Virginia confronts injustice of its past
Virginia has turned many pages on its racist legacy in recent years, but few packed the symbolic punch of a pair of decisions last week, by Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, and the state Supreme Court, which leans Republican. Both put Virginia on the right side of history and morality in a state, once the capital of the Confederacy, whose ongoing reckoning with the past would have been unimaginable less than a generation ago.
On Tuesday, Northam signed a pardon for seven Black men, executed for the rape of a White woman in 1951 after a trial that was a caricature of due process. A posthumous pardon is a legal device without precedent in Virginia and mentioned nowhere in state law, but as an act of restorative justice, its power is undiminished.
For most of the first half of the 20th century it was the commonwealth’s unwritten law that the only convicts executed for rape were African Americans. During that span, the commonwealth sent 45 men to the electric chair for that crime. All were Black.
Those pardoned by the governor, known as the Martinsville Seven, were indeed, as stated in the petition requesting a pardon submitted by their descendants, executed “simply for being black.” Whites convicted of the same crime were not subject to capital punishment, and the Supreme Court later determined that execution for the crime of rape was unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.
The governor’s action did not remove the jury’s finding of guilt. However, it left no question that the circumstances of the prosecution constituted an injustice — several of the accused were illiterate and unable to read the confessions they signed or, in the absence of counsel, understand what they had admitted to. And the trials themselves, before all-White juries, were farcical, with little attempt made to determine the individual actions of each defendant.
The execution of the seven was the subject of protests at home and abroad. An equally unremarked part of the Old Dominion’s physical landscape until recently was the presence of Confederate statues, given pride of place on the hallowed grounds of the state Capitol in Richmond, around county courthouses and on broad boulevards in practically every corner of the state.
On Thursday, the state Supreme Court unanimously backed Northam’s decision to remove the 12-ton equestrian monument, 21 feet tall atop a pedestal nearly twice that height.
Lee and other Confederate grandees were an object of folkloric reverence whose ideological role as defenders of slavery was airbrushed from the minds of generations. Northam and other enlightened officials have called foul on that revisionism; so now has the state’s highest court.