MARKED BY THESE MONUMENTS

SCHMIDT: Dr. Andrea Douglas, who’s executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.

DOUGLAS: Yes.

SCHMIDT: And I, I’m an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, Jalane Schmidt. So, we are your guides, and we give this tour usually on a monthly basis. I sometimes do it more with school groups and journalist groups that come through, as well. We do this as an effort to promote public history, and I call this an exercise of amplifying footnotes. So, this is kind-of taking the facts of history that are usually in musty old tomes, or discussed only in seminars, or academic conferences, and this sort of thing, and making it accessible to a wider public because this history belongs to all of us. Which gets to the fact that memory is not the same thing as history, that memory can be promoted, tweaked, produced, reproduced, by things such as, you know, statues, or books, or activities, pop-culture programming, and all this sort of thing. This is an activity that we’re doing as an effort to shift community memory, to kind-of unearth the history. And, specifically, we’re going to be talking a lot about local history here.

DOUGLAS: In terms of thinking about the monetization of Confederate objects and histories and things, we’re spending almost 40 million dollars a year on these things. Meaning the museums, meaning the care of parks, meaning the houses – all of those kinds of things do have a taxpayer monetization. 

SCHMIDT: You, you, you are paying for this. $800,000 in the Commonwealth of Virginia alone. 

DOUGLAS: Alright, so I think that when we have these conversations, they also need to be thought of within this sort-of larger context of our social spaces and what it is that we as taxpayers think about those social spaces. 

SCHMIDT: And they’re kind-of normalized as part of our physical landscape. Many people, not all of us, but many people kind-of walk by them for many years and don’t really even mind, or thought they were harmless, or all this sort of thing. And, so, we’re kind-of doing a little archaeological excavation of a historical nature, to see what were the values that were driving the folks who put them up.

DOUGLAS: March 3, 1865, the Union Army moves into Charlottesville, camped for three days - as Dr. Schmidt says. And, they are greeted by the rector of the university, and the mayor of Charlottesville.

SCHMIDT: And Professor Minor, of Minor Hall fame. The original site of surrender is where the UVA Chapel is now. These three individuals literally waved a white flag at General Sheridan’s approaching scout. The majority of people here were enslaved, so this had to be the biggest day in the history of this city, of this county. Over have the population - their status changes. So, we call it Liberation Day now. That is, we flip that narrative on its head. A number of years ago – late 90s, early 00s, – there was a plaque that was put up that recognized the surrender of Charlottesville, and that was the language of it. And, much umbrage was taken by certain individuals in the community. I think they tried to change the language, but then the plaque was just stolen. And it wasn’t replaced until just a few months ago. I mean, it was gone for years. Now, think about it: every once in a while someone comes and tags the monuments with graffiti. So what happens? It’s in the news, it is immediately scrubbed off! The city sends maintenance workers there, and it is gone within hours. Right? So, it shows a certain set of priorities. I mean, and these are your tax dollars, these are all our tax dollars, too. And, I think it’s a contextualization that’s worthy of consideration. But, it shows a certain priority. And, similarly with this marker that talked about the surrender of Charlottesville being stolen and just removed, not replaced, for years until very recently, that also shows a certain priority. 

DOUGLAS: Yeah, and the language has changed from ‘Surrender of Charlottesville’ to ‘Occupation of Union Soldiers,’ so…

(The tour group groans.)

SHMIDT: On March the 2nd, there was what was called the Battle of Waynesboro.and, Union Generals Sheridan and Custard defeated General Early, of Earlysville fame, and General Early and his men, most many of them, escaped, much to the ire of the white families that were living in the Shenandoah valley. Many of them actually complained to General Lee, saying that General Early had been very ineffective, they demanded that he - that Early - be fired, and Lee agreed with them and fired him. But, you don’t read that on any of the plaques. But this gets to the point, the distinction between memory and history. It does say on the plaque for Early something about [how]  he was in the most battles. So, we’re not hearing about him winning the battles, we’re just hearing that he was in more of them than anybody else.

