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Students at UNC Topple Confederate Statue

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Students at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill toppled the Confederate monument known as “Silent Sam” on Monday night. According to WRAL, nearly 200 student protestors assembled at the Peace and Justice Plaza at around 7 p.m. to call for removal of the statue. A short time later they marched to the statue, and by 9:30 p.m. it lay on the ground, toppled, while the crowd of students erupted in a raucous applause.

Silent Sam, Toppled. Photo by Samee Siddiqui

The university’s administration, however, was not amused. UNC Chancellor Carol Folt released a statement at 1:48 a.m. acknowledging that the Confederate monument was “divisive” and a “source of frustration” for many years, but calling the protesters’ actions “unlawful and dangerous.”

“Silent Sam” has stood on the campus since it was erected in 1913, and has been a flashpoint for students and faculty for many years. The official Department of History webpage even published a statement asking the university to remove the statue, saying, “The faculty of the Department of History urges the officers of UNC and other state officials to pursue every avenue to remove the ‘Silent Sam’ monument…[the creators] shared a veneration of slavery, the “Old South,” the Confederacy, and the ideology of white supremacy.”

Monday’s protest began as a march for solidarity with Maya Little, a graduate student who was arrested this past spring after defacing the statue. In addition to criminal charges, Little also faces an honor court that could lead to her being expelled from the university.

Governor Roy Cooper also issued a statement on Monday on Facebook saying, “The Governor understands that many people are frustrated by the pace of change and he shares their frustration, but violent destruction of public property has no place in our communities.”

Sources at the rally claimed the student protestors flanked the statue with huge banners, shielding it from view. During that time a rope was apparently attached to its base, which was used to pull it down. A WRAL reporter said she spied the rope before hearing a crack as the statue came down. Protestors then started shoveling dirt on the statue and kicking it before police made a cordon around the toppled monument. One person was arrested and charged for “concealing their identity during a public rally.”

This comes at a time when cities and institutions throughout the south are grappling with what role statues and symbols glorifying the Confederacy and spreading the Lost Cause myth should have in public spaces.

Photo by Daily Tar Heel

The One Year Anniversary of Unite the Right is Here. A lot Has Happened

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RVA Tank, Parkland Shooting, Democratic-nominee Spanberger, families separated at the border, KKK effigies, Governor Northam, punching Nazis, getting punched by Nazis.

It’s been a long year.

As we approach the one year anniversary of Unite the Right, the alt-right rally held in Charlottesville on Aug. 12 last year that ended with the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer, it’s hard to ignore the tension in the air. Whether that tension has increased or decreased, or the political dissension within our country is better or worse, Americans are certainly motivated. We’ve seen protest after protest, breaking news stories flying in each day with news of Russia, North Korea, Robert Mueller, Corey Stewart, and Jason Kessler.

The white nationalist movement has not slowed down, nor has it given up. Identity Evropa came to Richmond to pick up trash in hopes of normalizing their cause. The FBI has as many open cases concerning white supremacist propaganda online as they do for ISIS. And Unite the Right is happening again, but this time, its headed to Washington, D.C.

Here is a brief roundup of events from the past year to get you up to speed on the white nationalist movement in Virginia in preparation for this weekend’s latest appearance from our best-known racists (this list may not include every event related to white nationalism in Virginia):

August 2017: Jason Kessler, online blogger, and white nationalist, successfully organizes an alt-right rally called Unite the Right on Aug. 12 in Charlottesville, in the name of protecting the Confederate statues in two local parks. Several physical altercations occurred during the rally, and attendees were armed with bats, guns, or other weapons.

White Supremacists at Unite the Right

James Alex Fields, Jr., a white nationalist, drove his vehicle into a crowd of counter-protesters after the rally was deemed unlawful by police. His attack killed Heather Heyer and injured multiple others. Fields was part of Vanguard America, a white supremacist organization. He was placed in jail and denied bail.

President Trump suggested the blame for the violence rested with “many sides.”

