they saw that we had an outpouring of community support that they seemed to accept that it was happening,” she said. “We can’t personally ensure that our demands are met, but we plan to keep putting pressure on the city and the school board to deal with the issues we have identified.”

Students lined the 250 Bypass on Monday, holding signs spelling out their demands for change. eze amos

Bryant had posted a screenshot of the threat, from the message board 4chan, on Thursday, and said racism in city schools isn’t new. There will be no reconciliation without structural change and the redistribution of resources for black and brown students, she added.

“In the past, when students of color have brought forth racial concerns, there has been no real change,” Bryant said on Thursday. “This is the time to act and show black and brown students that they matter with lasting changes and reform. Now is not the time to pass another empty resolution. It is time to back the words up with action.”

Around noon Friday, March 22, Charlottesville police announced they had arrested and charged a 17-year-old male with a Class 6 felony for threatening to commit serious bodily harm on school property, and harassment by computer, a misdemeanor.

At a press conference, Charlottesville Police Chief RaShall Brackney told reporters and community members that the culprit identifies as Portuguese, was in Albemarle County at the time of the arrest, and is not a Charlottesville High School student. She said state laws prohibit police from publicly identifying the minor, unless he were to be tried as an adult.

Local, state, and federal partners located the suspect’s IP address with the help of internet service providers, according to Brackney. She did not divulge whether he had any weapons.

“We want the community and the world to know that hate is not welcome in Charlottesville,” Brackney said. “And in Charlottesville and around the globe, we stand firmly in stating: There are not very fine people on both sides of this issue.”

Similarly, Mayor Nikuyah Walker said at the press conference that she hopes the way the threat was handled will lessen fear associated with future threats, and that Charlottesville is “leading the fight for justice globally.”

Also on March 22, Albemarle police reported the arrest of an Albemarle High teen for posting on social media a threat to shoot up the school. Police say that is unrelated to the Charlottesville High threat to kill black and Hispanic students.

City schools Superintendent Rosa Atkins said the decision to close schools a second day and keep 4,300 students home was to make sure everyone in the community, including students and staff, feel safe returning to school.

The racial terrorism was a painful reminder to a community already traumatized from the August 2017 invasion of white supremacists.

UVA media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan tweeted on Friday, “Today, as Charlottesville teachers and students sit home for a second day trying not to let fear overtake them, I’m reminded of those who told me after August 12, 2017, that white supremacists were not a threat to this country. If you think that, be glad you have that luxury.”

Charlottesville School Board Chair Jennifer McKeever said, “It’s unfortunate and frankly it’s really frustrating that we live in this world where people can make these threats and feel comfortable making these threats.”

Courtney Maupin’s daughter is a freshman at CHS. “It’s scary to know there are people out there who don’t like you for the color of your skin,” she said. “I had to explain to my two younger children who didn’t understand why they weren’t in school.”

Like most parents, Kristin Clarens, a local anti-racist activist and mom of three, said she’s glad the city made safety a priority.

“I’m grateful for the efforts that people are making to keep our kids safe on every level, but I also think we should be more forceful in calling this act of white supremacy and terrorism out for what it is,” she said. “I’m heartbroken that we live in a climate where this is allowed to get to this level.”

McKeever, too, was heartened by the outpouring of community support in the face of a situation that is “not something you want to have to explain to our children.”—with additional reporting by Lisa Provence

An earlier version of this story appeared online.

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Arrest made in online threat against Charlottesville High School minorities

Charlottesville schools are closed for a second day while police investigate an anonymous online threat made for an ethnic cleansing at Charlottesville High School. Staff photo

By Samantha Baars and Lisa Provence

As thousands are celebrating literature at the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, a less-exalted missive from the nether regions of the internet, threatening ethnic cleansing at Charlottesville High, has closed all city schools for a second day Friday.

Around noon Friday, Charlottesville police announced they had arrested and charged a 17-year-old male with a Class 6 felony for threatening to commit serious bodily harm to people on school property, and harassment by computer, a misdemeanor.

