Racist past, uncertain future
Charlottesville, Va., Confederate statues continue to spark controversy
Two years ago, when white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Va., organizers of the Unite the Right rally said they were defending a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, which the city planned to remove from a public park.
The deadly street violence and outpouring of racist and anti-Semitic venom on Aug. 11 and 12, 2017, continue to haunt the national psyche.
But what about the sculpture that prompted the angry gathering, a huge bronze rendering of Lee astride his beloved steed?
Well, it’s still standing, as is a towering bronze equestrian statue of rebel Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, which the city also wants to remove. And the two Old Dixie icons won’t be going anywhere in the foreseeable future amid a seemingly endless legal fight over their historical meaning.
While supporters contend that the statues, installed in the 1920s, are simply memorials to the Confederacy’s war veterans, the city argues that the monuments “were intended to, and did, send messages of intimidation, exclusion and hostility to African Americans.” The question of whether the statues “were part of a regime of city-sanctioned segregation” appears headed for Virginia’s Supreme Court.
No matter how the statues are interpreted, though, Charlottesville’s history of Jim Crow apartheid is undeniable. When the Jackson and Lee sculptures were dedicated, in 1921 and 1924, respectively, this college community, like the rest of the South and much of the country, was steeped in institutionalized racism.
For instance: Eight months before the Jackson monument was unveiled, local citizens of privileged color were aghast at a subversive wish list published Feb. 12, 1921, in the black-owned Charlottesville Messenger, and reprinted, for shock value, on the front page of the city’s white-run paper, the Daily Progress.
Titled “The New Negro,” the article called for “Teachers’ salaries based on service not on color;” a four-year high school for black students; “Better street facilities in Negro districts”; a voice for blacks in municipal government; and the abolition of ” ‘Jim Crow’ street cars.” The Daily Progress, appalled by the manifesto, echoed its flabbergasted readers in an editorial warning that “the negroes” should remember their place:
“The circulation of such absurd tirades and impossible proposals … only serve to make the problem of the law-abiding and respected element among the colored people that much harder, [and] if trouble ensues, its greatest weight will ultimately fall on them.”
The statues, in the city’s Court Square area, were donated by Paul Goodloe McIntire, a philanthropist
whose slave-owning father had been financially humbled by the Civil War. McIntire, who was not quite 5 years old when the South surrendered in 1865, amassed a fortune in Chicago and New York before retiring in his hometown and becoming a civic benefactor.
“The princely giver of princely gifts,” as he was called, commissioned the monuments in the late 1910s, hiring New York sculptors Henry Shrady (for Lee) and Charles Keck (for Jackson). Both statues were expected to be finished by about 1921. After Shrady died in 1922, another sculptor took over the job.
On Oct. 19, 1921, the day of the first unveiling, Edwin Alderman, president of the University of Virginia, addressed a crowd of thousands in front of a 10-foot sculpture atop a 13-foot pedestal. “To the city of Charlottesville, and, in a high spiritual sense, to the valiant souls now living who fought beneath the Stars and Bars,” Alderman said, he was presenting the Jackson statue “in the belief that it will stand here forever.”
By then, the Confederacy’s defense of human bondage had been supplanted in popular thought by a gauzy fiction, the myth of the Lost Cause. This version of history held that the insurrection had been a second American Revolution, a righteous uprising against federal economic tyranny, and that the men who waged the rebellion should be revered for their patriotism and sacrifice.
The ex-rebel soldiers attending the ceremony belonged to a dying generation that had witnessed 12 years of black suffrage and biracial governance in the South during postwar Reconstruction. After the demise of federally enforced political equality, the culture and legal bulwark of Jim Crow were established, excluding blacks from civic life and denying basic entitlements such as those sought by “The New Negro.”
A majority of the Confederate monuments in the United States today were installed between 1900 and 1930. Whether the statues were erected only to honor vanishing heroes, or also symbolized the restoration of white power, made no practical difference to Charlottesville’s African Americans living under Jim Crow. Most of them bore daily oppression and ridicule silently while fearing for their safety.
A lawsuit aimed at saving the sculptures was filed in March 2017 — five months before the violent white-supremacist rally — and the litigation in Charlottesville Circuit Court has gone in favor of the 13 plaintiffs, all Confederate heritage enthusiasts. In a series of rulings this year, Judge Richard Moore decided that the effigies are war memorials protected by a 1904 Virginia preservation law.
The next step for the city is an appeal to the state Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the Lee monument, 26 feet high, stands where it always has, in a small park donated by “the princely giver,” which folks in the 1920s knew was for whites only.