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Hundreds of LGBTQ Advocates Lobby Lawmakers for Protections

VCU CNS | February 7, 2020

Topics: Adam ebbin, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, Barbara Favola, danica roem, Day of Action, Department of Education, Eileen Filler-Corn, Emma Yackso, Equality Virginia, General Assembly 2020, hate crimes, Jennifer Boysko, Library of Virginia, Mark Levine, Mark Sickles, Patrick Hope, Scott Surovell, Side By Side, transgender students, Vee Lamneck, Virginia Values Act

Equality Virginia and the Commonwealth’s LGBTQ community continue to lobby state legislators for important LGBTQ protections. Now that Democrats control the General Assembly, they’re having some success.

The day after hundreds lobbied lawmakers on behalf of LGBTQ rights during Equality Virginia’s Day of Action, two significant bills advanced in the General Assembly to further protections for the state’s LGBTQ residents. 

The House passed a bill from Del. Mark Levine, D-Alexandria, on Wednesday to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing, insurance, and banking. 

A Senate bill that adds gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability as reportable hate crimes, introduced by Sen. Barbara Favola, D-Arlington, reported from committee. The bill would also guarantee that victims would be able to bring civil action to recover damages against their offender. 

Vee Lamneck, executive director of Equality Virginia, was “cautiously optimistic” at the start of the legislative session, but said Tuesday during the organization’s annual lobby event that there is much to celebrate.

Equality Virginia lobbied their lawmakers to support LGBTQ bills during their Day of Action. League of Women Voters members Lois Page and Lynn Johnston regularly attend the weekly roundtables. Photo: Vee Lamneck, Equality Virginia

Lamneck noted that most of the bills supported by Equality Virginia, a group that advocates on behalf of the LGBTQ community, are still alive and advancing. Last session, most of those bills failed to pass from Republican-led subcommittees.

“This legislation will ensure that people are not discriminated against in housing, employment, public spaces, and credit,” Lamneck said.

LGBTQ youth showed up to make their voices heard too. Side by Side, a group dedicated to creating supportive communities for LGBTQ youth, helped sponsor the event.

“We want them to see that it’s easy and accessible, and what it’s like to actually be involved in the legislative process,” said Emma Yackso, director of youth programs and services for Side by Side. “A lot of them for many, many reasons don’t feel like they belong in government, don’t feel like their voices are actually ever going to be listened to.”

Groups visited legislators to discuss LGBTQ-related causes such as conversion therapy, housing instability, religious liberty, protection from discrimination, and the vulnerability of African American transgender communities. 

“We know that people who live at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities often face the most discrimination, harassment, and, unfortunately, sometimes violence as well,” Lamneck said.

The lobbying event was followed by an afternoon of workshops at the Library of Virginia and a reception to thank lawmakers. 

Equality Virginia hosted their Day of Action at the Library of Virginia on Tuesday to promote LGBTQ bills and rights. Photo: Maia Stanley, Capital News Service

 Some of the legislation that has advanced in the General Assembly — mostly with bipartisan support — includes two bills introduced by Sen. Jennifer Boysko, D-Fairfax. Senate Bill 657 would make it easier to change a person’s name and gender on a birth certificate. SB 161 would make the Department of Education create and implement policies concerning the treatment of transgender students in public schools; a duplicate bill in the House also passed.

The Senate also passed SB 245, introduced by Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, which would ban the practice of conversion therapy in Virginia on patients under age 18. A similar bill introduced by Del. Patrick Hope, D-Arlington, recently passed the House. On Tuesday, the House passed a health care bill introduced by Del. Danica Roem, D-Prince William, that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity or status as a transgender individual. 

Advocates also celebrated that two bills referred to as the Virginia Values Act have made it to the floors of their respective chambers: SB 868, introduced by Sen. Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria, and HB 1663, introduced by Del. Mark Sickles, D-Fairfax. Both would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in housing, credit transactions, employment and public spaces.

“We speak with many individuals from across the Commonwealth who have shared with us their experiences of discrimination,” Lamneck said. “And not just that, but the fact that they live in fear, day to day experiencing discrimination. And so the Virginia Values Act will have a profoundly positive impact on the community.”

Deanna Bayer (left), volunteer for the Day of Action, and Dorthy Kelley (right), an employee of Equality Virginia, greet participants for workshops and events. Photo: Maia Stanley, Capital News Service

Gov. Ralph Northam and Speaker of the House Eileen Filler-Corn, D-Fairfax, attended an evening reception to wrap up the Day of Action. 