After the win at Waynesboro, that’s when the troops entered Charlottesville and that’s when that surrender takes place, and the Union army occupies for 3 days. So, after Early ran off and some of the Union soldiers came into town, they commandeered the press at the Jeffersonian Republican Newspaper – of course it was Jeffersonian – in order to print a report about Early’s defeat and his subsequent running away. They published a kind-of satirical broadside in the style of the runaway slave ads, and so they said: “WANTED: Old Jube. He ran away.” They were gonna pay $2 to get him back, making fun of General Early, comparing him to so many escaping peoples. Now, we have an account that a young Paul McIntire, who was then only 5, stood on his porch, and the Yankee soldiers are walking by, and he supposedly shook his fist at them. This young Paul McIntire, and I would contend that Mr. McIntire’s most long-lasting fist shaking are these monuments.

SCHMIDT: So Reconstruction was a 12 year period from 1865 to 1877, when Union troops withdrew, when there were biracial governments throughout the South. Virginia was the first state to be readmitted to the Union, and the requirement was write a state constitution that’s up to snuff with the US Constitution. 

DOUGLAS: Just to sort-of locate some of the conversation here, Virginia constitution is 1868. That’s the constitution that allows Virginia back into the United States.  

SCHMIDT: So, this new constitution was put in, black voters – black male voters, after the 15th Amendment, anyway – were voting in numbers, were getting elected to office, were becoming Delegates in political parties, becoming Delegates and Senators in legislature. 

DOUGLAS: Very early on, this is a politicized community. It’s a community that says that we understand that our vote is important, and these are the kinds of things that we’re interested in if you want to have our vote. And it’s things like, we don’t want to be arrested.

SCHMIDT: Without cause.

DOUGLAS: Without cause, certainly. We don’t want to be thrown out of our homes without cause, we want free education. 

SCHMIDT: Public schools in the South really didn’t exist before Reconstruction, that is a legacy of those Reconstruction governments specifically. 

DOUGLAS: So, clearly putting forth a plan for their own citizenship. And, if you go to the Heritage Center, there is a little bit of an article that says, and I’ll paraphrase: “The Negroes are free. They found a little school, they’re learning to read and write, they’ll want to sit on our juries, they’ll want to be in our parlors, and then they want to marry our daughters.” So, that’s the concern of 1865, September 1865 - 

SCHMIDT: Of the white population.

DOUGLAS: -of the white population, locally. Emancipation, Freedom, and Liberation Day is March 3rd, 1865, this article is September 1865. It’s one of the contiguous announcements of what the white population is thinking about what emancipation looks like.

SCHMIDT: This was kind-of part of a downtown development boom that started happening at the beginning of the 20th century, so these statues are part of that development, this so-called city beautiful movement, which was interlaced with ideas about race. Part of what was beautiful was who needed to be removed, supposedly, from public spaces in order to beautify them. Because at this time in the early 20th century this is actually a mixed-race area, downtown here. 

DOUGLAS: It’s also about a kind of way that one orders a city – the ways in which certain parts of the city are used, the establishment of public parks for the good, the ways in which one thinks about what those parks do, the idea that you can create central squares where communities gather, that’s a lot of what city beautiful was about, too. It was about how do you order and cause communal interaction.

DOUGLAS: Virginia has the largest number of Confederate monuments in the country. 75 of them exist in front of courthouses.  

SCHMIDT: So, we need to talk about that. The courthouse is, you know, run under the rule of law, that's according to the United States Constitution. So, it does beg the question of why the people who tried to overthrow the U.S. Constitution would be here on this ground as you're going into court to supposedly get a fair trial. But, we have to consider the kind of historical backdrop here, particularly after the end of Reconstruction in 1877. The former Confederates that had been barred from office because of their participation, especially leadership cadre folks, start slipping back into government and trying to reestablish white supremacy. And they use those words, white supremacy. They were not embarrassed about it. I mean, it kind of rings in our ears today, but they were very sanguine. That's the goal here – it’s to have the supremacy of the white race, white supremacy. So, they start coming back into office, and then things start getting really bad. This paranoia of a black majority is very fixed in the white imaginary of this city.