September 2017: The Dreamers, young first-generation immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals act, mobilized after Trump’s threat to end the program. Long marches between Charlottesville and Richmond as well as Charlottesville and Washington sprung up as September clung to summer temperatures. DACA was rescinded later that month by Trump, but at least temporarily upheld by the Supreme Court.

An activist group hung Ku Klux Klan effigies in Bryan Park.

The New Confederate States of America planned a rally in Richmond to support Confederate statues on Monument Avenue, claiming to be motivated by the Monument Avenue Historical Commission convened in June by Mayor Levar Stoney and tasked with providing recommendations for what to do with the statues. The rally took place on Sept. 16, attended by over 400 counter-protesters, a heavy police presence, and a small handful of CSA members who arrived in twos and threes. The CSA was severely outnumbered in what RVA Mag called a “win for Richmond,” as the protest ended peacefully.

Counter-Protestors in Richmond

Later that month, the FBI claimed white nationalists are just as dangerous as Islamic terrorists.

October 2017: At the beginning of the month, a circuit court judge in Charlottesville handed down a ruling signaling that the Commonwealth’s laws protecting war memorials could be retroactively applied to Virginia’s Confederate monuments.

The City of Charlottesville and several small businesses in the area filed a novel lawsuit to prevent future militia groups from entering their city again. This lawsuit is ongoing and continues to seek a verdict in August of 2018. Six defendants have settled since May 2018.

White nationalist Richard Spencer held a torch-lit rally in Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, glorifying the Robert E. Lee monument and mimicking a similar torch-lit rally held on UVA’s campus the night before Unite the Right. Around two dozen white nationalists were present.

Jason Kessler began a new white nationalist group called New Byzantium following Unite the Right. It’s one of many new alt-right groups that continue to crop up to this day, largely spread through online forums.

November 2017: In a Democratic sweep, Ralph Northam became the new Governor of Virginia, joined by Justin Fairfax as Lt. Governor, and Mark Herring as Attorney General. It was a significant Democratic victory similar to the victory of then-Senator Obama when he won the presidency in 2008. The blue wave was accompanied by a new wave of female representatives in the General Assembly, the largest number of women to be elected to the GA in Virginia’s history. This included the first Latina women, the first Asian-American, and the first transgender woman to win a seat in the GA.

January 2018: Chris Cantwell, the notorious “Crying Nazi,” faced up to 20 years in jail for pepper-spraying counter-protesters at a torch-lit white supremacist rally on UVA’s campus the night before Unite the Right. At the beginning of the month, he attempted to sue anti-fascists, claiming that they discharged the pepper spray against themselves.

Thousands of women come to Richmond for the one-year anniversary of the Women’s March.

March 2018: Deandre Harris, a black man viciously beaten by white nationalists during the Unite the Right, was charged and then acquitted of assault by the District Court in Charlottesville. During Unite the Right, Harris was assaulted by six men with wooden pikes in the Market Street Parking Garage, eventually sustaining a spinal injury and receiving 10 staples in his head.

June 2018: Nathan Larson, a self-confessed pedophile and white supremacist, runs for Congress in Virginia. Previously an accountant in Charlottesville, Larson is running as an independent. Jason Allsup, another white nationalist who attended the Unite the Right rally, was elected as a Republican official in Washington state. This marked the beginning of many white supremacists and anti-Semitic candidates running on the Republican ticket in America ahead of midterm elections. This trend continued with Corey Stewart, Virginia’s Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. He appeared on CNN and struggled to answer questions about his past ties to white supremacists and anti-semites. He continues to be aggressive online and has not revoked his white nationalist ties.

Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee for Virginia’s 7th District, wins a huge primary victory and will run against Dave Brat in the fall for the congressional seat.

Abigail Spanberger

President Trump begins his “zero tolerance” immigration policies and enacts legislation that separates immigrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. National and international outrage sparks protests throughout the Commonwealth, including one outside Dave Brat’s office, who publicly supported Trump’s decision.

