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…

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.