“‘To Disturb or Interfere’: Local Authority for War Memorials in the State of Virginia, 2020”

Many of you cast your votes and went to bed two nights ago with the news that Democrats flipped the House and the Senate in the state of Virginia (Gregory S. Schneider and Laura Vozzella, “Democrats flip Virginia Senate and House, taking control of state government for the first time in a generation,” accessed 11/6/2019). Today, I’m thinking about what that shift in power means when it comes to local authority for war memorials in Charlottesville, Richmond, and beyond.

Figure 1. Screenshot of HB 2377 from Virginia’s Legislative Information System (LIS).

Many of you will remember House Bill No. 2377 (fig. 1, above), an amendment to the Code of Virginia that was introduced by Delegate David Toscano, D-Charlottesville, with co-patrons to the 2019 General Assembly. The bill would have given localities the power to decide what happens to war memorials in their jurisdiction but failed in Subcommittee #1 of the larger Committee on Counties, Cities, and Towns in the House of Representatives by a vote of 2–6.[1]

Figure 2. Print coverage of the subcommittee meeting by C. Suarez Rojas for the Richmond-Times Dispatch, published Thursday, January 31, 2019.

I was involved in the community organizing that took place in favor of HB 2377, with many others (fig. 2). So I want to make it clear, at the offset, that my purpose in writing is not to make a journalistic effort or pretend distance or disinterest when it comes to the issue of local control. What I would like to do, however, is to put the recent history of local authority efforts in one place and also acknowledge that we are much closer, today, to what is often called “enabling authority” when it comes to war memorials in the state of Virginia.

The struggle for local authority in 2018/2019 began in Charlottesville. The reason for community members’ engagement on issues of equity and commemoration is well known, as over two years ago members of the KKK, neo-Confederates, and white supremacist groups treated statues of Lee and Jackson as rallying points for a hateful cause. They carried torches and battle flags and chanted slogans that made their dream of a whiter America clear… and the Commonwealth has still not addressed a landscape that is littered with the symbols they adore. The presence of Confederate monuments in downtown Charlottesville is a continual source of pain for those in the community, and on January 30, 2019 about a dozen advocates gathered with friends in Richmond to give public comment in support of HB 2377 and hold signs that read “Local authority for war memorials,” “Lose the Lost Cause,” and “Truthful History Heals” (fig. 3).

Figure 3. Signs reading “Lose the Lost Cause,” “Truthful History Heals,” and “Local Authority for War Memorials,” displayed at the subcommittee meeting on January 30, 2019. Photo by author.

The substance of HB 2377 was substitutions and additions to § 15.2–1812 of the Code of Virginia, which pertains to memorials for war veterans. The bill from 2019 was pre-filed by its patron, Del. Toscano, on January 8 and offered at the opening of the session on January 9. In this early version, available here (also fig. 4), the bill amended language pertaining to localities’ inability “to disturb or interfere” with monuments and memorials in any way.

Figure 4. Screenshot of HB 2377. The timestamp reads “1/30/19 10:17,” or after the subcommittee meeting took place. However, the bill that is currently posted is the version that was pre-filed on January 8 and presented on January 9. It is NOT the version that was discussed at the meeting on January 30, which was timestamped to 10:35 AM on January 29. That version is currently unavailable online. For details regarding the version that was actually discussed at the subcommittee meeting, see the paragraph, below.

In its place, the author(s) inserted the power to “remove or provide for the upkeep, maintenance, or contextualization of any such monument or memorial located in its public space, regardless of when erected.” The bill underwent significant changes in the lead-up to the third and final subcommittee meeting on January 30. Rather than giving localities the power to remove monuments and memorials “regardless of when erected,” a final draft submitted at 10:35 AM on January 29 changed language related to the un-Reconstructed notion of a “War Between the States” to the “Civil War” and limited the authority of a city or town related to “a Confederate or Union monument or memorial,” specifically. Strangely, the updated version of the bill is no longer available on the LIS website (you can click here for confirmation; based the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, edits to the LIS website took place between January 31, 2019 and May 1, 2019). The organization of the bill also changed. Instead of cancelling “disturb or interfere with” language, completely, the authors offered their amendment as two caveats:

1. according to a subsection B, “to disturb or interfere with” would not include acts of contextualization; and
2. according to a subsection C, localities would hold all decision-making power when it comes to the removal of Confederate and/ or Union monuments and memorials in their public spaces.

