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Get Up Offa That Thing

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On Saturday, a crowd cheered as the “At Ready” Confederate statue was removed from its place of prominence at the Albemarle County Courthouse near Charlottesville.

The August 2017 events in Charlottesville were the catalyst for the removal of Confederate monuments around the country, but the area had yet to see any of its own monuments removed — that is, until Saturday, September 12. On that day, the “At Ready” statue, located on the lawn of the Albemarle County Circuit Court near downtown Charlottesville, was taken down.  

For 111 years, the 19-foot-tall bronze monument, depicting a life-size Confederate soldier, stood in front of the Albemarle County Courthouse. The County of Albemarle, City of Charlottesville, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy paid to install the statue, along with two cannons and cannonballs, in 1909. The county-owned property is a few blocks from the statue of General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville’s Market Street Park, the proposed removal of which led to the Unite the Right Rally in August 2017.

The statue as it appeared pre-removal. Photo via Matt Talhelm/Twitter

More than 100 masked spectators, including current and former elected officials, community members, and activists, assembled along East Jefferson Street, just outside of the metal construction barricades erected at Court Square, to see the historic moment unfold. Some gathered as early as 6 a.m., witnessing the arrival of trucks, a forklift, and other moving equipment, along with workers in hard hats, safety vests, and face masks, who were tasked with the removal.

The overcast sky could have laid a somber air over the proceedings, but the crowd was upbeat and celebratory. “It’s a great day for Charlottesville,” one community member said amongst the crowd. WXTJ 100.1 FM, the University of Virginia’s student radio station, broadcast from the street, playing tunes like Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” and James Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing.” People danced as they kept an eye on the process, cheering and clapping each time one of the items moved from its location — first a cannon, then another, followed by the statue, and finally its base and cannonballs. 

Photo by Erin Edgerton, via Twitter

The County of Albemarle planned to hold an official community gathering at Court Square to commemorate the event. “The community put the statue up, and we really wanted the community to be part of taking the statue down,” said Emily Kilroy, Director of Communications and Public Engagement. Ultimately, Albemarle opted for a livestream event, as local ordinances restrict gatherings to 50 people.

“We worked really hard to plan an inclusive event,” Kilroy said. “We wanted it to be an educational opportunity for people to understand why this is so significant.” The livestream, which is still available on the County of Albemarle Facebook page, included history about the statue’s placement in 1909, information about its removal, and an up-close view of the work. 

For many, this day was years in the making. In 2018, activist Matthew Christensen petitioned the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors to remove the “At Ready” statue. Discussions around the removal of statues within the city’s limits began even earlier. In 2016, the City of Charlottesville organized the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces (BRC), which sought public comment on the statues and made recommendations to Charlottesville City Council.

“This is a moment of redemption, a moment of reconciliation, and a moment where we move the needle of progress in a positive way,” said local activist and Chair of the BRC Don Gathers, who was in attendance for Saturday’s statue removal.

Photo by Erin Edgerton, via Twitter

In August, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to remove the “At Ready” statue from its location on the courthouse lawn. Virginia law prevented localities from removing Confederate monuments prior to July 1 of this year, at which point new legislation went into effect, granting local governments the power to determine what to do with these statues.

According to Scottsville District Supervisor Donna Price, the decision to remove the statue, cannons, and cannonballs from their prominent location at the courthouse was easy. “I believe courthouses are our hallowed halls of justice, and nothing except that which elevates a sense of equal justice, social justice, equal rights, should be on courthouse grounds,” said Price.

What to do with these items, on the other hand, presented a challenge. According to state law, the Board of Supervisors had to wait 30 days after its vote to remove the statue, during which time offers must be made to relocate the statue to a museum, historical society, government, or military battlefield. After reviewing a list of potential recipients, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors ultimately determined that the Confederate items would be relocated to a Civil War battlefield under the stewardship of the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation (SVBF). The County of Albemarle paid approximately $63,000 to a private contractor to complete the work of removing the items; the SVBF covered the cost of transportation. 

