Category Archives: Virginia history

UVA As a “Maze of Predatory Systems”

Posted on March 27, 2024 by | 26 comments

by James A. Bacon

If you visit the latest exhibit at the University of Virginia’s Ruffin Gallery, “EscapeRoom,” it takes no more than five or ten seconds for the artists’ message to sink in — the amount of time it takes to read the signage at the entrance:

The University of Virginia (UVA) is a site of reckoning. The legacies of slavery and white supremacy reverberate throughout its built environment. EscapeRoom confronts the frameworks of injustice that contemporary audiences inhabit and inherit in relation to this UNESCO World Heritage Site. … EscapeRoom charts critical routes through a maze of predatory systems.

Inside, the exhibits contributed by multiple artists elaborate upon the white-supremacy theme. Five 3D-printed pieces of porcelain, for instance, are described as giving “materiality, scale and dimension to the many ‘tools’ that mediate state violence visited upon Black victims: horses, batons, guns, tear gas, and more.”

A mobile made of steel sheet metal “examines violence visited upon Black people at the hands of the American state. It attends to the paradoxes of Black life and death in this anti-Black world.”

To set foot in the EscapeRoom is to enter a world of victimhood that would have been entirely justified a century or two ago but seems tragically out of date 60 years after the passage of Civil Rights legislation, the enactment of the Great Society’s war on poverty, and the dramatic transformation of attitudes toward race in America — not to mention the implementation of Racial Equity Task Force recommendations at UVA itself that made the exhibit possible in the first place. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, DEI, Race and race relations, Virginia history

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In Their Own Words: Jefferson, Whiteness, and Dicks in the Sky

Posted on March 27, 2024 by | 26 comments

Meet Marisa Williamson. The Harvard-educated assistant professor in the University of Virginia art department works in video, image-making, installation and performance art around themes of “history, race, feminism, and technology,” according to her UVA faculty page. Most recently, she co-curated the EscapeRoom exhibition at the Ruffin Gallery, which we highlight in a companion article.

Williamson, who has worked at UVA since 2018, was one of the first faculty members hired under the “Race, Justice and Equity” initiative made possible by grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

She described her approach to art in a 2021 conversation with Tori Cherry, a Charlottesville artist and UVA Grad, hosted by Charlottesville’s New City Arts.

“One of my big goals is to unsettle and to figure out how to haunt, how to keep things moving, how to agitate through these various forms of performance and monument,” Williamson said. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, DEI, Race and race relations, Virginia history

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RVA HISTORY: Schools Are for Learning

Posted on March 4, 2024 by | 3 comments

by Jon Baliles

The effort to save the old Richmond Community Hospital (RCH) from Virginia Union’s wrecking ball raises an interesting debate about recognizing history, remembering history, and benefitting by learning from history. Especially when one program is established that then becomes part of a bigger effort and very especially when it is used to overcome something as insidious as segregation. It is also an example of why saving monuments to black history is so important instead of sacrificing them for a revenue stream from 200 apartments.

This story, in a roundabout way, ties in with the opportunity Virginia Union has to create and model a historic preservation program like the successful program at Tuskegee University in Alabama — which is the only Historically Black College and University (HBCU) to have such a program. Doing something like that at VUU centered around the RCH as a starting point and building block could have an incalculable impact for generations of students to come.

The architecture program created at Tuskegee in 1893 (which led to the historic preservation program) was so lasting and impactful it quickly became a main contributor in educating almost 700,000 black children across the south for decades in what were known as The Rosenwald Schools. Continue reading →

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Posted in Civil Rights, Education (K-12), Virginia history

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A True Community Hospital

Posted on March 3, 2024 by | 20 comments

by Jon Baliles

Virginia Union University announced recently that it would utilize several parcels it owns just north of the main campus to build a new $40 million development with up to 200 apartments (some market and some lower income) and possibly some homes and commercial space for students or the public, which would create a revenue stream for the school and shared profits with the New York developer.

But the development project would come with the cost of demolishing the old Richmond Community Hospital (RCH), first opened in Jackson Ward in 1902 at the dawn of Jim Crow by black physicians to treat Richmonders who were not allowed to be treated in white hospitals. The building that now sits on VUU property on Overbrook Road was purchased and opened in 1932.