SCHMIDT: After the fall of Reconstruction in 1877, the Great Compromise of ‘77, Union soldiers withdrew from the South, effectively leaving the freedmen to the mercy (and there wasn't much mercy) of their former masters, who were then kind of started slipping back into office and establishing laws in order to reestablish white supremacy. And again, that was the language they used, this was the intent. 

SCHMIDT: And part of the enforcement mechanisms for doing this, of course, there's a legal regime that's being set up, but there's also extralegal terror. That is, lynching. Lynching campaigns that are being lodged against specifically black people who are trying to vote, black people that are trying to or do start businesses, or who are deemed to be too successful at businesses, showing up the white folk as it were. Black folks who are buying property. These are all folks that are getting beyond their, over their place. And law enforcement officials themselves are actually often involved in it. 

SCHMIDT: Exhibit A, I will give is our own community of Charlottesville with the lynching of John Henry James in 1898. Mr. James was accused of raping a young white woman from a prominent Charlottesville family. And again, this paranoia about black men seducing or sexually assaulting white women, this is just kind of paramount in the white imaginary in terms of fears of what would happen with a free black population. He was taken to jail, just behind on High Street there, the old jail. If you kind of look there you can see it just peeking over the top of a brick wall. There's this old gray stone. That was the old jail. That's where they held him.

SCHMIDT: A mob starts forming outside and so the police chief thinks it's a better idea, “wait, let's get him out of here so the mob doesn't overwhelm the jail, and let's take him to Staunton overnight. Just let things cool down here.” So they do, they actually took him over the back wall, went to the railroad and on to Staunton overnight. So then they're coming back the next morning, July the  12th, 1898, Mr. James is being transported with the sheriff and the police chief. You would think,  with this sort of enforcement of law, that he would be able to be brought to trial and given a trial.  But, what happened was that a white mob, armed mob, went and gathered on the train tracks.  And they weren't masked. They made no attempt to hide their identities. One of them was dressed as a woman, had a dress on, was doing a kind of damsel in distress action on the track to try to get the train to slow down and stop.  

SCHMIDT: Also at this time, there was a group of about 40 black men who came from Charlottesville out to what became the lynching site, which is now on the grounds of the Farmington Country Club.  This group of black men, they were trying to thwart the lynching. They were repelled by this armed mob. The train slowed down, stopped, and Mr. James was taken off.  

DOUGLAS: Taken 40 yards, he was allowed to pray for 20 minutes. Then he was hung, shot, and then left to hang there. Where his body, over time, parts of his clothing were cut away, parts of his body were cut away as souvenirs. He was removed from that site by the black undertaker, and then tried posthumously and found to be guilty.  

SCHMIDT: The sheriff and the police chief were present  at the lynching. And no one was ever charged. And all those people were unmasked. But, the coroner of the inquest afterwards said it was at hands unknown. That's actually the title of a book. To hands unknown. It's history of lynching. Because this was often the conclusion. So, that happened here

(this transcript contains upsetting language.)

DOUGLAS: The first constitution is the Virginia Constitution of 1868. 

SCHMIDT: The Reconstruction Constitution.

DOUGLAS: The Reconstruction Constitution, yes. And the next constitution is the Constitution of 1902. And that's the Constitution that is meant to really solidify many of the sort-of Jim Crow laws that you begin to see in and around the 1890s. But by the time you get to 1902, the kind of segregation laws that are being implemented have a lot to do with voting, as Dr. Schmidt said. So you begin to see things like poll tax resurge, right? And the poll tax has to be paid three years in a row in order to vote. Also with that are things like literacy tests, and literacy tests are yet another opportunity to disenfranchise the black voter. And by the time you get to the 1902 constitution, even across the South, the poll tax and those kinds of what they call Black Code laws become the laws that are then defining how we understand Southern life all across the south. Virginia is arguably one of the more milder. It's not Tennessee, it's not Mississippi, it's not the deep dark South, but it's very clear that this is a changing landscape. And even in the  language and excuse me, but… they say we are going to write a constitution that turns back, excuse my language, the “nigger constitution” of 1868, right? That's in the Virginia text. 