Price and others were concerned about the recipient, but there was not a sufficient consensus among the Board of Supervisors to defer the disposition decision. “While the choice of the recipient may not necessarily have been fully satisfactory to every member of the Board,” Price said, “the removal and disposition was ultimately determined by the six of us to be the best decision we could make under the circumstances that we had at that time.”

Photo by Erin Edgerton, via Twitter

Local activists shared their displeasure about the statue’s new location. University of Virginia Associate Professor of Religious Studies and community organizer Jalane Schmidt said, “I was really glad when they voted unanimously to get rid of it but very disappointed with where it’s going.” Schmidt described the SVBF as “a major purveyor of the Lost Cause here in our region,” adding, “It is not morally or ethically acceptable to be disposing of our toxic waste at the expense of other communities that had no say at all in this stuff coming to their community.” 

Between the City of Charlottesville, the County of Albemarle, and the University of Virginia, there are a number of monuments still standing that are considered problematic by local activists. Among them are monuments to Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in Charlottesville, the removal of which is currently being prevented by an injunction. The Virginia Supreme Court will hear a Charlottesville lawsuit, including an appeal of the injunction, in November.

In light of all the remaining statues, activists considered the removal of “At Ready” a positive step, but far from a complete victory. “This is just another battle in the war. Our ancestors have been fighting the same war for centuries now,” Gathers said. “We certainly can’t give up the fight at this point. It’s a victory won, but there are many more that still need to be won.”

Top Photo by Erin Edgerton, via Twitter

Monument Avenue and The Insidiously Seductive “Lost Cause” Narrative

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Monument Avenue features statues commemorating five Civil War-era political and military figures, all of whom were on the Confederate side of that conflict. These statues stand at the center of a longstanding controversy that has heated up considerably over the last year or so. Feelings were greatly inflamed after the tragic events surrounding last year’s Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, a rally that originated with the battle over a monument celebrating Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

After seeing the trouble Charlottesville’s Lee statue caused, a great many Richmonders united in attempting to rid our city of our own Lee statue, as well as statues glorifying other Confederate political figures. But quite a few residents in the city still see no cause for consternation. They regard the statues as history, and don’t wish to discuss them any further. Even the Richmond City Council doesn’t seem to want to do anything about the statues; last month, they voted 6-3 against requesting direct control of the monuments from the Virginia state government.

While many today see these statues as lacking modern political context, the fact that their history is inextricable from that of the post-Civil War Lost Cause movement indicates otherwise.

The Lost Cause movement, most prominently represented in Richmond today by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), is heavily invested in the creation of a certain narrative regarding the pre-Civil War past. Getting its start in the decade following the end of the Civil War, the Lost Cause movement has argued for over a century that slavery was an unimportant factor in the war, ignoring secession statements and pre-Civil War declarations by former members of the United States Congress, who left the Union to join the Confederacy.

The narrative pushed by the UDC and the Lost Cause movement instead, one of overwhelming Northern aggression against a valorized yet ill-defined “Southern way of life,” is strongly promoted by the statues displayed on Monument Avenue.

The Lost Cause narrative became so pervasive during the era in which the monuments to Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and other Confederate figures were erected that it showed up in textbooks taught in Virginia schools — and remained there until as recently as four decades ago, in some cases.

A 1914 Virginia History textbook, School History of Virginia by Edgar Sydenstricker and Ammen Burger, contains this quote regarding the life of a slave: “There were some cruel and inconsiderate masters, of course; but they were exceptions. … As a general rule the slaves were happy and contented and were faithful to their owners.” A 1957 textbook called Virginia: History, Government, Geography suggested that slaves were perfectly happy with their situation.

The happiness of these slaves is most famously belied by the incident that took place on August 21, 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia. That day, Nat Turner led a rebellion that resulted in the death of sixty white men, women, and children. Killing children is troubling, but so is slavery — infamously, millions of Africans died while being transported against their will to the Americas. And once they arrived in the US, their infant mortality rates were double that of white Americans of the era.