Eric Kolenich wrote in the Times-Dispatch that “across the street was a neighborhood of prominent black residents, called Frederick Douglass Court, that later was home to civil rights attorney and federal judge Spotswood Robinson.” The hospital moved to Church Hill in 1980 and the building has been vacant ever since. A VUU spokesperson said the school determined there was no way to save the building. But the local preservation nonprofit Historic Richmond weighed in and has suggested that because of its historical significance, it could be incorporated into a larger project and still produce revenue for the university.

Michael Paul Williams wrote an excellent piece noting that “We live in a city chock-full of adaptive reuses, including of the former Westhampton School building by Bon Secours. Shouldn’t we be as passionate about preserving our  bricks-and-mortar black history while it’s still above ground?”

That is why a group of Richmonders dedicated to preserving the derelict structure have organized to try and save the building. They are asking VUU to incorporate the structure into its plans. VUU needs the revenue stream that the project would bring, but the group and others believe there are ways to do it and preserve the building and its history. Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (higher ed), Virginia history

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Youngkin and Confederate Heritage

Posted on March 3, 2024 by | 128 comments

by Donald Smith

Does the Virginia GOP want the help and support of the Confederate heritage community? We should get a pretty good indicator this week.

Three bills just passed by the General Assembly will soon land on Governor Youngkin’s desk, if they haven’t already. They will remove the tax exemptions of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Stonewall Jackson Memorial House in Lexington, and stop further issuance of the General Robert E. Lee and Sons of Confederate Veterans license plates (but not recall existing ones). The governor will have only seven days to sign, veto, or let them become law without his signature.

That is plenty of time. Plenty of time for him to do the right thing, and veto them. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, General Assembly, Virginia history

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The Purge Comes for Edwin Alderman

Posted on February 13, 2024 by | 40 comments

by James A. Bacon

As President of the University of Virginia between 1904 and 1931, Edwin Anderson Alderman led Thomas Jefferson’s university into the 20th century. A self-proclaimed “progressive” of the Woodrow Wilson stamp, he advocated higher taxes to support public education, admitted the first women into UVA graduate programs, boosted enrollment and faculty hiring, established the university’s endowment, reformed governance and gave UVA its modern organizational structure. Most memorably to Wahoos of the current era, he built a state-of-the-art facility, named Alderman Library in his honor, to further the pursuit of knowledge.

Like many other “progressives” of the era, Alderman also promoted the science (now known to be a pseudo-science) of eugenics, and he held racist views that  have been roundly rejected in the 21st century.

A movement has burgeoned at UVA to remove Alderman’s name from the library. The Ryan administration was poised in December to ask for Board of Visitors approval to take that step by renaming the newly-renovated facility after former President Edgar Shannon. The administration withdrew the proposal after determining it did not have a majority vote. But Team Ryan could resurrect the name change at the February/March meeting of the Board, as suggested in the flier seen above. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Education (higher ed), Virginia history

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Rep. Bob Good Calls for Hearing on Naming Commission

Posted on February 10, 2024 by | 90 comments

Rep. Bob Good

by Donald Smith

The Virginia congressman who represents Appomattox, where the Civil War started to end,* wants the House of Representatives to examine the impacts of Congress’ attempt to grapple with the legacy of that war — an attempt that could lay the groundwork for the legacies of Confederate generals and soldiers to be deemed unworthy of public respect in American heritage and in modern-day American society.

Bob Good, representative from Virginia’s 5th Congressional District and chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, issued this press release on Friday, February 2.  It calls for the House Oversight Committee to convene a hearing to review the operations and decisions of the Naming Commission. 

Congress should conduct a thorough review to determine the true nature of the efforts to remove historic statues and memorials. Historical sites are meant to preserve moments that are critical to the growth and healing of our nation and should not be subject to the destructive ruse of political wokeness. I am calling for a full accounting of the actions taken by the Naming Commission so the American people can see for themselves how the Biden Administration used their tax dollars, and if they did so to arbitrarily erase our history.

Good said that the “need for proper accountability and oversight regarding the rationale behind the Commission’s deliberations” warranted a hearing. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Virginia history

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RVA HISTORY: Strides of Strength

Posted on February 6, 2024 by | 10 comments

by Jon Baliles

Richmond unveiled a new sculpture last week on the site of the old Westhampton School (near St. Mary’s Hospital) that marked the desegregation of the West-End school in 1961. The 12-foot piece, entitled “Strides,” marks that day when 12-year old student Daisy Jane Cooper (now Jane Cooper Johnson) arrived as the first African American student following a three-year legal battle that took a U.S. District Court’s intervention. (Photo courtesy of Bon Secours.)

