Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity

By Claudrena N. Harold and Louis P. Nelson

When hate groups descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, triggering an eruption of racist violence, the tragic conflict reverberated throughout the world. It also had a profound effect on the University of Virginia’s expansive community, many of whose members are involved in teaching issues of racism, public art, free speech, and social ethics. In the wake of this momentous incident, scholars, educators, and researchers have come together in this important new volume to thoughtfully reflect on the historic events of August 11 and 12, 2017.

How should we respond to the moral and ethical challenges of our times? What are our individual and collective responsibilities in advancing the principles of democracy and justice? Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity brings together the work of these UVA faculty members catalyzed by last summer’s events to examine their community’s history more deeply and more broadly. Their essays—ranging from John Mason on the local legacy of the Lost Cause to Leslie Kendrick on free speech to Rachel Wahl on the paradoxes of activism—examine truth telling, engaged listening, and ethical responses, and aim to inspire individual reflection, as well as to provoke considered and responsible dialogue. This prescient new collection is a conversation that understands and owns America’s past and—crucially—shows that our past is very much part of our present.

Contributors: Asher D. Biemann * Gregory B. Fairchild * Risa Goluboff * Bonnie Gordon * Claudrena N. Harold * Willis Jenkins * Leslie Kendrick * John Edwin Mason * Guian McKee * Louis P. Nelson * P. Preston Reynolds * Frederick Schauer * Elizabeth R. Varon * Rachel Wahl * Lisa Woolfork

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Aug 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9780813941912

Book preview

University of Virginia Press

© 2018 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2018

ISBN 978-0-8139-4189-9 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4190-5 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4191-2 (e-book)

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

Cover photo: Alec R. Hosterman

CONTENTS

Foreword, by Grace Elizabeth Hale

Chronology

Introduction: Dialogues on Race and Inequity at the University of Virginia

REMEMBERING: HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS

History, Mine and Ours: Charlottesville’s Blue Ribbon Commission and the Terror Attacks of August 2017

JOHN EDWIN MASON

The Original False Equivalency

ELIZABETH R. VARON

Vae Victis!: Antisemitism as Self-Victimization (and What Spinoza Knew about It)

ASHER D. BIEMANN

SPEAKING: POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES

In the Shadow of the First Amendment

FREDERICK SCHAUER

The Answers and the Questions in First Amendment Law

LESLIE KENDRICK

Where Do We Go from Here?

RISA GOLUBOFF

LISTENING: CRITICAL ENGAGEMENTS

This Class of Persons: When UVA’s White Supremacist Past Meets Its Future

LISA WOOLFORK

Eugenics at the University of Virginia and Its Legacy in Health Disparities

P. PRESTON REYNOLDS

No Ordinary Sacrifice: The Struggle for Racial Justice at the University of Virginia in the Post–Civil Rights Era

CLAUDRENA N. HAROLD

On Listening

BONNIE GORDON

RESPONDING: ETHICAL COMMITMENTS

Ethics under Pressure: An Autoethnography of Moral Trauma

WILLIS JENKINS

Dialogue in Bad Times

RACHEL WAHL

How I Learned That Diversity Does Not Equal Integration

GREGORY B. FAIRCHILD

Race, Place, and the Social Responsibilities of UVA in the Aftermath of August 11 and 12

GUIAN MCKEE

Notes on Contributors

Index

FOREWORD

Universities are complex networks of buildings and organizations that provide education and jobs and health care and cultural enrichment. They take form in classrooms, dorms, dining halls, and hospitals. They field sports teams and community volunteers. They possess histories that include shameful compromises with the inequalities and oppression of their times. And they nurture opposition to those moral and ethical errors. Most fundamentally, universities are students, professors, staff, and alumni who think together about what is needed—from food and computers and trust to books and ideas and evidence—for us to continue in this essential act of collective thought.

This book brings together University of Virginia professors thinking about and feeling their way through the events of August 11 and 12, 2017. When white nationalists and neo-Nazis marched through the University of Virginia, students staged a counterprotest in front of the Rotunda by standing in a small, brave circle around the statue of Jefferson. When white supremacists of all kinds rallied in Emancipation Park and fought in the streets of downtown Charlottesville, students, staff members, alumni, and professors stood among the counterprotesters and said no to hate in our town and our nation. Here, professors write about these events as scholars—as students of history, law, photography, literature, and music, yes—but also as humans, as parents and spouses and siblings, as colleagues and congregation members and citizens of a historical moment in which choices must be made and false equivalencies abolished.

