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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.

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

Tensions flare at first Monument Avenue Commission

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The first meeting of the Monument Avenue Commission was held Wednesday night, with well over 500 citizens showing up to share their ideas. That was the plan anyways, the meeting quickly became emotional, with boos, claps, and yells emanating from all sides.

The Monument Avenue Commission was created by Mayor Levar Stoney to explore possibly adding context to the Confederate monuments, or even constructing new monuments honoring others in Richmond’s history.

Commission Panel. Photo by Mark Hillgrove

The meeting was held at the Virginia Historical Society, with some people having to be turned away due to high capacity. The speakers were chosen by lottery, although several other speakers were ultimately allowed to take the floor. The opinions completely crossed the ideological spectrum, and tempers were high.

“When you bring up the events in Charlottesville as justification for leaving the monuments alone, you’re just saying that you’d rather placate white supremacists and racists because you’re too much of a coward to stand up to white supremacy and racism,” said one man over a cacophony of boos and cheers.

One of the ideas proposed was to design another avenue to honor the city’s African-American history. “We have ignored them and I think the boulevard would be perfect for that,” said a female speaker, a former history teacher.

Despite the purpose of the commission being whether to remove the monuments, over and over again, people found themselves debating instead on keeping them or removing  them.

One speaker, echoing the sentiments of several attendees, proclaimed that it was time for the monuments to go.”They should go down, there’s nothing heroic about it, and it’s painful to this day.”

Still, others passionately pushed for the monuments to remain, arguing that they’re a part of the city’s heritage.

After many a heated speech, the head of the commission paused to remind the attendants about their purpose, which is to discuss the potential adding of context to the confederate monuments or even adding more statues to the city honoring others.

The reminder did not dissuade people from speaking their mind.

“These are monuments that were installed well after the civil war in celebration of slave-owning war mongers,” said one young woman, in an impassioned speech. “These were never intended for historical education. They are quite literally the opposite of accurate historical education as they are a celebration of a genocide of African people that barely touches on the actual genocide that was American slavery and a slavery which is legally permitted to continue in our prisons today pursuant the 13th amendment. I’ve done a lot of work having to undo the ridiculous and romanticized B.S. history that I was subject to in Virginia schools.”

One man later countered that simply doing anything to the monuments would be “sacrilegious.”

Another man even argued that the city should build a monument to honor “the black confederates that served in the Confederacy.”

One constant theme throughout the evening was the upcoming “Unite The Right” rally to be held in Charlottesville. “I hope to see all of you that support solidarity with black and brown folks on Saturday in Charlottesville,” said one young woman, in one of the night’s most memorable speeches.

She continued, explaining that a ““Unite The Right” rally has been planned by the alt-right and is growing with literal Nazis and fascists daily.

“They are rich kids using your confederate monuments to trick you again into their violent movement. Many in this room are falling in lock step with Nazis without realizing and many who know and are proud to be out in the open and many others are ready to defend the communities under attack by right wing violence. And then there are many fence straddlers.”

The commission ultimately decided to cut off her mic.

Mayor Stoney, the creator of this commission, did not attend the meeting.

The next public hearing on the issue is Sept. 13.