In this context, Nat Turner’s rebellion, despite its death toll, is more understandable. It wasn’t an isolated case in Virginia either. Take Brother Gabriel, who on October 10th, 1800, was hanged in Richmond, Virginia, along with his two brothers and 23 other slaves, for planning a revolt. In 2017, the decision to create an emancipation-themed statue in Richmond that included both Turner and Gabriel caused significant controversy, with some social media commenters comparing Turner to Hitler.

Yet for over a century, the African-American community of Richmond has had to look at monuments glorifying Civil War generals who fought to keep their ancestors enslaved.

Indeed, there are still people who congregate regularly outside the UDC’s Memorial Building on Boulevard carrying Confederate flags. I saw them while walking by not too long ago, and decided to stop and talk with them. Of course, they supported Monument Avenue remaining unchanged. And when I asked about the impact of slavery on the Southern economy, I heard what can only be described as typical Lost Cause arguments.

“Slavery was on the way out anyway,” one man said, repeating a common Lost Cause myth — one belied by Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens’s 1861 Cornerstone Speech. In the speech, Stephens said of the Confederacy, “Its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.” The fact is, one in ten of the South’s enlisted soldiers were slave-owners, and more than one in four lived with their slave-owning parents.

“The South was a society of honor, family, and tradition,” said another man outside the UDC Memorial Building. He argued that the Union posed a threat to the confederate way of life, and the Confederacy was merely defending itself — another Lost Cause talking point. 

The argument regarding whether or not the Confederacy was a legitimate nation or traitor to an already established nation is still waged today. One thing is for sure though — if it’s your son or daughter killed in a war, you don’t care about sides. Hollywood Cemetery’s monument to Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War is both a monument to their sacrifice, and a tribute to a lost generation for the Southern states.

Many from the South feel they were denied a glorious destiny when the war was lost. Yet in being forced to reconstruct their culture, the South has never entirely been willing to own up to some of the more sadistic aspects of that same culture. Signs on the Jefferson Davis monument in particular repeat core Lost Cause concepts; this was exactly why Mayor Stoney’s Monument Avenue Commission recommended earlier this year that that monument be removed from Monument Avenue.

“Of all the statues, this one is most unabashedly Lost Cause in its design and sentiment,” the commission members wrote in their report. They felt that the other four Confederate-focused monuments could remain up if signs contextualizing them were added, but the Davis monument must be taken down.

In order to move forward, we must look back on the past with as vigilant of an eye as possible. Monument Avenue only tells a portion of this city’s story; the things it leaves out are of crucial importance. At some point, we need to decide whether remembering a proud bygone culture is worth romanticizing past injustice.

Top photo: George Washington Custis Lee (1832–1913) on horseback in front of the Jefferson Davis Monument in Richmond, Virginia on June 3, 1907, reviewing the Confederate Reunion Parade. Public domain/via Wikimedia

City Council Rejects Resolution for Greater Control over Monuments Celebrating the Confederacy (Again)

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The future of memorials to Virginia’s dark history, on one of Richmond’s most iconic streets, is still out of the city’s hands. Following a 6-3 vote by Richmond City Council, the chamber rejected a resolution to request greater control of the statuary on Monument Avenue from the state government.

“I’m baffled by the notion of us not being willing to address matters like these, and shirk our responsibilities,” said 9th District Councilman Michael Jones, at the start of discussions on the resolution. Jones, the resolution’s patron, voted with 6th District Councilwoman Ellen Robertson and Council Vice President Cynthia Newbille of the 7th district to approve the measure.

“We can only move this city forward by having the right to decide,” Jones said. “We cannot be afraid to tackle the tough decisions of our day, because they will go nowhere. We must decide if we’re going to be one Richmond or remain divided,” said Jones.

Councilmen Jones

Jones’ statement set the tone for over an hour of deliberation between councilmembers and public speakers. In the half-filled City Council room, speakers were occasionally spirited, but mostly measured in their approach. 

“I think this is my fourth time down here, both at the committee level and city council,” said Bill Thomas, at the start of his public comments in opposition to the resolution. Thomas’ comments were a brief acknowledgement of the long series of events that led councilmembers to this point, and almost certainly they are far from the last. 