SCHMIDT: That's an elected official saying this, you know, about why this 1902 constitution, yeah, is being voted in. All right. All right. It's to overthrow that other one. Because now it's an all-white legislature, or pretty near, you know, almost everyone's been pushed out by then. Has anyone ever heard the term grandfathering, you know, to grandfather something? Yeah, this notion that you have to pay your poll tax three years in a row, I don't think you have to do that if you were white. 

DOUGLAS: No, well, everyone had to do it because it was considered a head tax, but the idea of the capacity to be able to do that had to do with grandfathering. It also had to do with whether or not your ancestor was a… soldier in the Civil War. 

SCHMIDT: Yeah, so if your grandfather voted or your grandfather was a Confederate soldier, then you can vote.  You see? So about 90% of black men are effectively disenfranchised by this new constitution, and a lot of poor whites too. You can see there's a display at the Jefferson School that kind of goes into this in a little bit more detail. But you can see the voting rolls there, and you can see the steady drop, drop, drop year by year in the number of voters that are showing up.

SCHMIDT: I want to speak a little bit about… since we're talking about place and the controlling specifically of black bodies in spaces that are increasingly being designated as white as the separate but equal clause gets instituted after the Plessy decision in 1896,  the vagrancy laws that were put into place… If anyone's seen the Netflix documentary, 13th, Eva DuVernay talks about this. black men were often deemed vagrant if they couldn't demonstrate that they were employed, usually by a white person. And so just the movement  of black people through public spaces is becoming riskier and riskier. I mean, all right, there's lynch mobs, you can be charged with vagrancy if you're deemed to not have a job. There is… Also, this is when the convict  leasing labor system gets going. You still see them today, guys in orange jumpsuits running around doing the yard work. Here, you see them? When you come around here, yep this is the… we're still living with this. And these statues are doing that work.

SCHMIDT: So, this downtown area was not really developed. This is the first downtown Confederate statue that's put up. It was put up in 1909. Now, there is another Confederate soldier statue at the Confederate Graveyard over in UVA. There's over a thousand Confederates that are buried there. And there is a Johnny Reb there, and that was put up in 1893 by the predecessor organization of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Ladies’ Memorial Associations. So what had started out… The memorializing that  took place  in graveyards, it was about mourning and memorializing. So these confederates, especially the soldier, were put up in graveyards by Ladies’ Memorial Associations. It's only into the early  20th century where there's this kind-of migration, like a Trojan horse, you know, out of the kind-of mourning memorialization of monuments, out of cemeteries and into public squares, like we have here. As Dr. Douglas said earlier,a  large proportion of these Confederate soldier monuments are put up all across… the South and in Virginia and an inordinate… number of them are put on courtyard lawns and it's done for a reason.

SCHMIDT: So, this statue here was erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Albemarle Charlottesville chapter was one of the earliest chartered chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It started in 1894. So, it was the Daughters of the Confederacy, it doesn't mention here the Sons of Confederate Veterans, but they were involved as well. Albemarle County levied a special tax for this. The city of Charlottesville kicked in some money. They appealed to the House of Delegates to get more revenues, right, but this is a joint effort. It took 10 years.

SCHMIDT: This is a mass-produced, cast-bronze statue.

DOUGLAS:  There are thousands of them. They were mass-produced in factories in Connecticut and in…

SCHMIDT: Massachusetts. 

DOUGLAS: Massachusetts

SCHMIDT: This one here… So, irony of irony, this one here was made in Chicago. That is, the land of Lincoln.  

(Dr. Douglas laughs)

SCHMIDT: They were shipped all over the place, they were generic. The purchaser, if they were a Northerner, they could specify they wanted USA on the belt buckle, and then it'd be a Union one. Southern purchasers put CSA. So this one, it says: “Commemorating the heroism and volunteers of Charlottesville and Albemarle County,” and also, and I should say, the University of Virginia too. Men from the county, the city, and UVA who were part of the 19th Virginia Regiment, which was with Lee's Army in Northern Virginia, and thus, kind-of Southern Cross variety of the Confederate flag, what's often known as the Confederate flag, but it actually was  Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.  