The National Parks Service approved an application submitted by Jason Kessler for another alt-right rally to be held in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 11 and 12 this year. This will come to pass this weekend in Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C.

Identity Evropa visited Richmond for a little community service by picking up trash around town in an attempt to normalize their organization and beliefs. In Lexington, local restaurant owner Stephanie Wilkinson refused to service White House Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at her restaurant, The Red Hen. It was followed by five days of protests against and for her restaurant. In one instance, someone threw chicken feces on their storefront window.

July 2018: The Monument Avenue Commission recommended that the Jefferson Davis monument be removed from Monument Avenue, with Mayor Stoney’s approval. Later in August, an unknown individual vandalized the Robert E. Lee monument with red paint, writing “BLM” (Black Lives Matter) on the statue’s base. This is only the latest act of vandalism concerning the statues over the past year.

Chris Cantwell, the aforementioned “crying Nazi,” was barred from entering the Commonwealth for the next five years. He plead guilty to assault and battery for spraying two anti-racist activists with pepper spray the night before Unite the Right.

August 2018:

Now that August approaches, we look to another year that will hopefully not result in death or injury. Jason Kessler will be in D.C. this Sunday, Aug. 12, in Lafayette Square to march and protest in the name of “white civil rights.” Regular faces like Kessler, Spencer and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke are said to appear and speak, although the movement has suffered serious divisions and other prominent white nationalists are disavowing Kessler.

A vigil will be held on Saturday, Aug. 11, in Charlottesville at 5 p.m. for Heather Heyer, in remembrance of her life, as well as an anti-racist march the next day in an attempt to heal from the events of last year.

Stay with RVA Mag on Instagram (@rvamag) and Twitter (@RVAmag)  for updates on these events this coming weekend.

RVA Global: Beirut’s Reckoning With Civil War Has Lessons For Richmond

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Like Richmond, Lebanon’s capital city Beirut is still grappling with the legacy of civil war. Unlike those in Richmond, though, many of Beirut’s current residents lived through the most recent civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990. The political structure that exacerbated the tensions of the war still exists. Lebanon’s 18 official sect affiliations organize political representation, access to government services, and much of social life, largely as they did before the war.

The Beit Beirut house

Debates about reconciliation and commemoration co-exist with immediate concerns about ongoing rebuilding and preservation efforts, contemporary politics, and even, for some families, with lingering questions about the disappearance of loved ones. As a result, the attempt to identify some sort of collective memory is fraught.

The International Center for Transitional Justice notes that, “The civil war is not documented in school history books, and young people are often actively discouraged from discussing it in school.” I heard this concern echoed by friends and fellow educators in Beirut and ascribed to the difficulty of politicians’ and community leaders’ coming to narrative consensus about the war.

Without a shared academic curriculum or national narrative commemorating the war, Beirut’s artists and designers play a key role in visualizing memory and linking their history with the present. My time in Lebanon last month coincided with the seventh annual Beirut Design Week.

The program, which ran from June 22 through 29, showcased the work of local artists, designers, writers, and activists. Begun in 2012, Beirut Design Week (BDW) now offers more than 150 exhibits, lectures, temporary public art pop ups and performances, and interactive community events, drawing at least 25,000 visitors per year, according to the organizers’ calculations.

The theme of this year’s BDW was “Design and the City.” It called for contributors and audience members alike to, “Consider design’s transformative role in conceiving of the urban space in such ways that express our needs, desires and dreams as inhabitants of the city.”

Fleeting Memories exhibit

While BDW exhibits explored a range of topics, the war’s legacy echoed throughout artists’ work and even through the exhibition sites themselves. The exhibits I attended cautioned against both remaining beholden to and ignoring history. Instead, they looked for ways that design and public art could mediate between the past and present.

Some pieces explicitly took up the impact of war reconstruction efforts. The BDW exhibit “Fading Memory” was created by the organization Architects for Change and was installed in Zico House, a formerly private home built in 1935 in the Sanayeh District. Architects for Change called Zico House a model of “adaptive reuse.”