The vote last night was a near-repeat of a similar measure last year, rejected 6-2 with Newbille abstaining. This new resolution came with new support, however, in the form of Mayor Levar Stoney, who made an appearance during the meeting’s start to introduce a bill calling for greater funding from the Virginia General Assembly for Richmond’s schools.

That bill, which would be expedited and approved by the council later in the meeting, proved to be one of a few recent developments used by councilmembers in their arguments against against Jones’ resolution.

2nd District Councilwoman Kimberly Gray drew attention to the poor state of Richmond’s schools in explaining her opposition to the proposal, arguing that this issue and the General Assembly’s involvement was a more pressing concern than gaining greater autonomy over city structures.

“The biggest monuments to white supremacy are in our schools,” said Gray. “If we don’t change how we’re operating, nothing will change for the condition of the people of color in our city,” a sentiment echoed by 8th District Councilwoman Reva Trammell. 

Their votes rejecting the proposal were also joined by councilmembers Andreas Addison from the 1st district, Kristen Larson from the 4th district, Parker Agelasto from 5th district, and Council President Chris Hilbert of the 3rd district.

This reasoning was later challenged by Jones, Richmond Public School Superintendent Jason Kamras, and Stoney himself, who described the process as indicative of a “culture of can’t” on Twitter following the vote.

“We can support choosing our own destiny about the future of Confederate monuments in our city AND advocate for the state to fund the true cost of public education. This was not a either/or proposition,” wrote Stoney. 

Councilmembers also negatively pointed to the differences between Jones’ resolution and the recommendations made by Stoney’s Monument Avenue Commission. The commission, created in 2017, was in response to events following the white supremacist pro-Confederate Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which left one counter-protester dead and over 30 wounded. 

The 10-person Commission’s 115-page report, released in July, recommended the removal of the Jefferson Davis statue, along with efforts to re-contextualize the statuary, following months of private and public discussion. Addison and Gray also served as members of the commission.

Newbille disputed this interpretation, pointing out that while Jones’ resolution implies more than the Davis statue would come under the Council’s oversight, “it doesn’t say remove them.” 

“This paper allows this council, this local government, to have authority in the dispositions of monuments and statues. For me, that is a responsibility this city and this city council should have,” said Newbille.

Mayor Stoney Speaking at City Council

Jones’ legislation wasn’t the only one with a focus on how Richmond should handle the reminders of Virginia’s ugly history.  Also introduced for future consideration was legislation submitted by Stoney that would establish the Richmond History and Culture Commission. This focus would include “providing guidance on the recommendations of the Monument Avenue Commission regarding the reinterpretation of the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue.” 

The legislation will likely be part of the City Council’s agenda in their next meeting on November 13. 

As the meeting prepared for the council vote, Hilbert acknowledged a changing cultural “mood” in the U.S. that has seen other Confederate memorials removed or destroyed, remarking that regardless of the council’s decision on Jones’ resolution, Monument Avenue won’t remain the same forever.

“I was poisoned by the Lost Cause version of the Civil War,” said Hilbert, “and it’s wrong, the Civil War was about slavery. I do think that in 50 years these statues won’t be here.” 

*Photos by George Copeland 

Statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee Vandalized in Richmond

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*This story has been updated

The statue glorifying Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which sits on Monument Ave. in Richmond, was vandalized in the early hours of the morning. Dark red paint was splashed all over the plinth of the statue with the letters BLM written on the base – seemingly an acronym for the group Black Lives Matter.

Two capitol police officers were present at the statue, but declined to comment on when they arrived on the scene. However, RVA Mag spoke to Joe Macenka, the public information officer for the Capitol Police – who patrol and manage the security of state property, including the statue of Lee.  Macenka said the department was notified shortly after 6 a.m., and the incident likely took place in-between one of their patrols. While not commenting on the particulars of the investigation, he said they were following a “number of angles.”

Capitol Police Inspecting the Damage

RVA Mag also spoke with an employee for the Department of General Services who was present at the scene to oversee the cleaning crew, who said he was called at 7:30 a.m. alerting him to what happened. At 9:30 a.m. the cleaning crew had not started power washing the statue, saying they were still waiting for the investigators to arrive.

