Bacon's Rebellion

Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira has won two journalism awards — the Poke award for state reporting, and the Hechinger Grand Prize for educational coverage — for his coverage of “relentless racism” at the Virginia Military Institute. It’s a good bet that the Washington Post will nominate his coverage for a Pulitzer Prize, the gold standard for American journalism.

VMI alumnus Robert Morris has started a petition at Change.org calling for the Pulitzer Committee to conduct a “full and objective investigation” before granting him a prize for what many in the VMI community is his highly biased reporting. Check out the petition here.

Update: If you’re of a mind to express your indignation this quiet weekend, speak out about Fairfax County’s plans to implement a new “Anti-Racism, Anti-Bias Curriculum Policy” in place of the old “Controversial Issues Policy” that ensured that teachers would be fair and impartial discussing controversial issues in the classroom. Parents Defending Education takes tells you how to let your opinions be known.

— JAB

by James A. Bacon

In a series of blistering articles over the past year, Washington Post staff writer Ian Shapira has accused the Virginia Military Institute of “relentless racism” and written favorably about the renaming of statues, memorials and iconography associated with slavery and the Confederacy.

Reporting on the May meeting of the VMI Board of Visitors, for instance, Shapira recounted how the Board took steps to downplay the military academy’s tributes to Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, whom he described as “a former professor at the college who owned six enslaved people.” The board stripped the Civil War general’s name from an arch and from the memorial hall. The purge went so far as to expunge Jackson’s name from a barracks plaque that was inscripted with a maxim he often quoted.

That erasure came, Shapira noted in a self-administered pat on the back, after The Washington Post published a story, which he had written, “chronicling a host of disturbing incidents in recent years at VMI.” That article also prompted Governor Ralph Northam to launch an investigation into racism at the school.

One would never imagine it from reading his broadsides against VMI, but Shapira himself has a few Confederates in the attic. The Post reporter sits on the board of directors of a Kentucky-based distillery, Heaven Hill Distilleries, Inc. The family-owned business sells three brands of bourbon named after owners or employers of slave labor and a brand of rum named after a fervent defender of England’s slave plantations in the West Indies. (more…)