In their introduction to the exhibit, they argued that Beirut has been negatively impacted by “the boom of foreign gentrification” in which developers from outside Beirut rebuild without considering the city’s culture and history. The Beirut Souks, for example, once the site of local trade in fabrics, spices, and other goods, now more closely resemble Short Pump. The renovation was spearheaded by a private real estate company called Solidere, which came under fire for its connections to the Hariri family (Rafik Hariri was a former prime minister of Lebanon who was assassinated in 2005; his son Saad currently holds the same position) and its willful erasure of civil war history in Beirut’s downtown.

Timeless Tiles exhibit

To challenge that kind of development, Architects for Change turned Zico House into a space visibly flooded by memory. Artists created an imagined former resident of the house, a young boy whose recollections of home—“the rubber tree roots that broke through our tiles and became part of our house,” for example—were written on walls and hung from trees.

As visitors wound their way up Zico’s steep stairwell, they were invited to describe their own feelings about Beirut’s past, present, and future in a single word on tiles which were then added to a rooftop mosaic (one respondent’s three answers: “Raw, tragic, fragile”). Once on the rooftop, signs marked the former locations of buildings that were since demolished by war or by rebuilding, as cranes and constructions workers labored across the street.

Before the war, Beit Beirut, another BDW site, functioned as the Barakat House does now. It was designed by Lebanese architect Youssef Afandi Aftimos in 1924. Because of the building’s position on the dividing line between East and West Beirut, it became a sniper post and saw heavy fighting.

The Beit Beirut house as it stands now

Today, Beit Beirut’s façade is pockmarked with bullet holes and worn down by fire. The casual observer might assume that she’s looking at a condemned building. Inside, though, new metal supports bolster the structure, the paint is fresh, and renovators have installed a modern auditorium and office spaces.

On the ground floor of Beit Beirut, a permanent exhibit describes the former photography business, Photo Mario, that was located at this address before the war. Curator Mona El Hallak describes the project as essential to Beit Beirut’s efforts as a “Museum of Memory.” Negatives and images uncovered from the debris after the war hang from the walls. Additional boxes of photos encourage viewers to pick one and attempt to locate the person in the image, drawing the audience into the work of reconciliation.

Project Mario at Beit Beirut

In her work on Beit Beirut, it’s clear that El Hallak sees memory as not only the attempt to clarify and understand the past, but as a way to navigate Beirut as it is now, a city informed by a long history of art, culture, business, and, yes, violence. The BDW-specific exhibit at Beit Beirut this summer continued that effort. Inside a building marked by what El Hallak calls “war architecture,” urban design researchers mapped 2018 Beirut based on the perception of migrant delivery drivers, the diminishing presence of the Beirut River, and interactive surveys that, in Jimmy Elias’s “Multiple City” project, uses feedback from the audience to “translat[e] subjective emotions and experiences into narratives that contribute to a better comprehension of cities and one’s own life within the city.”  

Richmond and Beirut are nowhere close to identical cities, and what works for Beirut as it continues working toward a future that engages a legacy of violence and deep divide will not necessarily be true for Richmond. But with the Monument Avenue Commission Report’s recent emphasis on partnering with the local arts community to envision new possibilities for commemoration in Richmond, Beirut Design Week is a useful reminder that the work of navigating the past and envisioning the future should be creative, intentional, collaborative, a bit messy, and always open to the public.

All photos by Katie Logan 

*This article was made possible in part by support from the VCU Global Education Office.

So Long, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States

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After a long, heated debate, change became the chosen path for Richmond today. According to the Monument Avenue Commission, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney officially recommended the removal of the Jefferson Davis Monument today from Monument Avenue.

“Of all the statues, this one is most unabashedly Lost Cause [sic] in its design and sentiment,” the commissioners wrote in the report.

The board includes Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum, and Sarah Driggs, author of “Richmond’s Monument Avenue,” among others who look to direct the River City away from the ‘lost cause’ narrative many of these monuments represent. And with these monuments having origins in the Confederate ‘lost cause’ mythology and Unite The Right 2.0 coming up in August, the commission came as a much needed response for these controversial monuments.