At a following press conference, Charlottesville Police Chief RaShall Brackney told reporters and community members that the person they arrested identifies as Portuguese, was in Albemarle County at the time of the arrest, and is not a Charlottesville High School student. She said state laws prohibit police from publicly identifying the minor, unless he were to be tried as an adult.

Local, state, and federal partners located the suspect’s IP address with the help of internet providers, according to Brackney. She did not divulge whether he had any weapons.

Chief Brackney addresses media and community members.

“We want the community and the world to know that hate is not welcome in Charlottesville,” Brackney said at the press conference. “There are not very fine people on both sides of this issue.”

Charlottesville Superintendent Rosa Atkins also spoke, and said she found it “particularly troubling” that the person who made the threat is not enrolled in the city school system. School will resume as normal next week, and counselors will be available as usual.

“We will give [students] a warm welcome Monday morning,” Atkins said.

Mayor Nikuyah Walker said she hopes the way the threat was handled will lessen any fear of future threats, that Charlottesville is “leading the fight for justice globally,” and that “the world is aware that this will not be welcomed [here.]”

Thursday, Albemarle police arrested an Albemarle High teen for posting on social media a threat to shoot up the school. Police say that is unrelated to the Charlottesville High threat to kill black and Hispanic students.

Atkins says the decision to close city schools a second day and keep 4,300 students home is to make sure everyone in the community, including students and staff, feel safe returning to school.

The racial terrorism is a painful reminder to a community already traumatized from the August 2017 invasion of white supremacists.

UVA media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan tweeted, “Today, as Charlottesville teachers and students sit home for a second day trying not to let fear overtake them, I’m reminded of those who told me after August 12, 2017, that white supremacists were not a threat to this country. If you think that, be glad you have that luxury.”

Another reaction came from UVA law professor Benjamin Spencer, who tweeted, “America: This is life as a black family in America. My children cannot go to school for a second day in a row because some rando person has threatened to murder all the “n*ggers” and “w*tbacks” at C’ville High School. #Charlottesville #ThisIsAmerica”

City School Board Chair Jennifer McKeever says, “It’s unfortunate and frankly it’s really frustrating that we live in this world where people can make these threats and feel comfortable making these threats.”

CHS senior and activist Zyahna Bryant, president of the Black Student Union, posted a screenshot of the threat from the message board 4chan, and says racism in city schools isn’t new. There will be no reconciliation without structural change and the redistribution of resources for black and brown students, she adds.

“In the past, when students of color have brought forth racial concerns, there has been no real change,” says Bryant. “The is the time to act and show black and brown students that they matter with lasting changes and reform. Now is not the time to pass another empty resolution. It is time to back the words up with action.”

Courtney Maupin’s daughter is a freshman at CHS. “It’s scary to know there are people out there who don’t like you for the color of your skin,” she says. “I had to explain to my two younger children who didn’t understand why they weren’t in school yesterday.”

When she heard Thursday schools would be closed again, “I cried last night because it’s heartbreaking,” says Maupin.

Kristin Clarens, a local anti-racist activist and mom of three, is one of several community members who says she’s working to dismantle white supremacy at a local, national, and international level. In the immediacy of the school closings, they’re making sure food insecure students who rely on school lunch are still getting fed.

Two of her children go to Burnley Moran Elementary, the city’s largest elementary school, where kids from two public housing projects—Westhaven and one near Riverview Park—are bused in everyday. Clarens, who’s watching four extra kids today, says these students can be particularly vulnerable, and their parents can’t always find childcare or transportation when school is cancelled abruptly.

During yesterday’s closing, she and other parents hosted an open invitation lunch at Westhaven, and they’re planning to have another one today from 12-2pm. It will be paid for by the Burnley Moran PTO, which is accepting donations of money and nonperishable food that can be delivered to the Westhaven Recreation Center during the community lunch hours.

Like most parents, Clarens says she’s glad the city made safety a priority.