At age 9, Jane was having to travel five miles to get to the segregated Carver Elementary School. In 1958, civil rights attorney Oliver Hill submitted an application to the Richmond City School Board on behalf of Jane’s mother to transfer Jane to the all-white Westhampton School. The State Pupil Placement Board rejected the request, which led to the lawsuit that lasted three years and resulted in a groundbreaking victory in 1961. It impacted not only Richmond City schools but other localities as well — and the ruling meant that African-American students no longer required permission from the State Board to attend a white school.

A year after first walking through the doors of Westhampton, Cooper also became the first African-American student to integrate Thomas Jefferson High School in September 1962, after deciding she wanted to go there instead of the all-black Maggie Walker High School. Continue reading →

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Posted in Civil Rights, Education (K-12), Virginia history

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What Do You Do If There Are No Statues Left to Tear Down?

Posted on January 25, 2024 by | 108 comments

Can of worms

Step #1: Reinterpret the Confederate statues;

Step #2: Remove the Confederate statues from the public square;

Step #3: Prevent those who want the statues from having them. Decapitate the statues, melt them down, or desecrate them in art and museum displays.

What’s left? Where else is there to go?

Step #4: Take away tax-exempt status from a prominent organization dedicated to preserving the statues.

SB517 and HB 568 would eliminate the exemption from state recordation taxes for the Virginia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) as well as the tax exemption for real and personal property owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The House Bill passed the House Finance Committee in a 12 to 10 (presumably party-line) vote. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Virginia history

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Rebellion Within the Rebellion: The Wayward Militiamen of Rockingham

Posted on January 22, 2024 by | 7 comments

by Karl Rhodes

Thomas Jefferson once wrote that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing; as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions indeed generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them.”

Perhaps this was the principle at work in March 1862, when a significant number of Virginians in Rockingham County refused to comply with Gov. John Letcher’s declaration that all militiamen in the Shenandoah Valley must answer the bell for round two of the Civil War.

The first inkling of this little-known rebellion within the rebellion came from the pen of Jedediah Hotchkiss, who would become Stonewall Jackson’s topographer. “The Rockingham militia has been released for 10 days,” he wrote on March 18, as he passed through the county on his way to Jackson’s headquarters at Winchester. “They are quite averse to going.”

It was certainly no surprise to Hotchkiss or to Jackson that groups of Mennonites and Dunkers (German Baptist Brethren) were captured in mid-March as they tried to flee through the mountains of Western Virginia. But these nonviolent deserters were not alone in their refusal to return to the war. Jackson’s 10-day grace period had ended, and quite a few Rockingham militiamen were still AWOL. Some of these men had volunteered for military service at the start of the war, and under Virginia law, their one-year military obligation was about to expire. More disgruntled men joined the Rockingham Rebellion after March 29, when Governor Letcher proclaimed that all Virginia militiamen would be inducted as privates into “volunteer companies” of the Confederate ranks.

“There is much uproar among the militia,” Hotchkiss wrote. “I am glad that I have made my escape from the militia [onto Jackson’s staff] before this proclamation.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Virginia history

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The War Over Robert E. Lee Never Ends

Posted on January 12, 2024 by | 78 comments

by James A. Bacon

First they came for the equestrian statues of Robert E. Lee.

Then they removed his name from Lee Chapel at Washington & Lee University, where he is buried.

Then they came for the memorial to his horse Traveller.

Now they want to remove him from Virginia license plates.

A bill introduced by Del. Candi King, D-Woodbridge would direct the Department of Motor Vehicles to prohibit the issuance of license plates that make reference to the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, or any other prominent Confederate leader. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Virginia history

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Congress, Commission Renounce Reconciliation

Posted on January 10, 2024 by | 60 comments

The Confederate Memorial in Arlington.
(Arlington National Cemetery photo by Rachel Larue)

by Donald Smith

‘In passing the 2021 William M. “Mac” Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act, the United States Congress determined that Confederates and the Confederacy no longer warrant commemoration through Department of Defense assets.’

***

At such a time and under such conditions I thought it eminently fitting to show some token of our feeling, and I therefore instructed my subordinate officers to come to the position of ‘salute’ in the manual of arms as each body of the Confederates passed before us.

The first statement is from the Naming Commission, the body Congress created to review Confederate names and iconography on DOD installations. It appears to be the commissioners’ interpretation of Congress’ intent behind Section 370 of the FY 2021 National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA), which established the Naming Commission and outlined its mission.