After nearly one year of intensive study by the ten person commission, the group produced a 117  page report considering the future of Richmond’s Confederate statues, opening the floor to options including removal or relocation of the Confederate statues into a museum, or somewhere with proper context.

“In addition to taking on the responsibility of explaining the monuments that currently exist, I have also asked the commission to look into and solicit public opinion on changing the face of Monument Avenue by adding new monuments that would reflect a broader, more inclusive story of our city,” said Stoney in a statement one year ago. “That is our goal.”

The yearlong review examining the statues originally created to “determine how best to reconcile a particular landscape viewed as both sacred and profane,” is now figuring that for many of the statues, removal is the best option. Riding off the recent change to the Barack Obama Elementary school last month, this is the first of many necessary reforms to a city that has never truly healed.

The report also addresses the monuments of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart and Stonewall Jackson, President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis and Confederate commander Matthew Fontaine Maury with short term changes that will add context to the statues, such as proper signage. They will also consider the opening or expansion into a museum exhibit, where the monuments may be put into proper context that reflects the newly inclusive historical significance the city wants to promote.

The commission’s site currently offers an open forum for public discussion, but is also developing a mobile app and new film and video that looks to rewire the proper narrative about Monument Avenue that is “consistent and historically accurate.”

Proposal Seeking Authority To Remove Confederate Statues Fails

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Last night, Richmond City Council voted 6-2 against a proposal requesting the General Assembly of Virginia grant the City Council the authority to remove of Confederate memorials on Monument Avenue.

Councilman Michael Jones of the 9th District proposed the measure, inspired in large part by the three deaths in Charlottesville. “I don’t see anyone dying over the Mona Lisa,” he said by phone earlier in the day. “It’s more than just artwork.”

“There’s an African proverb, when lions learn to write, the hunter is no longer a hero. Well, if slaves would have had a pen, the history would be different,” Jones said. He was anticipating some of the arguments that would be raised by people opposing his proposal, which he described as a vote on right versus wrong.

These were themes he returned to in a speech introducing the measure, invoking civil rights and Charlottesville, while proactively addressing opposing views. He noted that he’d been receiving death threats against himself and his children and even angry phone calls from a colleague on Council, which he described as unprofessional and borderline threatening.

“There comes a time when leaders need to step out in front of the polis. The civil rights legislation was not fully supported by many Americans,” Jones said. “When they were erected, it wasn’t simply for artwork, it was for the perpetuation of white supremacy.”

Some Opponents of the Measure

Opponents took turns speaking in three-minute slots, and they cited tourism dollars along with popular support, and many echoed claims of the Lost Cause narrative, a well-known historical myth that re-casts General Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis as heroes pulled into a war they didn’t want to fight – many sought to minimize the role of slavery.

“The Confederate Congress had a Jew and an Indian,” Ron Moore said. He used the two racial slurs to argue that the presence of Judah P. Benjamin and Stand Watie, a Cherokee who formed the Southern Cherokee Nation, meant that the Confederacy couldn’t be racist. Another opponent, Helen Marie Taylor, introduced herself as a 94-year-old with a long history working to preserve Monument Avenue. She first focused on Jones, telling him to be “more grateful” for the monuments, which she says were built to facilitate a better union. After she was reminded that she can’t directly address an individual councilmember, she turned back to Council President Chris Hilbert to compare Jones to an arsonist.

“Suppose I came here and told you that I’m an arsonist, I like to burn things down, but there are laws against it, so I came to you to get the law changed,” Taylor said. “He likes to tear things down, I like to burn things, why should I be discriminated against?”

Another speaker, Ned Ruffing, described the city as a living museum and said he only learned about Gabriel Prosser, who led a failed rebellion to escape slavery, from a stencil someone had done by the Davis Monument.

Earl Brantley spoke in support of the proposal, noting the limitations of the proposal and the history of disenfranchising African-American voters.