The core issue was not the establishment of clear language when it comes to contextualization, upkeep, or maintenance of war memorials, of course. All eyes were on “to disturb or interfere,” plus the key verb: “remove.” However, it is important to note that HB 2377 did not grant ultimate or unquestioned authority to any individual or group when it comes to the re-contextualization or removal of a Union or Confederate monument. Its most important aspects actually pertain to the limits imposed on a governing body that may put forward the possibility of removal. These limits are the “provisions” mentioned in the second half of the bill, which stipulate that “Prior to removal of said monument or memorial, a locality shall comply with the public notice and public hearing provisions set out in subsection A of § 15.2–2204 with separate hearings to be held by the planning commission and the governing body.” To paraphrase: Nothing can take place without public input in multiple venues and the issue being brought to members of both the Planning Commission and the City Council. The provisions to HB 2377 mean that the removal of a monument is a possibility to be discussed at the local, rather than state, level — something that is just and right because they are the citizens who live with these monuments, everyday.

It is also important to note that HB 2377 died in subcommittee. Not committee. Subcommittee. The proposed legislation wasn’t passed to the House floor for a full vote. It didn’t make its way over to the Senate. Nor did it go to Governor Northam for final approval or veto. If we appreciate the distance from subcommittee to the bill becoming law, it may seem like a discouragement to efforts in 2019 and 2020. It is not. I offer the statement, in part, as a way to gauge what can be done in the future. I also know that the process will not dissuade the activist, the organizer, the letter writer, the public commenter, the speech-giver, the teacher, or the student who works at the intersection of art and social justice.

We also need to appreciate the opposition to HB 2377 for what it is: the closing down of civil discourse at the local level and the preservation of Confederate heritage at the cost of a city’s right to freedom of speech. There is no doubt that the art and material culture of the Civil War is contested in America, today. White women and men can be seen waving — and wearing — Confederate battle flags, even as members of the African American community identify the same symbols as standards of white supremacy. Monuments have also become gathering places for racists who arrive at protests in tactical gear, with automatic weapons slung across their backs. Given the recent and still very painful memory of A11/12 and subsequent demonstrations in Richmond, it was clear that Confederate monuments were at the forefront of everyone’s minds during the subcommittee meeting on January 30. If we look forward to the legislative session in January, 2020, however, I would urge elected officials to think about more than the Civil War.

If I think about it, hard, I understand why the language of HB 2377 was changed eighteen hours before the subcommittee meeting took place. It narrowed the scope of the bill. It acknowledged an issue that was at the forefront of everyone’s minds. But the modification also dealt a significant blow to those who oppose racist depictions of, say, indigenous peoples in public space. Or foreign conquerors such as Christopher Columbus. Or monuments that offer unquestioning praise of our Founding Fathers, regardless of their slaveholding history. As the bill was written, there were protections related to the re-contextualization of monuments outside of the Civil War (subsection B)… but not removal (subsection C). Some would call it pragmatic. I see it as reverse intersectionality, wherein advocacy “for the good” abandons the people it professes to care about.

The fight for local authority in 2020 will not be a repeat of 2019. The makeup of Subcommittee #1 within the House Committee on Counties, Cities, and Towns will change. It certainly should, given that the eight committee members in the room were all white men (fig. 5).

Figure 5. Eight white men (twelve, actually) (image source).

When the legislative session opens in early January, 2020, we will also have spent a year reflecting on the four hundredth anniversary of enslaved peoples being brought to what would become the state of Virginia. We may be closer to racial conciliation in the Commonwealth. In the meantime, this is what we know about Confederate monuments in downtown Charlottesville, on Monument Avenue in Richmond, and in public squares across Virginia:

1. they are monuments to white supremacy;
2. they were and continue to be attractive to those possessed of a hateful ideology;
3. they peddle a false version of history wherein slavery is denied as a cause of the Civil War;
4. their placement is calculated and contributed to the system of enforced racial segregation known as Jim Crow;
5. they were used to “beautify” spaces and crowd out black families;
6. they marked public spaces as white and presided over all kinds of racial violence, including the threat of lynching;
7. and they continue to intimidate, today.