Richmond’s Confederate statues are vandalized frequently, with Jefferson Davis being spray painted twice in the past year. This comes at a time of contentious conversation surrounding the role of Confederate statues in public spaces and the finalization of a report by Richmond’s Monument Ave Commission, which recommended that Davis’ statue be removed.

The Capitol Police reached out to RVA Mag at 1:30 p.m. to suggest that the paint used to vandalize the statue came from a “high pressured sprayer” or a refillable fire extinguisher. 

Monument Avenue Commission Held First Open Community Meeting Since 2017 Last Night

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The Monument Avenue Commission, tasked with evaluating the fate of the statuary on Monument Avenue, held its first public community meeting since its contentious, chaotic first meeting last summer. The meeting proceeded relatively peacefully despite two sets of outbursts from pro-monument attendees, with the first occurring near the halfway point of the night and a second at the end.

After a series of presentations by commission members, pro-monument attendees interrupted commission co-chair Greg Kimball from the Library of Virginia, who was sharing historical documents on the construction of Confederate monuments and the root causes of the Civil War.

He’d just finished explaining inaccuracies in the Lost Cause narrative which minimizes the role of slavery in secession, pointing to records of secession voting sessions where slavery was referenced 512 times and states rights only 29. “I think that says something,” Kimball said, making the case that the South seceded over slavery, a statement widely accepted as fact due to the overwhelming preponderance of accepted historical evidence.

It was after this that shouts from pro-monument attendees briefly broke out with one man yelling, “were Union monuments built during Jim Crow too?” Amid the noise, another man, who seemed to be trying to quiet the pro-monument disruptors, yelled, “can you let the man talk please, we didn’t come here for this.”

Much of the meeting was occupied by the presentation of statistics detailing who was present, who gave feedback, and what that feedback has looked like up until this point. Among the findings: 84.5% of respondents favor a change with only 15.5% asking to keep Monument Avenue unchanged. Of those who wanted change, 26.8% favored adding context but leaving the current monuments, 28.5% for relocation, and 20% for removal without relocation.

Commission co-chair Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum, explained that they were collecting the data to help present the community vision for Monument Avenue. She said, “The monument commission feels that it is not their role to make the decision about what to do with the monuments, it is to hear what the community wants to do so that that recommendation can be passed on.”

When it came to public commentary, a majority of speakers spoke against the statues in 2-minute time slots based on the order they queued up.

The first speaker identified himself as being from New Kent County before saying he’d be quick, adding, “I’m tired, I’m hungry, I have to go to the restroom, and I’m on the clock.” He spoke in favor of context, but wanted to see statues to the black soldiers who fought for the Union near Richmond, instead of more contemporary figures or people already honored by statues.

Photo by Chelsea Higgs Wise

After telling the commission he didn’t envy their position, another speaker suggested that Richmond was “too emotional” to have the discussion. “Maybe we should reach out to places around the world that have had this discussion, like South Africa, Germany, or South Korea,” he said, noting that they’d had to deal with similar questions.

The first man to speak for the statues said they were to “great men” who “struggled, fought and died to defend their country,” before comparing the Civil War to the American Revolution.

A woman who also rose to defend the statues claimed that they were about love, not hate, and invoked her race when she said, “I didn’t know that if you’re white you have a certain amount of time to put up a statue.” She added, “They’re taking my statues down but y’all are letting them put their statues up all the time.”

A man who started by saying he hadn’t prepared to speak called on the commission to keep the statues and not change the city. He described Richmond as “not a city of the future, it is a city of the past. It was the Capital of the Confederacy.” In a fast-paced conclusion, he made the counterfactual claim of the Lost Cause narrative that men “fought not for slavery but for states rights.”

A later speaker addressed his claim without naming him by reciting the conclusion to the Cornerstone Speech of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, in which he stated that the Confederacy was founded upon the idea that the white man was superior.