“This brother is just asking us to have the dialogue for the community that now has a right to talk that didn’t. So the community that was looked at as a commodity can speak now,” Brantley said, before asking why people opposed the conversation. “Because we can speak now?”

Proponents Line Up To Speak

Many of the 13 proponents echoed similar comments as Jones and Brantley, covering the history of discrimination and oppression in Richmond and beyond, including slavery, Jim Crow, and highway projects that bulldozed African-American neighborhoods.

Rebecca Turner, a historian who works in Richmond, said that museums were the place to learn history. “I do not believe we can contextualize these monuments in any way,” Turner said. She also noted that each of the statues avoided mentioning slavery. “In Latin, the inscription on Davis says that he fought for states rights and the constitution. There already is a movement to change our history, and it’s on those statues.”

Omari Kadaffi, a local activist on housing and food issues, said he was moved to speak by seeing people of color who opposed the proposal.

“I am shocked that they’d be so deluded as to believe the myths,” Kadaffi said, referring to the Lost Cause. “Anyone can go and read the articles of secession filed by each state, and each of those articles mentions slavery. There is no confusion about why they seceded.”

“I cannot explain to a black child why they should be proud of that statue,” LeSean Greene, the next speaker, said. He noted that monuments were meant to inspire. “Do we want our children to look up to them? Do we want our children to aspire to grow up to be people who have slaves?”

Phil Wylato, editor of the Virginia Defender newspaper was supportive, but critical of the measure.

“They perpetuate a myth, a government-sponsored and paid-for myth about one of the most divisive issues that we’ve ever faced as a country,” Wylato said. “I’m in favor, but it’s very mild, it doesn’t even put you on the record as being against the statues.”

Pointing to opponents of the proposal, former City Council member Marty Jewell noted he was friends with some of them.

“They’re not racist people to my knowledge, but they’re misguided people. I’ve read the same textbooks they read in school, which said that black folks liked slavery, that we were ‘a happy lot’.” He spoke on the history of racism in Richmond before urging the Council to vote up the measure.

After public commentary, city council spoke, many citing the Monument Avenue Commission as a reason to delay the vote. Although Council Member Ellen Robertson echoed many of her colleagues on the importance of dialogue, she came out in support of the proposal.

“I want to support Mr. Jones in his courage and determination to move forward, and I also want to set the plate, so that when we do have this conversation, we won’t be like Charlottesville and say we can’t do anything anyway,” Robertson said. Charlottesville voted to remove their statues only to discover that state law prohibited their removal.

“Council President Hilbert said he’d vote no, but used his remarks to criticize the Lost Cause narrative, and tied the building of the statues directly to Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan.

Jones was given one last chance to speak before the vote. Among his comments, he expressed support for the Monument Avenue Commission, too, and described his proposal as part of that support. “If we choose to wait for the Commission, we’ll only be back here again, if they decide to add context or take them down,” he said.

Robertson and Jones voted yes with Vice President Cynthia Newbille abstaining, and all other commissioners voting no.

“We applaud Council Member Robertson for recognizing that this vote would simply give local authority,” Wylato said, outside the meeting. He was skeptical of the other members. “The rest are using the Mayor’s Commission as cover to delay this until, they hope, people don’t feel as strongly about it.”

Reached by phone after the meeting, Jones was disappointed. “I’m shocked that people would seek to leave that authority with the State Assembly,” he said, describing the vote as a procedural and moral failure. “All the other issues they raised, education, housing, they all stem from white supremacy. If you try to compromise with systemic evil, you will be co-opted by it.”

Monument Avenue Commission Holds First Meeting Post-Charlottesville

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After a series of postponements, the Monument Avenue Commission met for the first time since the violent alt-right rally in Charlottesville on August 12, for a working meeting without public comment. Half of the 10 commissioners met before some 80 citizens and covered state laws concerning the preservation of monuments, an online exhibit by the American Civil War Museum, and discussions on public engagement and future meetings.