The second is from Union General Joshua Chamberlain. Chamberlain commanded the detachments of the Union Armies of the Potomac and James which received the surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. The “such a time and under such conditions” Chamberlain found himself confronted with, was the approach of the surrendering Confederate infantry on April 12th, 1865, at Appomattox Court House.

Apparently, Congress has chosen to agree with the Naming Commission, instead of Chamberlain. In so doing, it has chosen to play Jenga with American heritage and culture. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Virginia history

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The Fighting Editor

Posted on January 9, 2024 by | 18 comments

Alexander, Ann Field. Race Man:  The Rise and Fall of the “Fighting Editor” John Mitchell Jr., University of Virginia Press, 2002

Review by Dick Hall-Sizemore

John Mitchell, Jr. was a major figure in Richmond and Virginia public affairs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Over the course of this career, he was a nationally known newspaper editor, a member of Richmond City Council, president of a bank, and a gubernatorial candidate.

In her well-researched biography, Ann Alexander tells Mitchell’s story in fascinating detail. In the course of following the life of Mitchell, the book provides insight into the political and social lives of middle-class Blacks in Richmond’s Jackson Ward in the late 19th century. There is also a discussion of the effects of the Readjuster movement and the subsequent defeat of the Readjusters and rise of the Democratic party in the city and state.

John Mitchell, Jr., the child of slaves, was born July 11, 1863, at Laburnum, an estate in Henrico County on the outskirts of Richmond. His parents were house servants of James Lyons, a prominent Richmond attorney. After Laburnum burned to the ground less than a year after Mitchell’s birth (the result of suspected arson by a disgruntled slave), the Lyons family eventually relocated to one of Richmond’s finest houses, a Greek Revival mansion on Grace Street near Capitol Square. Continue reading →

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Posted in Book review, Race and race relations, Virginia history

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Virginia Army National Guard Switches from Red to Blue

Posted on December 28, 2023 by | 59 comments


by Thomas. M. Moncure Jr.

Confederate statues have come down and in some cases – to assure they will never rise again – have been melted down. Schools and roads have been purged of Confederate references. Army bases likewise are renamed in this cultural cleansing. This rewriting of history – Soviet style – would make Joseph Stalin proud. This eradication of one of the most significant events in American history – the formation of the Confederate States of America – has been done more swiftly and with greater success than even George Orwell might have envisioned.

Even symbols must be dispatched down the memory hole. The old unit patch of the Virginia Army National Guard (above left) showed a spear cutting thru the chain of tyranny in a St. Andrews Cross on a field of red. This is a subtle but somewhat obvious nod to the Confederate Battle Flag; any vague resemblance to anything Confederate must be purged.

The new National Guard patch shows Virtue over the dead body of Tyranny, imitating the Seal of Virginia on a blue field. Symbols do underlie and emphasize political realities. In addition to removing Confederate taint, the Guard has -intentionally or not – fallen in with the transition of the partisan makeup of the General Assembly. As Virginia has gone from Red to Blue, so has the Guard.

Thomas Moncure lives in Colonial Beach. He is an attorney and former Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates. 

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Posted in Culture wars, Virginia history

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Daughter of Heroines

Posted on December 6, 2023 by | 28 comments

Roanoke College women’s swim team (front row) and supporters at press conference at Hotel Roanoke, Oct. 5. (photo/Scott Dreyer)

by Margot Heffernan

The year is 2023 but it feels as if the calendar has rolled back a hundred years for women and girls in Virginia, and just about anywhere else in the Western world. Hyperbolic? Over the top?

Sadly, no.

Each day women are censored, denigrated, and erased; called bigots for speaking biological fact; losing to men in female sports; redefined with terms like “chest feeders” and “uterus havers.” Violent male felons are routinely housed in women’s prisons in at least four states because they “identify” as women. And private female spaces are ceded to biological men in schools and other public places.

Virginia is a microcosm of the problem writ large. Remember the scandalous sexual assault of two Loudoun County girls over two years ago that were perpetrated by a male who gained access to girls’ restrooms. Recall the recent Roanoke College attempt to hijack the women’s swim team by allowing a man to join. Then, on September 27th, at a Turner Ashby High cheerleading event in Rockingham County, several males entered the female locker room without consent from the girls. Some cheerleaders felt compelled to change in the shower stalls or bathrooms of their female-only locker room. Continue reading →

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Posted in Civil Rights, Culture wars, Feminism and women's rights, Parental Rights, Politics, Virginia history

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