Former school board member Mamie Taylor spoke against the statues, telling the story of her grandmother, Mary McLeod Bethune, who was born to parents who’d been enslaved. After talking about her ancestors, she addressed proponents of the monuments, asking how they would feel “if someone raped, murdered, castrated your grandmother, and then placed a picture of that monstrous person on your living room wall.” She said that feeling is “what I feel like when I have to drive up and down Monument Avenue on an almost daily basis.”

One of the last speakers was former City Council Member Marty Jewell, who asked for a truth and reconciliation process in the city before further discussion of the monuments. He also addressed an undercurrent that’s surrounded the process, asking why people who don’t live in the city were included.

Several of the pro-monument attendees were affiliated with the Virginia Flaggers, a pro-Confederacy organization that organized to support the statues. On Facebook, members advised out-of-town supporters to lie about their address, suggesting they use the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts street address so they could leave a comment, something restricted to people who work or reside in the city.

As the meeting ended, Coleman thanked attendees. As she detailed the next community meeting to be held at Martin Luther King, Jr., High School on May 19, a Saturday, at 10 a.m., followed by a commission work session the same day in City Hall at 6 p.m., one of the men sitting with the Flaggers interrupted her, yelling, “Why isn’t the mayor here?”

Continuing to talk over the co-chair, the man blamed the mayor for the commission and insisted that he needed to be at the meetings.

Keeping her composure, Coleman finished thanking the attendees before she told the man to take it up with the mayor’s office as she adjourned the meeting.

Cover Photo by Landon Shroder

Rally planned by Tennessee group to protect Lee monument in Richmond

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*This story has just been updated. 

According to a Facebook event page sponsored by CSA II: The New Confederate States of America, a rally is being planned on September 16 to “protect” the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on Monument Ave. A previous rally was planned by the Virginia Flaggers on the same date, but was later cancelled due to public pressure on the organizers.

From the CSA II Facebook Event Page

The event, billed as a ‘heritage not hate’ rally contends, “CSA II: The New Confederate States of America…and fellow supporting individuals / organizations will be standing up to protect the General Robert E. Lee Monument in Richmond, Virginia from being taken down or destroyed.” The details section goes on to say, “We hope you will come out and support our efforts and stand tall for our Proud Confederate Monuments. This rally is a Heritage ~ Not Hate Rally and any Hate will NOT be stood for on our side whatsoever.”

This comes on the heels of an executive order signed by Governor Terry McAuliffe on August 18, which prohibits all forms of protest at the Lee monument in Richmond. McAuliffe claims the order is necessary until emergency measures can be implemented that can manage protests with the potential to end violently. The decision to ban protests at Lee monument in Richmond was in response to the violence of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville on August 12, which left one person dead and up to 30 wounded in a terrorist attack by a white supremacist. According to the executive order, the ban will “remain in full force and effect until such emergency regulations are promulgated by the Department of General Services by November 18, 2017.”

The group hosting the rally, CSA II: The New Confederate States of America, looks to be based out of Dandridge, Tennessee and claims to be “The Official Provisional Governmental Organization of the New Confederacy, protecting our Proud Southern Heritage, The Confederate Flag, our rights and values, and our way of life.” While the organization’s webpage claims to be veteran ran and explicitly states, “We are not a hate organization nor will it be tolerated in any way!!!,” Confederate symbols have become a national flashpoint for white nationalist, supremacist, and alt-right groups looking to grow their message.

From the CSA II Facebook Event Page

This rally, if happens, will come at a critical time for the city of Richmond. More so, because the city is still grappling with the direction of Mayor Stoney’s Monument Avenue Commission and recent comments signaling his willingness to consider a plan for removal of Confederate Statues.

*Updated

In response to the planned rally by CSA II: The New Confederate States of America, Community of Richmond (CORVA) has scheduled a RVA No-Hate Counter Protest. According to the event page, CORVA has stated, “The CSA is planning on holding a demonstration on the 16th to “protect” the Lee monument.” The event listing closed with, “We can only expect the same violent extremists that were at Charlottesville to be in our city. We need to organize to protect our community, neighbors and minorities against this ideology of hate and oppression.”