City Attorney Allen Jackson fielded many questions about state laws regarding monuments, with the final takeaway that neither alteration nor removal was permissible under law. Signage that points to the monuments is legal, only so long as it does not interfere with viewing the monuments as they currently exist. Commissioners challenged the finding, noting past additions of fencing or changes to the adjacent road surface, but none of the concerns impacted the legal opinion.

Jon Baliles. Photo by Landon Shroder

The next agenda item concerned public feedback. Commission co-chair Christy Coleman read some of the more than 1,200 letters the commission has received, noting that before the fatal rally in Charlottesville most letters were in support of keeping the statues. After the rally, letters shifted to safety concerns and preventing another tragedy. After many letters were read aloud, commissioner Julian Hayter asked if and when the letters would be available online, and in what format.

“We’re hoping for December 1st,” Coleman answered, before a lengthy description of a database system holding full text, summaries, and accompanying meta-data to signify what position the letter writer held, but noted that addresses and names would be stripped out for privacy concerns. City councilor and commission member Kim Gray cautioned the commission to proceed carefully, expressing concerns that Freedom of Information Act rules might be violated by a focus on privacy.

After the letters, a brief slideshow of an online exhibition for the “On Monument Avenue” website was presented by Stephanie Arduini and Chris Graham, respectively the director of education and a special curator at the American Civil War Museum. Arduini noted that people often say they want to hear different perspectives, but that many discussions turn to debates; in response, they are working on providing the viewpoints anonymously, so people can read without a back-and-forth.

Commission co-chair Gregg Kimball encouraged a similar approach for future meetings, pushing to move away from the public forum they adopted for the August meeting. “I did not find that very useful,” he said, referring to the heated, sometimes messy exchanges.

Gray agreed that small discussions were useful, but advocated for holding at least one public hearing. “I don’t think talking to small groups is enough,” she said, before describing public hearings as difficult but necessary. “As a public body, having a public hearing is important, it’s part of the process. It’s fundamental to democracy.”

Outside the meeting, former council member and mayoral candidate John Baliles, now a senior advisor to Mayor Stoney, drew a distinction between the Mayor’s opinions on the need to remove the statues and the legal opinion presented by the city attorney. He was in favor of more public engagement and the small groups. “You want to engage with people on this, and it’s hard to do that in a big open-mic setting,” he said.

Members of the Democratic Socialists of America stayed after the meeting, and throughout the session, they held signs reading #TearEmDown, as a way to generate discussion on monuments in a forum where public comment was not allowed. One member, Dean Sayers, talked about the impact of the monuments on oppressed communities and said it was a big issue for the group. “Every meeting we have, this comes up,” he said, before sharing his opinion on the progress of the commission. “It felt stalled.”

“I was disappointed by the focus on pro-confederate views instead of comments by people of color,” said Sarah, another DSA member who used only her first name, about the letters which were read during the meeting. The majority of letters selected for reading were in support of the monuments.

James Ray, second-in-charge of the Sons of Confederate Veterans Virginia Chapter – a pro-Confederate heritage group – was also critical of the process, but for different reasons. He supports keeping the monuments untouched without additional context, but was disappointed that the commission hadn’t reached out to his group. “They never invited us to participate,” he said, questioning if the commission was biased in favor of removal. He was encouraged by the opportunity for the small group discussions. “We’ll take them up on that,” he said, describing it as a good chance to share their perspective.

He was reassured by the legal opinion of the city attorney, but skeptical of the number of questions the commission asked, noting that the law isn’t very ambiguous. “It’s crystal clear,” he said, pointing to the conclusion the commission arrived at. He was confident that monument preservation would win at the General Assembly if the council did recommend removal.

“I played competitive sports, basketball, tennis. I’m not big on celebrating a loss,” offered one man who went by JB. Although critical of the monuments, he said he was just there to observe, not to push for removal or preservation. “But whichever way they go, if it’s not removal, the only way is to add more statues, right there on Monument Avenue. You have to tell both sides of the story. People who fought against the Confederacy, the people they enslaved, people like Nat Turner, they need to go up there. Tell their stories too.”