“I’m grateful for the efforts that people are making to keep our kids safe on every level, but I also think we should be more forceful in calling this act of white supremacy and terrorism out for what it is,” she says. “I’m heartbroken that we live in a climate where this is allowed to get to this level.”

McKeever, too, is heartened by the outpouring of community support in the face of a situation that is “not something you want to have to explain to our children.”

Updated Friday, March 22 at 11:53am with the Charlottesville Police Department announcement that they’d made an arrest.

Updated Friday, March 22 at 1:50pm with information from the press conference.

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Beyond the statues: Councilor’s book explores Confederate monument backlash

City Councilor Wes Bellamy spoke candidly about Confederate statues, the controversy over his old tweets, and the effect his career has had on his family. Photo by Mina Pirasteh

By Jonathan Haynes

City Councilor Wes Bellamy sat down for a revelatory interview at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center January 10 to promote his new book, Monumental: It Was Never About a Statue.

The title alludes to the former vice-mayor’s push to remove Confederate monuments from Charlottesville parks, and the racist backlash it inspired, which culminated in the August 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally. “If it’s just about the statues, people aren’t going to kill you,” he said. “People don’t drive a car into a group of people over the removal of a statue.”

Andrea Copeland-Whitsett, director of member education services for the Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce, conducted the interview. She began by addressing the derogatory remarks Bellamy had tweeted about women, white people, and the LGBTQ community between 2009 and 2014, and the outrage that erupted when the tweets resurfaced in November 2016.

Bellamy called the tweets “something evil-inspired,” and described his personal experience of the scandal for the first time. He was spending Thanksgiving in Atlanta with his wife when he got a call from a blocked number. According to Bellamy, the voice said, “Hey n—-r, we’re going to break you down. This is Trump’s country now.” Then he received another call from his office letting him know that his old tweets had been sent to City Council and local press.

He could hardly believe they were from his account. “I was so far past that [kind of attitude],” he said.

Come Monday, “a tsunami hit.” Friends and allies turned their backs on him. Then-governor Terry McAuliffe publicly denounced him. He was devastated. Though he remained on City Council, he resigned from his positions at Albemarle High School and on the Virginia Board of Education.

Ultimately, he said, the experience was humbling. “I used to walk around thinking I was a hero. It was a very necessary lesson to me that I am not.”

Bellamy’s tweets were dug up by Jason Kessler, who organized the Unite the Right rally the following year.

The movement to remove the city’s Confederate monuments is often presented as Bellamy’s idea. But he gives credit to Mayor Nikuyah Walker and local high school activist Zyahna Bryant, who drafted the original petition asking City Council to remove the statues and rename Lee Park.

Bryant contacted him after McAuliffe vetoed a bill that would protect Confederate monuments in March 2016. “You can remove the statue,” she told him.

He teamed up with then-councilor Kristin Szakos, who had been publicly questioning the presence of Confederate monuments, and calling on the city to end its celebration of Lee-Jackson Day.

When Bellamy and Szakos held a press conference, he began to fear for his safety. Staring down “a sea of individuals” bearing Confederate flags and shouting, “I was concerned someone was going to shoot me,” he said. Afterwards, Bellamy began receiving death threats on a daily basis, and “would hear loud beats on the back window” of his home after midnight.

It wasn’t about the statue, he said. “People believed we were going to change what was theirs, that this is their community.”

Though his tenure in office has been tumultuous, Bellamy professed an unremitting love for Charlottesville, praising local residents for coming together to confront racial inequities. There are other cities that have the same issues, he said, “but we’re really willing to talk about it.”

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Pilgrims’ report: What they brought back from civil rights pilgrimage

UVA professor Frank Dukes points out the Confederate memorabilia for sale at Appomattox, a national park. Photo Eze Amos

A month ago, around 100 locals set off on two buses to Montgomery, Alabama, carrying soil from the site where John Henry James was lynched in 1898 in Albemarle County. On August 5, nearly 200 people gathered at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center to hear the pilgrims’ report back to the community about what they experienced, what they learned and where they go next with what they brought back from the historic journey.