DOUGLAS: If it said CSA as it says here, so that's the Southern  one, and the ones in the North are the USA, and they are placed in Northern towns in order to talk about the unification of the United States, where these clearly are talking about something quite different. What strikes me always about how we are engaged in this place is the way in which they create the relationship between the law and religion. And, that these spaces are not just all about the law, but they are also about  the kind of divine right that is offered through religion. You can come at this in multiple directions but the most straight shot to it is straight down this street. And, so you would be coming up this street in sort-of a processional way, meaning that you would be in very real ways venerating this object.

SCHMIDT: So this is put in, as I said, in 1909, so that's just seven years after that new constitution. And, remember what we've been talking about with the demographic changes that were happening locally here in Charlottesville with the black population actually dipping under 50% for the first time… in 1890s. But in the white imaginary, there is still this fear of a tyrannous majority. That's a direct quote from the installation speeches. We can actually tell a lot about these statues and what the people thought who were putting them up by reading about the ceremonies… Great pomp and circumstance, these were spectacles. UVA suspended classes, a thousand school children, if the daily progress count is to be believed, were lining the streets waving Confederate flags, singing Dixie and all this sort-of… the preachers came and gave benedictions, dinners were held… Confederate veterans coming, it was just a big, big spectacle. And the… Confederate veteran who gave the address for the statue, he was kind-of complaining at one point that this statue actually is meant to undo the history of Reconstruction. So again, here's this kind-of memory supplanting history, okay, is going on here. How do we know this? Because he told us so, in his speech, right? ah Because he said, “Well, people say that the result of the Civil War was so great, that it freed slaves. But actually, it's just a worse slavery because now even white people are enslaved.” So this is the “You Will Not Replace Us” of 1909, basically. You know… it's this false sense of white victimization. So there's some very deliberate work being done here by the installation of this statue, and a kind of anchoring of public space, and specifically the courthouse. Remember this is the first one that's downtown, here. It's basically stamping this space the white preserve.

DOUGLAS: The way in which the statue stands, the kind of contrapposto of that, if you look through your art history books, over and over and over, you'll see venerated saints standing with a similar kind of contrapposto. Right? It is part of a language of bodies  and how they're described  in space and what those bodies are supposed to do. Here, it suggests something that is at the ready. Right? But, as a language of visual or the visual language of art, that whether we understand them or not, because we are all visual people, we look at things and images are repeated for us over and over and over, hence why they seem  normal. We don't  question that.

GATHERS: You know, if you're not awake now, you're not asleep, you're in a coma.  

…

INTERVIEWER: All right. We are back at the Johnny Reb takedown special broadcast and I have an interview right now. Would you mind introducing yourself?  

GATHERS: Don Gathers.  

INTERVIEWER: What brought you here today?  

GATHERS: A moment of pleasure and reflection, a moment of redemption and reconciliation. 

INTERVIEWER: And as you saw the plaque being carried away, what was kind of going through your mind, that first step of taking it down?

GATHERS: The first thought was about our ancestors, and the pain and suffering that  this  symbolizes  for them. But it's also a moment in time where…  we're in amomentous moment.  We're finally  realizing the reality of… what the history of this country represents  and…  that these  symbols of hatred really  bear no relevance in today's modern-day society. Next, and very quickly, I hope that we can get rid of Stoney and little Bobby Lee down the street. And don't stop there. We also need to remove the George Rogers Clark statue. We need to remove the Sacajawea statue. So, this is a… progressive moment, but there's still five in this immediate community that need to come down immediately right after.

INTERVIEW: Right now, just a quick update on the statue. It looks like they are almost ready to move it. But we're going to turn back to Jalane. 

SCHMIDT: Hi, I'm Jalane Schmidt. I'm a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, and I'm a community organizer here in Charlottesville. Four years ago, in 2016, when the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Places was holding their hearings, I started going to those. Just started getting involved with community members who are interested in having a different landscape here. 