“This session we are going to ensure it is no longer legal in Virginia to discriminate against someone because of who they love,” Filler-Corn tweeted. Two House bills that add gender, disability, gender identity, and sexual orientation as reportable hate crimes and a House bill replacing terms such as “husband and wife” with gender-neutral terms have yet to advance through their respective committees prior to crossover day on Feb. 11.

Written by Maia Stanley, Capital News Service. Top Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash.

RVA Global: Stolpersteine, Nazi Ancestors, and Coming To Terms With The Past

Wyatt Gordon | March 5, 2019

Topics: American Evolution 1619-2019, family ties, German culture, Holocaust, Library of Virginia, Nazis, Secretly Y'all, Stolperstein

My grandmother was a Nazi. During the war she worked as a nurse and was betrothed to an SS officer. My mom always added the context that Hitler Youth was compulsory, but she’d also likely admit that her mother-in-law may have been one of the more enthusiastic participants. That’s not to say that I didn’t love her. Her willpower always inspired me. After smoking unfiltered menthols for over 70 years, she quit cold turkey one day because she decided she didn’t want to smoke anymore. From that day till the end of her life she would always give the money she saved from not smoking to a different person each week.

She was a survivor. She scavenged or stole whatever it took to keep her mother and younger sister alive. After her fiancé died on the front and Hitler capitulated, she married an American soldier who whisked her away from Germany as his war bride. Together they raised four kids, the oldest of which was rumored to be the love child of the SS officer. My father was the youngest.

None of them learned much German. All my aunts and uncles can order a beer, but none of them really took the time to learn the language of their heritage. Why? I never asked my grandmother, but I have a few theories. Perhaps she didn’t want them to grow too close to the land she almost died for many a time. Perhaps, after the early passing of my grandfather, single-handedly raising four kids was enough of a challenge without the addition of family language lessons. Or maybe her kids didn’t care to learn. Perhaps their heritage, like that of millions of Americans before them, simply got washed away in the assimilating churn of our country’s unrivaled melting pot.

My dad died when I was young. The death of a parent at any age is always a tragedy, but four is a fascinatingly wicked age to lose a parent. You’re not old enough to have built up a treasure trove of memories by which to know who your parent really was, but you’re not young enough to have no recollection at all. Instead you’re left with a smattering of hazy memories. You know your parent like a word on the tip of your tongue that your lips never seem to fully form.

My grandmother showered me with so much gingerbread, advent calendars, and lederhosen throughout my childhood (seriously, I’m not sure I have a picture of me not wearing lederhosen from age 3-8), constantly reminding me that my dad had somehow come from Germany. Subconsciously my brain decided that if I wanted to better know who my dad was, then I’d have to go to the land of his heritage to find out. While my classmates picked out which colleges they’d be at the following Fall, I applied for a scholarship to Germany.

Without speaking a word of the language (Spanish is usually a better bet around here), I took a gap year and moved to a village of 2,000 to live with a host family and go to a German high school for a year. In the decade that’s passed since then, I’ve lived in Germany two more times, both in Berlin, once working in Parliament and until last December for Berlin’s Green Party. I speak German fluently now, and long ago fell in love with their often misunderstood culture.

If I was to poll y’all here tonight and ask, “What is German culture?” I’d likely hear some good things about fancy cars, punctuality and beer, but I’d also likely hear some stale tropes about their lack of a sense of humor or their supposed love of Hitler. Even if some Americans haven’t noticed, Germany has long moved on from the days of the Nazi regime. You might think that’s just what time does, and sure, 70 years have passed since the end of World War II, but anyone in the former capital of the Confederacy who’s been living through the Black History Month we’ve been having should know that some societal wounds don’t just heal with time. If not treated, some wounds fester.

As a country whose national pastime is process optimization, Germany doesn’t let anything fester. Over the past 70 years, German society has cultivated a culture of confronting head-on the worst atrocities of their past.

They even have a word for it: Vergangenheitsbewältigung — a coming to terms with the past. This process of accounting for the horrors of the Nazis, the Stasi, and, as of late, also those of their colonialists takes place in ways big and small. Anyone who visits a German city will inevitably stumble across the simultaneously tiniest and largest form of Vergangenheitsbewältigung should they notice among the cobblestones one covered in brass.