A common theme emerged: The violent events from last summer’s Unite the Right rally were not isolated events, but part of a continuum of white supremacy dating back to this country’s founding, say pilgrimage participants and organizers.

“Charlottesville has a long history of violent white supremacy,” said Jalane Schmidt, UVA religious studies professor and pilgrimage co-organizer. Along with James’ lynching, she listed the KKK in the 1920s—active at the same time controversial monuments of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were erected—sit-ins in the ‘60s to integrate restaurants, and August 11 and 12 last year.  “And in all of these cases, police were complicit,” she added.

The journey began on July 8, the anniversary of the KKK rally last year, but Andrea Douglas, executive director of the heritage center and the pilgrimage’s other organizer, pointed out that July 9 was a more significant anniversary—the 150th of the ratification of the 14th Amendment that gave African Americans citizenship, due process and equal protection.

“Those are the same things we’re talking about today,” she said.

The six-day pilgrimage hit civil rights landmarks and museums between Charlottesville and Montgomery, and included Danville, Greensboro, Charlotte, Atlanta and Birmingham. It began with a stop at Appomattox, where a national park depicts the surrender of the Confederacy with remarkably little information about slavery, the issue that had sparked the Civil War, the pilgrims noted.

“They were selling Confederate memorabilia” at a taxpayer-funded national park, reported Frank Dukes, UVA Institute for Environmental Negotiation professor.

Dukes identified the Sweet Auburn district in Atlanta, a historic African American community that has been preserved and works to remain affordable, as a model for Charlottesville. He also mentioned memorials to the legacy of racial terrorism and the civil rights struggle, such as the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial to Peace and Justice and the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “We don’t have enough of that,” he said.

Multiple people reporting to the community said school curricula is an issue.

Cauline Yates reports back for the Seasoned Saints, the demographic with the most years. Eze Amos

“We’d like to see schools do a better job of teaching black history—and not just at Black History Month,” said Cauline Yates.

Rising Charlottesville High senior Zyahna Bryant echoed the call for “more comprehensive black history” in schools. She, too, pointed out that the lynching of John Henry James “was not one singled-out event,” but is part of a history of white supremacy seen today in mass incarceration and “students of color failed over and over again.”

Bryant said the Real Justice PAC lobbies prosecutors. “I met with [Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney] Joe Platania about how we can get people of color out of the criminal justice system,” she said.

Zyahna Bryant was one of the high school students who made the pilgrimage. Eze Amos

DeTeasa Gathers and Patsy Goolsby were among the 21 faculty and staff UVA sent on the pilgrimage, which they describe as transformative and enlightening, while evoking feelings of anger, pain and shame, empathy and gratitude. “The pilgrimage was hard,” said Goolsby.

“Did I really miss all of this in history?” Gathers asked. “Did I miss what happened to my people?”

“The original sin was not slavery, but the narrative of white supremacy,” said Goolsby. She says European-Americans have a “moral obligation” to work with other white people to understand this history.

The message they bring back to UVA: “Acknowledge people of color’s ability to serve in leadership roles,” said Gathers, to applause from the audience. Blacks have to work twice as hard as whites and “this is UVA’s reality.”

Civil rights is an ongoing effort, she added, and “make sure everyone votes.”

Her husband Don Gathers, chair of the city’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces and member of the newly formed Charlottesville Police Civilian Review Board, says he was struck by the interactions among the people sharing a journey that affected them “spiritually, psychologically and emotionally.”

The pilgrims visited places where they experienced joy, sorrow, lamentations and anger, “all fueled with clear recognition of the persistence of white supremacy over our history,” he says.

Gathers was moved by “sacred moments”: seeing the struggle for justice, standing in front of August 12 victim Heather Heyer’s picture at the Southern Poverty Law Center, standing in the pulpit at Dexter Baptist Church in Montgomery where Dr. Martin Luther King preached and marching across the Pettus bridge. “We don’t get this kind of learning in schools,” he said.

