Historical Context

For a century, Charlottesville’s public landscape was littered with monuments that valorized settler colonialists and the defenders of a slaveholding regime – which is to say, white supremacy. The statues were celebrated by many residents as self-evident “history,” while others ignored them, felt intimidated by their presence, averted their eyes, or regarded these symbols with resignation. The normalcy and seeming permanence of these statues was a testament to their perverse success as propaganda art.

Certainly, Charlottesville has been home to Founding Fathers, “conquerors” of Native American lands, slaveholders, Confederate civil and military officials, founders and leaders of neo-Confederate organizations, lynch mobs, Klansmen, eugenicists and segregationists. But this is not the only narrative.

For centuries, Charlottesville residents have organized to resist white supremacist assaults on human dignity: from the three enslaved men who fought off a Confederate official who came to conscript them into the Confederate war effort; the more than 250 Black men who enlisted in the United States Colored Troops, including James T.S. Taylor, who then served as a delegate to the Reconstruction-era state constitutional convention; freedmen’s school teacher Isabella Gibbons; the group of 40 Black men who bravely confronted the murderous mob which lynched John Henry James; “New Negro” proponent George Buckner; union organizer Randolph White; the “hidden nurses” at the hospital; NAACP leaders such as Eugene Williams; anti-segregation activists such as Paul Gaston and Sarah-Patton Boyle; health advocate, activist and City Councilor Holly Edwards; most of whom have passed on, and all of whom continue to inspire us.

At the 2012 Virginia Festival of the Book, when Vice Mayor Kristin Szakos publicly floated the idea of removing Confederate statues, the audience gasped in shock, and Szakos, a white woman from Mississippi, became the target of racist vitriol. Four years later, Charlottesville High School student Zyahna Bryant started a petition to remove the Lee and Jackson statues, and her effort was championed by Wes Bellamy, City Council’s youngest member. Thereafter, the teenage activist and the Vice Mayor, both African Americans, were subjected to violent threats. Undeterred, City Council appointed a Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Space to study the matter and gather community feedback about Confederate monuments. During the BRC’s six months of public meetings, a steadily expanding number of attendees engaged in sometimes heated debates about the history of slavery, Civil War memory, the era of Jim Crow segregation, and the continuing legacies of white supremacy.

While the Charlottesville community engaged in our local reckoning with white supremacy, the national political climate grew ugly: presidential candidate Donald Trump spewed racist rhetoric at his 2016 campaign rallies and incited his supporters to violence. One year later, emboldened fascists attempted to use Charlottesville as a stage to “Unite the Right” into a powerful coalition of hate.

Charlottesville community members and our allies refused to cede our streets to this white supremacist message. Eze Amos’ poignant images of participants, coupled with their recorded accounts, capture those days of resistance, trauma, and resilience in “The Story of Us.”

Jalane Schmidt

Scholar-activist

Director, University of Virginia Democracy Initiative’s Memory Project