INTERVIEWER: Just for those of you who may have heard some cheers, the forklift is moving towards the statue. Jalane, what are you feeling right now as you see this  getting closer and closer to happening? 

SCHMIDT: I feel like a kid on Christmas. Part of what's happening is that the city and county are engaging in a full renovation project of the Court Square here, including thinking about what memorialization will look here. And so we're hoping to build up the Slave Auction Block Site into a more respectful and developed.. memorial there. And then also to memorialize John Henry James, a man who was lynched here, that'll be coming. So, there's a lot of wholesale changes that are going to be coming up here in terms of our landscape here in Charlottesville, much like at the University where we have the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers now. There's just been a lot more thought about how to be inclusive and how to narrate our histories in ways that… are  more life sustaining and inclusive. 

INTERVIEWER: Here I have Zyahna Bryant with me. She's a Charlottesville community member and student at UVA.  

BRYANT: I wrote the original petition to take down the lease statue, which is right down the street um in 2016. And so this is the result of the work of a lot of Black women, Siri Russell, Jalane Schmidt, Dr. Douglas…

(Cheering)

BRYANT: …and also just a host of other people. So, I'm really excited to see that it's coming down today. It should have been down a long time ago. But of course, this is only one step in the process of equity and redistributing resources and tearing down systems. 

INTERVIEWER: And you mentioned that this is just one step. I know you're a student at UVA. What would you say to a peer that would be satisfied with stopping here or stopping with the event that we had today?

BRYANT: When you go out to do something, you never do it halfway. And I think the university is often satisfied with doing things halfway. And so… to my peers and to the faculty who are out here today, I encourage you to continue to push for more. You know, the BOV yesterday made some monumental decisions with wanting to remove the Clark statue. But I ask you, what about the Whispering Wall? We can't rededicate our way, we can't  recontextualize our way around racism. And so until we… it's all or nothing really, until we decide to take down all these odes and shrines to white supremacy, then we're still… giving into the issue. We're still feeding the problem. And so… simply I say no platform for white supremacy anywhere, period.  

INTERVIEWER: Right here with me is Andrea Douglas. She runs the Jefferson School. So, from an educational perspective as someone who is very intimately involved, what does this day mean?  

DOUGLAS: For me, watching this statue come down… it's somewhat bittersweet. I had hoped that we would go the full mile and not just take it down, but really sort of remove it from our public spaces. That's not going to happen. It’s going to go to a battlefield where it's believed that it will be contextualized in an appropriate way. I don't think it can be, by the very nature of what it is. The symbols that are coming with it are symbols that are very specific to an ideology that is about ownership, this is about control, this is about power. And I think that we feel that at least we have moved a body of people to understand that, a body of people who did not quite understand that in the past. The Board of Supervisors in making their decision clearly understood that this was an inappropriate object in its place, but I'm not quite sure they went as far as saying it's an inappropriate object, period. There's a whole group of young people who understand what this is and understand why this thing is a problem. 

DOUGLAS: And I think if you're asking me about education, that's where I feel most… I don't know the word. I feel good about it because I think that it's going to take every single one of us to be speaking to every single one of us in every single voice that we have to make sure that what is on that object is understood, that it's not just about bronze and stone. It's about ideology. In the front of that object is religion. On the back of that object is the state. It stands in front of our… jurisprudence discussions, right? This is wrong in every single way, and I think that that's what education means to me.

SCHMIDT: Stonewall Jackson never came to Charlottesville except on one occasion, and that was in his funeral car.  

(laughter)

SCHMIDT: Seriously, he was going on to Lexington to be buried. He was shot by friendly fire. That's another thing they don't talk about a lot either.