“The future is long and the work is never done,” said Gathers. “Those on the pilgrimage can no longer sit on the periphery. We are forever changed.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Journey begins: #cvillepilgrimage commemorates, reclaims local lynching

CHS student Zyahna Bryant and Mayor Nikuyah Walker dig up soil from where John Henry James is believed to have died. It will be taken in a pilgrimage to Montgomery to join that of other African Americans who died from lynching around the South. staff photo

About 50 people gathered in the woods beside the train tracks running west of Charlottesville early July 7. The morning was cool and birds could be heard chirping in the quiet—a scene nothing like the one 120 years ago, when a mob yanked John Henry James off a train there at Wood’s Crossing and strung him up on a locust tree.

“Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world.” The Reverend Brenda Brown-Grooms sang the Mahalia Jackson spiritual as participants contemplated the violence that had taken place on the site.

The occasion was to gather soil from property now owned by Farmington Country Club, the first step of a pilgrimage in which approximately 100 Charlottesville citizens will transport it to the recently opened lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama—the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial to Peace and Justice.

“We are embarking on an important journey,” said Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and one of the pilgrimage organizers. “Today we recognize a murder. We, in doing so, are returning humanity to a dehumanizing act.”

The journey is a way to “commemorate, understand and recognize this act and incorporate it into our DNA and bodies as wrong,” said Douglas.

City and county officials were present for the ceremony, including Mayor Nikuyah Walker, Vice Mayor Heather Hill, councilors Wes Bellamy and Kathy Galvin and police Chief RaShall Brackney, as well Albemarle supervisors Diantha McKeel, Ned Gallaway, Norman Dill, Rick Randolph and Chair Ann Mallek.

UVA professor and pilgrimage organizer Jalane Schmidt recounted the details of James’ slaying. He’d been accused of assaulting a white woman, arrested and taken to spend the night in jail in Staunton because of fears of a lynching. On the train ride back, accompanied by the Albemarle sheriff, a group of around 150 unmasked men boarded the train.

After James was hanged, his body was riddled with 75 bullets, according to the Shenandoah Herald. “Hundreds of people visited the scene with many snatching souvenirs, such as pieces of his clothing,” said Schmidt. No arrests were made.

Walker and Charlottesville High student Zyahna Bryant dug up dirt from the site, and Walker asked all the black people there to come closer, to close their eyes and “yell out a name you’d like to share this moment with.”

Said Walker, “There is no explanation for the violence black bodies have endured in this country. There are no amount of sorry that can make up for the amount of turmoil black people and black families have endured in this country.”

She pointed out the volume of the violence inflicted on James with 75 shots into his body. “Somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, maybe somebody’s father.” She said those same injustices and hate happen every day in this country and in Charlottesville.

“We take this journey to gamble on the ancient notion that the truth will set us free,” said the Reverend Susan Minasian, who is one of three clergy going on the pilgrimage.

Schmidt concluded the ceremony by pouring “a libation for the dead”—Virginia distilled whiskey from a flask—onto the ground where James is believed to have perished.

The mood of participants afterward was somber, with some relief.

“It’s rehumanizing,” says April Burns, whose mother, Joan Burton, grew up across the street at Ednam Farm and had played around the “hanging tree.”

“This was for somebody who never had a funeral,” said Burns.

“In my opinion, slavery was this country’s original sin and we can’t get past it,” said Supervisor McKeel. “It’s haunting us to this day.”

Chief Brackney acknowledged being torn between her race and her job as a cop. “I’m saddened my profession is still part of that,” she said. “I’m also feeling hope that we’re standing on rich soil that allows us to plant our findings forward.”

She added, “We start to own and change the narrative.”

“It was very emotional, being able to be in the spot as a black man,” said Bellamy, who has family members who have been lynched. “I was thinking about the mob and what [James’] feelings must have been to feel the train slow down, and the state of shock and fear he must have felt.”

The murderers took 20 minutes for prayer, “making a ritual of hanging and shooting this man,” said Bellamy.

And he thought of two years ago, when he created a firestorm by saying the city’s Confederate statues should come down. “I wonder if [people] knew this story,” he said.