A Stolperstein — or “stumbling stone” in German — is a cobblestone bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of a victim of Nazi extermination or persecution. Artist Gunter Demnig began the project in 1992 to commemorate individuals at their last place of residence before they fell victim to the Nazis through euthanasia, eugenics, a concentration or extermination camp, or escaped it all by committing suicide.

He chose the name Stolperstein for several reasons: 1) When someone tripped in the Nazi era, people would say, “hier könnte ein Jude begraben sein,” meaning “a Jew could be buried here!” Why would people say that? Our modern ears don’t find this antisemitism funny, but the point of any form of prejudice, whether it’s antisemitism, racism, sexism, or homophobia, isn’t to be funny. The point is to hurt and dehumanize. 2) Gunter saw Germany’s inability to cope with its horrendous past as the biggest potential stumbling stone on its way to becoming a modern society and shedding its pariah status. 3) The stones are designed and placed so that people will stumble across them at any moment. He wanted people to stumble across the stories that Nazis wanted to erase while going about their day.

The first stone Gunter laid was a rebellious act. He placed it in the ground in Cologne on December 16th, 1992, exactly fifty years since the day that Heinrich Himmler signed the Auschwitz-Erlass, ordering the deportation and extermination of the Roma and Sinti peoples that are sometimes derogatorily referred to as gypsies. Local authorities desperately wanted this Stolperstein removed, not because they were Nazis, but because Gunter hadn’t gotten a permit! It is still the land of rules and order. German officials stymieing Holocaust remembrance efforts is not a good look and they knew it, so they let it stay. Since that first stumbling stone was placed twenty-seven years ago over 70,000 Stolpersteine have been laid in 22 countries across Europe, making the project the world’s largest decentralized memorial.

We all know that over six million people died in the Holocaust, and that the vast majority of them were Jews. However, what many don’t realize is that the Nazis targeted a long list of people. The Nazis persecuted and murdered anyone who didn’t fit in with their far-right vision of society, including Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, pacifists, Sinti & Roma, communists, socialists, leftists, and anyone else who didn’t conform — such as queer people. We know that over 9,000 gay men were specifically targeted and killed in concentration camps. We also know that an additional 100,000 people were arrested because the Nazis deemed their gender or sexual orientation deviant. Out of those interned, an unknown number passed away from police brutality, starvation, and disease in prison.

Last year, while living in Berlin, I sponsored what will become only the 38th Stolperstein dedicated to queer victims of the Holocaust. To choose who I wanted to honor, I read dozens of pages filled with accounts of prejudice, cruelty, and death. I chose Fritz Dubinsky because my first love reminded me of the love he died for. He was born in Friedrichshain, Berlin in 1907 and emancipated himself from his abusive parents at the age of fifteen. He was a hard worker and found his own way in life, eventually becoming one of the capital’s hippest alcohol distributors (fitting for the venue in which this story was originally presented).

In 1944 he wrote to his partner of five years, who had been conscripted into fighting on the eastern front: “In this moment I lack a good and honest friend with whom I can share my joy and sorrows and bring life to these hours, for there is nothing left in Berlin but a dead wasteland.” Later that year, he was apprehended and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for his “unnatural fondness towards men.” After just a week in custody, a guard claimed Fritz had looked at him funny and proceeded to brutally beat him. Fritz was transported to a hospital, where he died of his injuries at the age of 37. Later this year he will receive a stone at his former address of Breslauerstraße 23: today’s Ostbahnhof train station.

You may now be asking: why did I spend 120 euros on a Stolperstein for a dead man I never knew? Because the wounds of our past fester if left untreated, and the legacy of my Nazi grandmother demanded a Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

This story was originally told at Secretly Y’all’s (em/im)MIGRATION event in partnership with the Library of Virginia and American Evolution 1619-2019 on February 25th.

Increasing Access To An Important Chapter In African-American History

Ginny Bixby | February 25, 2019

Topics: african american history, History of Slavery, Library of Virginia, Untold No Longer, virginia museum of history and culture, Virginia slavery, Virginia Untold

Working together, the Virginia Museum of History & Culture and the Library of Virginia are making it easier than ever for researchers to study the history of enslaved African-Americans in Virginia.

The Virginia Museum of History & Culture (WMHC) and the Library of Virginia (LVA) are joining forces, merging their resources to create a large database containing records of enslaved African-Americans. The resulting database will provide significantly increased access to a much wider spectrum of documentation about the lives of African-Americans who were enslaved in Virginia.

“This offers researchers an enormous amount of African-American genealogical content in one site and one place,” said Paige Newman, associate archivist for VMHC. “It will also give them the ability to discover information not likely available in other sources.”

