In reaction to the slaughter at Mother Emanuel, South Carolina’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, called for the Confederate flag to be removed from the statehouse grounds, and across the country liberal activists began tagging Confederate monuments with the words “Black Lives Matter.” Roof’s crime forced people throughout the country to reconsider questions of history, honor, and the role of memory in racial politics. “Charleston was the marker,” Blight said. “Everyone’s positions had to change.” In New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu began a campaign to remove four Confederate monuments. Two years later, as the last of the monuments came down, Landrieu delivered a speech in which he explained how he came to believe that they should be removed. A friend had suggested that he consider the plight of black parents trying to explain the presence of a statue of Lee to their fifth-grade daughter. In his speech, Landrieu asked, “Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her?”

The conflict over Charlottesville’s Confederate monuments began with, among others, a sixteen-year-old girl named Zyahna Bryant. In March, 2016, Bryant, a freshman at Charlottesville High School, sent a petition to the City Council, asking that the Lee statue be removed and Lee Park be renamed. “As a teenager in Charlottesville that identifies as black, I am offended every time I pass it,” Bryant wrote. “I am reminded over and over again of the pain of my ancestors and all of the fighting that they had to go through for us to be where we are now.” Her petition was posted on Change.org; several hundred people signed it. Wes Bellamy, a City Council member and computer-science teacher, invited Bryant to attend a rally at Lee Park later that month. She agreed. Speaking to a few dozen liberal activists and to a smaller group of counter-protesters, who were waving Confederate flags, Bryant said, “We are in 2016. Things have changed, and they are going to change.”

Bellamy and another council member, a writer and activist named Kristin Szakos, asked the City Council, chaired by Mike Signer, Charlottesville’s mayor, to vote to have both monuments removed. Signer, a forty-four-year-old Democrat with close-cropped hair and a serious mien, is a practicing lawyer. (In Charlottesville, the mayoralty is a part-time position.) He studied law at the University of Virginia and has a doctorate in political science from Berkeley, where he wrote his dissertation on how democracies resist demagogues. Signer told me that he was sympathetic to Bellamy and Szakos’s point of view but resisted the idea of “removing irritants,” as he put it, from public spaces. He lived in Fifeville, a historically black neighborhood, and when he asked an elderly woman there what should be done with the monuments she said that they should stay put, “so that my grandchildren can know what happened here.” Signer felt much the same, although he was receptive to ideas on how the statues might be altered. The Lee statue could be taken off its pedestal, or surrounded by panes of glass, on which the testimony of one of Lee’s former slaves might be printed. In 1866, a man named Wesley Norris had described Lee’s reaction to an attempted escape: “Not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine.”

Charlottesville’s Confederate monuments had been installed undemocratically, when Jim Crow laws were in effect; now, Signer believed, they needed to be reconsidered through a deliberative democratic process. The council appointed a commission of nine prominent citizens to study the issue and to deliver recommendations. Signer viewed the commission as a means of conducting a less emotional conversation. “The central problem of democracy for nine thousand years has been controlling the passions,” he said.

From June to November of last year, Charlottesville’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces held seventeen public hearings. The chair, Don Gathers, the deacon at First Baptist Church, a historically black church founded just after Emancipation, and the vice-chair, John Edwin Mason, a professor of African history at the University of Virginia, led a largely liberal commission that believed its task was, among other things, to explore Charlottesville’s history of slavery and segregation. But the most vocal group at the early hearings was composed of local preservationists; as the ranks of traditional heritage groups, most prominently the Sons of Confederate Veterans, have dwindled, upholding a historically minded pride in Confederate heritage has fallen to dedicated individuals.

“You know, it would be nice if, every once in a while, I got credit for hearing the first part of almost everything you say.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

At Charlottesville’s hearings, the preservationists included Lewis Martin III, a fourth-generation resident and the former president of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Bar Association. To Martin and many of the others, the commission was full of relative newcomers, who saw only race when they thought about Charlottesville’s past. The notion that the monuments were about Jim Crow “doesn’t get beneath the topsoil,” Martin told me. “The people who were pleased with the erection of the statues in town were my Sunday-school teachers, and they weren’t thinking about slavery or oppression. They were thinking about the veterans of the Civil War whom they knew personally, and the generals whom they considered heroes.”

By the fall of 2016, Martin had started calling his group the Deplorables Plus Jane. (Jane Williamson was the only Democrat in the group.) The University of Virginia was back in session, and Martin found himself battling a faction at the hearings which was demanding that the monuments be removed. Jalane Schmidt, a forty-nine-year-old religious-studies professor, who was trying to establish the Black Lives Matter movement in the community, was supplementing the work of the commission with some historical research of her own. She found evidence that, several months before the Jackson sculpture was unveiled, in October, 1921, hundreds of Charlottesville residents had attended a Klan ceremony at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, which included a cross-burning at Jefferson’s tomb. To Schmidt, this left no ambiguity about the purpose of the Confederate monuments. “They were emblems of white supremacy,” she told me. Schmidt is wiry and intense, and although she was fond of Charlottesville, she was cold-eyed about its politics: “People like to think that we’re this progressive university place. At the end of the day, we’re just a small Southern town.”

The debate concerning the monuments became increasingly heated. Don Gathers recalled telling Mike Signer, “The only way you’ll get me to contextualize Lee is if you put up a thirty-five-foot statue of Nat Turner holding an axe.” The controversy spilled outside the commission. In November, Jason Kessler, a local conservative blogger, began a campaign to unseat Wes Bellamy, the only black member of the City Council. Kessler had found that Bellamy, a thirty-year-old high-school teacher and a member of the Virginia Board of Education, had a history of making vulgar remarks about gays, whites, and women on Twitter. Bellamy resigned from the board and from his teaching job, but he kept his seat on the City Council. At a council meeting in December, Kessler approached the speakers’ table to denounce Bellamy. With his friends filming the encounter, he carried a portable speaker that blasted Tom Petty’s anthem of persistence, “I Won’t Back Down.”

In early 2016, Charlottesville had seemed evenly divided about moving the monuments, Gathers told me. By the end of the year, it was much the same, but convictions on both sides had hardened. In December, the commission delivered a split recommendation to the City Council: the Lee and Jackson monuments could either be moved or “transformed in place.” On January 17, 2017, the council deadlocked on a proposal to move the monuments. Bellamy and Szakos supported it, Mayor Signer and a fourth council member opposed it—and a seventy-two-year-old contractor named Bob Fenwick abstained, because, he said, he believed other programs should take priority. For a week, it seemed that everyone in town was mad at Fenwick the fence-sitter. Then, in late January, he announced that he would change his vote, to support the proposal. The Monument Fund, a nonprofit founded by the conservationists, and by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, filed a joint lawsuit to prevent the removal of the monuments, and a judge granted a preliminary injunction in their favor. The formal debate was over; the statues stayed put.