SCHMIDT: These statues don't just pop up on their own. I mean, there's a lot, there's urban planning that's going on. I've talked about, you know, the City Beautiful movement. There are different organizations.The United Daughters of the Confederacy, their role cannot be overstated, right? Women couldn't vote at the time that they were most active and influential,  but their campaign to memorialize Confederates, you know, as I said, it began in cemeteries, but then it starts in the early 20th century, emerging from cemeteries. It's no longer kind of mourning, mournful kind of statuary, but rather an emergence into the public square and it's laudatory now. It's about citizenship and what's the ideal citizen to be, of course… passively white and… on the courthouse lawn. So we have to look at this in context that at the same time that the UDC, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, is having their biggest building boom, right, in the early 20th century.  They are also promoting the Klan. Okay, not many people know I've got a book here to show I'm not making this up. You know, here it is. I was just in the archives yesterday.  This is a UDC-approved, a UDC-written book, 1913, just a couple, three years after Johnny Reb was put up here. Uh, was passed unanimously, which means our Virginia division voted for it.  Okay, so bear that in mind.  

SCHMIDT: So these are not disconnected. Okay, the kind of extralegal, terroristic enforcement by the Klan and these statues that are being put up, these are being fueled by some of the same people. I found this in the minutes…just yesterday: “…Mrs. Rose of Mississippi spoke of her work in compiling the history of the Ku Klux Klan,” that's this book, “asked for the endorsement of the daughters thereof and the cooperation of the president, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Anyway, motion passed and they wanted to put this in all the schools. That was the goal, to put it in all the schools and libraries all across the South so that the youth will know about this glorious organization. These are some of their terms. And why should the youth know about it? Because the Confederate soldiers were the real Ku Klux whose deeds of courage and valor have never been surpassed. There's a clear connection that's being made by these organizations between kind-of legal structures that are being put in, extralegal intimidation, and memorialization, in defining space, whether social, legal, or physical, geographical, as white.

SCHMIDT: Since we just talked about 1909 and the installation of Johnny Rebs, so we're in the 1910s here, and we want to talk about how this used to be a mixed-race neighborhood, McKee Row. So, we're going to talk about that neighborhood here, because it's not here anymore. It's the earliest, well, one of the earliest examples of gentrification. Actually, the first one's in the 1840s, because when the railroad comes in, those black-owned properties that were on Main Street got taken away from black property owners. 

DOUGLAS: When you talk about McKee Row, you have to talk about one person in particular: an African American…person named John West. And you do that because John West is known to have owned several homes here. It's, again, a biracial community, but largely a community filled largely with African American people. John West is descended from…Isabella Gibbons, who is the first African American teacher at the Jefferson School. 

SCHMIDT: She was a slave at the University.

DOUGLAS: Yep, enslaved at the university, leaves the University right after emancipation, and comes to live and reside in the community. At some point during her life, she gives her son, John West, to be raised by Nancy West, who's owning property along Main Street, places like where the hardware store, is it a hardware store? That property's being owned by them. Once Nancy dies, John West inherits all of her property, and he becomes one of the largest white or black property owners in Albemarle County, Charlottesville in particular. He owns the property where City Market is. He owns that property. He owns the property that is 5th Street. He owns the property over by 10th and Page. He's owning property there, and he's owning property here. He's owning something like 200 acres over in the Shenandoah Mountains. So a very significant property owner, wealthy property owner. 

SCHMIDT: I can show you here, it's a little rainy unfortunately today, but here this is a census form from the 1900 census and it lists all the properties here in the key row and the names of the folks that are there and their occupations and their races. And you can see here it's black, white, white, white, white, black, mulatto, you know, they're all…mixed in there together. But this is 1900. By the 1910s that is gone. It doesn't exist anymore. That is the legal regime is changing, first starting in Richmond, coming over to here, making it illegal for blacks to live in majority white places and whites to live in majority…Sound familiar? This is where it starts happening. 

DOUGLAS: So that's the 1911 ordinance from Richmond. It's fit to pass in Richmond. By 1917, it's voted on here in Charlottesville, and the council tables it, and it's never actually accepted here in Charlottesville. But, the idea of it maintains, and the idea is if the majority of the block is black, then no white can purchase that block on that block, and vice versa. So that is how we begin to start talking about how these kinds of segregations of living spaces occur. And they largely occur and are maintained through racial covenants that are placed into the deed. And those racial covenants say that homes, if owned by whites, no blacks can ever own them, right? So that's how you begin to get those segregated spaces.