Know that. These monuments are not about heritage. Those who push for local authority do not discriminate against people of “Confederate national origin,” as one monuments supporter ludicrously claimed. So, if you find yourself talking to someone who defends Confederate monuments by appealing to a general sense of “history” or evoking their ancestors, tell them to stop living in the “good ol’ days” of 1864 and see these monuments over time. Tell them to look not just to the Civil War but also to the period of enforced racial segregation known as Jim Crow, the Civil Rights era, and all the ways that monuments that were erected between the 1890s and the 1960s were used by whites against people of color. I will also say this: if you are white and respond to a monuments debate by entrenching yourself further within your slave-owning, slavery-defending family history… stop it. Stop it right now.

We do not have to be passive as we continue to pursue local authority for war memorials. We can insist on new and proper context for monuments. We can continue to respond creatively, with photographs, design competitions, posters, billboards, light projections, self-constructed monuments, “free history lessons,” teach-ins, zines, tags, kudzu, T-shirts, books, and performative protests. We can continue to draw strength from “the fighting editor,” John Mitchell, Jr., and the revolutionary Gabriel. We can deepen connections between advocates for local authority in Charlottesville and Richmond. And we can grow the movement, municipality by municipality, throughout the state of Virginia.

So:

1. To the Board of Supervisors of Albemarle County and similar bodies, elsewhere: we need you to include local authority for war memorials in your year-end recommendations to the state legislature.
2. To Governor Northam, who was recently quoted in The Washington Post (11/6/2019) as saying “My thoughts are, the localities are in the best position to make those decisions”: we will hold you to that statement, and also depend on your advocacy in helping bills to the floor.
3. To Sally Hudson, the newly-elected delegate in House District 57: we need a local authority bill pre-filed, with co-patrons like those from 2019, and we need the issue in the public eye from now until the legislative session opens in first week of January.
4. To Senators Creigh Deeds and Jennifer Boysko: we need a companion bill in the Senate like the one offered by Jennifer Wexner in 2018, related to another bill by Charniele Herring, and we need you at subcommittee meetings in both the Senate and the House.
5. And finally, to Stephen Heretick (D), the delegate from Norfolk and Portsmouth: we need you and your colleagues to vote “yea” in 2020!

Let’s do this!

—

Justin Greenlee is a PhD candidate in the department of Art History at the University of Virginia. He studies the militarization of works of art in the context of Crusade.

The need for local authority legislation was re-presented in 2019 via a Change.org petition created by Matthew Christensen related to the Confederate soldier in front of the Albemarle County Courthouse in Charlottesville, Virginia. Christensen’s petition expressed the signers’ frustration with the monument and their desire to have it removed. The campaign was aimed to convince the Board of Supervisors in Albemarle County to include a recommendation related to the need for local authority to the General Assembly. The petition was submitted to the Board on November 14, 2018, and the members included it in their packet to the General Assembly for 2019.

[1] If you’re interested in learning more about what transpired on the morning of January 30, cf. Lisa Provence for Cville Weekly (“Confederates win: Subcommittee kills bill to give localities control of statues,” published January 30), C. Suarez Rojas for the Richmond Times-Dispatch (“Lawmakers kill bill that would allow localities to remove Confederate memorials,” published January 30), and Rosemarie O’Connor for the Capital News Service (“House panel says localities have no right to remove war monuments,” published January 31).

In 2019, the “yeas” (2) within the subcommittee of Cities, Counties, and Towns were: John Bell (D), who will be replaced in District 87 by Suhas Subramanyam (D); and David Reid (D). The “nays” (6) were: Charlie Poindexter (R); Terry Austin (R); Jeffrey Campbell (R); John McGuire (R); Bob Thomas (R), who will be replaced in District 28 by Joshua Cole (D); and Stephen Heretick (D).