I began my career as a professor of history researching how white Southerners created a culture that legitimated segregation: the system of violence, oppression, and discrimination they created to replace slavery. The question that animated my work was how white Southerners learned to live with what they had done, how they convinced themselves that their world was moral and good and true. Building Confederate statues in parks and in front of courthouses formed an essential part of that work. After twenty years of teaching at the University of Virginia and living in Charlottesville, I have become the rare academic who wishes her research was not quite so relevant.

Here, on a campus where slaves once labored and African American students were not welcomed until almost a century after emancipation, the right to speak freely is not an abstract concept. It is a material, grounded, and embodied act that has been defeated in the past by slavery, war, lynching, rape and other forms of assault, eugenics, and segregation. It has also at times been defended by brave students, faculty, and staff members. It is palpable. In this collection, UVA professors suggest answers to what this history means the next time the white supremacists come to this or another university campus. They turn the university’s collective thinking to the prospect of creating a truly antiracist future.

Grace Elizabeth Hale

CHRONOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

Dialogues on Race and Inequity at the University of Virginia

In the spring of 2016, Charlottesville High School ninth-grader Zyhana Bryant petitioned her city council to remove the monumental equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee from one of our city’s downtown public parks. Her cause was soon championed by Wes Bellamy, the only African American on the city council. Bryant’s petition shone a spotlight on the material legacies of white supremacy that mark Charlottesville and hundreds of other towns in the South. In response to Bryant’s activism, as well as the African American community’s longstanding frustration with local politics, Bellamy began a very public conversation about past and present racism in a city that thinks of itself as highly progressive. Tensions escalated and as the conversation about the removal of the Lee statue gained currency, white nationalists and even the KKK came out to protest. The city council then expanded the conversation to include the Stonewall Jackson monument as well, the second of two large equestrian statues dominating Charlottesville’s downtown parks. Then, in the summer of 2017, two white nationalists began planning a massive invasion of the city—with now-famous disastrous and murderous results.

Those arguing to protect the statues ground their rhetoric in constitutionally protected free speech, citing broad cultural claims about preserving heritage. And it is true that these events raise important questions about free speech, intimidation, citizenship, and other fundamentals of American political identity. For those eager to see the statues come down, the potential deinstallation of these works of public art symbolize a commitment to Charlottesville’s African American community that the persistent structures of white supremacy will no longer be the default. What quickly becomes clear is that these monuments are potent symbols—flashpoints of the heated and polarized condition of contemporary America. These huge issues define our moment as a nation. That these events center on historical monuments confirms for us that Faulkner was right: The past is never dead. It is not even past. In this utterance, Faulkner reminds us that our past is a part of us. We daily face the task of confronting or ignoring it.

When confronting these monuments, one of the first tasks is to recall that they are not a part of the immediate post–Civil War South, that era we generally call the Reconstruction, but of the era of the Jim Crow South, after the failure of Reconstruction. It is also important to understand the construction of these monuments within the regionally specific context of white anxiety over the growing political insurgency of the New Negro. The egalitarian rhetoric and political transformations engendered by World War I and its immediate aftermath had a profound impact on black Southerners, including those living in the town of Charlottesville. Convinced that the struggle for democracy extended beyond the bloody trenches of western Europe, African Americans across the South fought valiantly against the political, social, and economic manifestations of white supremacy. Operating in a variety of political arenas, southern New Negroes pushed hard to increase their presence in the electoral arena, formed independent labor bodies and trade unions, and lent their support to prominent political organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The growing militancy of black Southerners, particularly black Virginians, did not escape the notice of Garvey, who after a visit to the Old Dominion wrote: The Southern Negro now feels that he has a part to play in the affairs of the world. A new light is burning for our brothers at this end. They are determined that they too shall enjoy a portion of that democracy for which many of their sons and brothers fought for and died for in France.¹

This new light did not escape the town of Charlottesville. In fact, in 1921 the local black newspaper, the Charlottesville Messenger, published a provocative article entitled, The New Negro: What He Wants. In that article the self-identified New Negroes of Charlottesville put forth the following demands:

1.Teacher salaries based on service not color

2.A four-year high school

3.Representation in the city council

4.Jim Crow streetcars abolished

5.Representation on the school board