The new database is a combination of the records from VMHC’s database, Unknown No Longer, which contains more than 600 documents and close to 13,000 names, and LVA’s database, Virginia Untold: The African-American Narrative, which contains nearly 11,000 records. The merged database is accessible online.

“Combining the resources gives users access to our combined record-types,” said Newman. “But also — since our institutions have unique records — by pooling these sources together, the user can search between the array of our record-types without leaving the site. It also gives the user the ability to see the connections between our collections.”

Unknown No Longer was launched by the VMHC in 2011 to make their records of enslaved Americans in its archives accessible to online visitors.

“Unknown No Longer is one of our most important digital resources,” said VMHC President and CEO Jamie O. Bosket, in a press release from VMHC. “Joining forces with our friends at the Library of Virginia will make work we’ve done even more accessible and useful. We are proud to contribute to the remembrance of so many people from our past whose names were forgotten for far too long.”

The database includes a variety of records. VMHC’s contributions are from its personal papers repository, and includes more personal records such as family Bible records, letters, and diaries. The LVA records are mostly city, state, and county government records, including coroner’s inquisitions, judgments, and public claims. Within all of these records, there are the names and descriptions of slaves, slaveholders, and freed people.

Newman said that most of the records obtained by VMHC are donated, and that the museum is constantly working to make more records available and accessible.

This is information that is available but not very accessible, and our database makes these records more accessible,” said Newman. “This opens up a whole new world to genealogical researchers.

But in terms of genealogical researchers, it’s not just academics who are using the database. Newman said she was surprised by the number of ordinary citizens who have accessed it.

“People [access it] mainly for family research and genealogical information,” said Newman. “At first I thought it would mainly [used by] researchers or authors, but the majority is just your average researcher searching for genealogical information. It’s great to talk to them because they’ve exhausted [online resources like Ancestry.com], so having them come in and talk about the other sources we have is helpful, and I love doing it.”

Newman said that while the records are “important and priceless,” there are a few that really struck her.

“Peter Spain is special to me because of his story,” she said. “We have a will of his from 1840.”

Peter Spain was a freed man from Richmond who in his will emancipated a friend who he considered his wife. He bequeathed his estate to his two sisters, who were free women of color, as well as a free boy of color who lived with him and his wife. Newman said that VMHC and LVA are working to uncover more of Spain’s story.

Newman said she was particularly fascinated by the few items in the collection that were written by slaves — including a letter that a slave wrote to ask his owner for a woman’s hand in marriage — because it is difficult to find actual written documents from enslaved people.

“All of this has a huge impact,” she said. “But when you see a list of, say, inventory of property, you see enslaved names, and right beside them are lists of horses or other types of property, so it really draws importance to see that that’s actual history.”

INTERMEDIATE GENEALOGY WORKSHOP: Private Papers Collections at the Library of Virginia

Joe Vanderhoff | August 10, 2018

Topics: genealogy, genealogy workshop, Library of Virginia

In addition to state and county records, the Library of Virginia holds nongovernment papers such as Bible records, family papers, letters, organization records, and business records. Library staff members Trenton Hizer (senior manuscripts acquisition and digital archivist) and Ginny Dunn (archives and library reference services manager) introduce you to the collections and the valuable information they contain. They will also share tips on how you can preserve your own family papers. For more information, contact [email protected]virginia.gov or 804.692.3999.

AFRICAN AMERICAN GENEALOGY – African American Research at the Library of Virginia: Reconstruction–World War I

Joe Vanderhoff | August 10, 2018

Topics: African American Genealogy, Library of Virginia

This workshop provides an overview of records created during the Reconstruction era through World War I and explores how they relate to African American genealogy. Library of Virginia reference archivist Cara Griggs covers topics such as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands; population schedules from the federal census; newspapers; and records for elections, educational institutions, businesses, and organizations. For more information, contact [email protected]virginia.gov or 804.692.3999.

Emilie Raymond discusses Food for Victory during World War II

Joe Vanderhoff | August 10, 2018

Topics: American politics, Emily Raymond, food for victory, Library of Virginia, World War II

Many Americans remember food rationing, shortages, and victory gardens during World War II, but few realize the powerful role food played during the war. Virginia Commonwealth University professor Emilie Raymond will discuss new research and her experiences teaching food policy. Raymond specializes in 20th-century American politics and culture, focusing on the intersection between Hollywood and politics.

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