Being at the lynching site couldn’t help but feel very close to home. “I get letters all the time about how they want to hang me on a tree,” said Bellamy. “My daughters—they send letters to my daughters and want to hang them on a tree.”

One thing Bellamy said he’s seen is the “evolution” of white people. “A lot of white people just didn’t understand how painful this was for us.”

He said, “People’s minds are a lot more open from March 2016 until now.”

Following the Farmington ceremony, the heritage center held a community conversation on lynching and screened “An Outrage,” a documentary by Lance Walker and Charlottesville native Hannah Ayers, who didn’t have Charlottesville on her radar when they started work on a film about lynching. Like a lot of people, Ayers was unaware of James’ murder.

But lynching was much more a part of history than “what we’d been taught,” said Walker.

Supervisor Randolph got a standing ovation for his talk on race—”truly America’s disgrace”—and declared July 12, the day of the lynching, John Henry James Day. “Here we repudiate the vile murder of John Henry James.”

Many of the 100 people who will be leaving on the July 8 pilgrimage were present in the historic African American Jefferson School.

Said Douglas, “I believe this is nothing short of monumental. We’re taking hold of history. We’re examining it critically and rewriting the narrative that’s been incomplete.”

 

 

 

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Removing the mask: Series unveils racial issues within the community

A Virginia Humanities series addressed Charlottesville’s dark past and featured a panel that included moderators Samantha Willis and Justin Reid, with members Mayor Nikuyah Walker, Niya Bates, Jordy Yager and Zyahna Bryant. Eze Amos

By Jonathan Haynes

A little backstory: Charlottesville began as a plantation community with slavery as its foundational industry. Racial violence did not stop after Emancipation, but continued with lynchings and segregation, according to Monticello historian Niya Bates. The University of Virginia, she adds, was a big proponent of scientific racism at the turn of the 20th century. And, until last year, it had buildings named for famed eugenicists Harvey E. Jordan and Ivey Foreman Lewis.

Bates was one of the speakers at a June 22 panel, entitled Backstory Breakdown, which included Mayor Nikuyah Walker, freelance journalist Jordy Yager and student activist Zyahna Bryant. Part of the Virginia Humanities’ #UnmaskingCville series, the panel’s goal was to educate the public on racial issues affecting the Charlottesville area.

The first half of the program focused on Charlottesville’s past, and Yager traced modern wealth inequality to housing policy. He explained how, during the post World War II period, the Federal Housing Administration only offered subsidized loans for homes in neighborhoods that barred sales to black buyers—a policy known as redlining. While white Americans accumulated wealth through homeownership, which they would then pass down to their children, black Americans were effectively locked out of the housing market, which prevented them from integrating into white communities and accumulating wealth of their own.

During the evening’s second half, which focused on the future, moderators addressed the issue of Confederate statues.

Bates dismissed the notion that the statues were a source of pride in one’s heritage, explaining that they were erected in the 1920s to promulgate the Lost Cause narrative and intentionally placed in areas that intimidated black residents.

Bryant, who drafted a petition to remove the statues, expressed frustration that her tax dollars will go toward their maintenance. She said it would be cheaper to just remove them, since demolition would be a one-time expense.

Walker was outspoken on the impact mass incarceration and the war on drugs has had on the black community. “It’s about upholding a system of slavery,” she said, pointing out the racial disparities in drug arrests, despite similar rates of use. Yager concurred, noting that the language of the 13th Amendment prohibits involuntary confinement except as punishment for a crime.

This discussion continued into a Q&A, including a question about a new law Governor Ralph Northam had signed in Charlottesville the day before that requires the collection of DNA and fingerprints for two additional misdemeanors. Walker replied that Charlottesville is the locality that “fueled the law.” She cited former Charlottesville police chief Tim Longo’s “rounding up” almost 200 black men to request DNA after a victim described a serial rapist as a black male as evidence the policy is racist.

“I think it will continue to perpetuate those practices that lead to mass incarceration,” she said.

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Re-righting history: Katie Couric documents what divides us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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