DOUGLAS: And the moment that Paul Goodloe…

SCHMIDT: Paul Goodloe McIntire.

DOUGLAS: …McIntire is thinking about returning to Charlottesville, thinking about what his legacies would be, ultimately thinking about placing some object to honor his parents, which is what this object…does. It's not meant to be a monument in that kind of way, in the same way that that monument is meant to be. This community that is essentially from, I would argue…from Jefferson Street towards the back there is needing to be removed. And the language that is used is the same kind of language that is always used in relationship to black property. It's blighted… We have to… 

SCHMIDT: Rookery, negro rookery, it was called. I don't know what that means, but I want the t-shirt. But I mean, but… it is damaging in that a rook in this case is a place, a messy bird's nest. So here is this problem again with black people being compared to animals and that this is a nest that needs to be rooted out. Also, it's very close to the opera house, where the white folks are coming for their entertainment and this is just seeing, again, the proximity to black bodies. This is something that needs to be separated out. Again, given the years that we're talking about, early 20th century. So, moving black people, seizing by eminent domain, it was originally, they were gonna, the county was going to put in…This is county courthouse, the county was gonna put in a white school there. That was the original plan. And black folks were moved out of there. Paul Goodloe McIntire bought it. And instead, what they did was they razed all those buildings, okay, that were black owned and owned by John West in order to  set up an all-white, whites-only park. Because again, we're segregating now, right? This is 1921, all right? And then anchoring this park with this statue for Jackson.  

DOUGLAS: Paul Goodloe McIntire gives the ceremony at the unveiling of this statue. The people who are doing that are the United Daughters of the Confederacy. 

SCHMIDT: Right, right. In the paper, The Daily Progress, noted this uh installation of that negro rookery was removed by McIntire's magic.  So there's a very, you know, just a very kind of clearly delineating…that white is replacing black. You know, this is what's going on. And it's being marked by these monuments.

SCHMIDT: So, since we're here at the courthouse, there are Klan meetings going on in the courthouse. This is where their organizational meetings are happening. You can't make this stuff up. Their first meeting took place at Monticello at Jefferson's tomb. Seriously. I mean, of all the places they could have selected to have their first inaugural cross burning, they chose Jefferson's tomb. And this is in 1921, the same year this is being put up. There's Klan parades going on, there's bombings, cross burnings, there's meetings in the courthouse of the Klan, and there's this.  

DOUGLAS: And there's a formation of the Anglo-Saxon Club. 

SCHMIDT: Yes. 

DOUGLAS: Right? And the Anglo-Saxon Club is based on the idea of the purity of the white race and ensuring the purity of the white race. And so all of that is happening within the context of this. And the Anglo-Saxon Club is largely…many of the members are located here. 

SCHMIDT: At the University of Virginia Medical School, specifically, there are many members there because this was the center of eugenicist thought…it was what University of Virginia Medical School was known for. It wasn't some sideline or something over there, it was like the Dean was a leading expert. These were invited lectures, et cetera. This is all going…So, yeah, this notion of segregating space, racial integrity, and all this sort of thing in physical spaces and then in eugenics and anti-miscegenation laws is really taking hold in the here. 

DOUGLAS: Again, this notion of black threat, this notion of black possibility, coincides with all of the need to entrench whiteness. So, by 1924, we have the Racial Integrity Act. The Racial Integrity Act is the reason why we all check boxes. And the Racial Integrity Act was really about identifying who was not white and making sure that, through the use of the registrar's office, that…it's both tied to all manner of things, every single thing we do. In terms of marriage, in terms of filing any kind of paper that gives us identification, it goes through the registrar's office. The registrar's office is also the office that controlled, at that point, voting. So, when you begin to see these two relationships, this is yet another one of these moments where there are some corollary kinds of information that suggest that that object is in no way innocent. That object is in no way about thinking about a long lost history. It is really about implanting and implementing  physically a kind of white supremacy.