the pandemic can't stop jalane! i'm excited to be attending this virtual tour of downtown public space currently occupied by monuments to white supremacy. https://twitter.com/TheReligionLab/status/1291043818293338117

jalane is kicking off the conversation by playing a union version of dixie - a song sung by union soldiers to mock the confederates during the civil war. (i love jalane)

jalane is talking about the way destruction of symbols isn't just "vandalism." this slide is a depiction of american colonists pulling down a statue of george III.
we don't have statues of tories or general cornwallis in america today.

and now videos of US soldiers at the toppling of a statue of saddam hussein & blowing up a nazi party emblem at the end of WWII.
iconoclasm has always been part of vanquishing an enemy.

"why do confederate monuments get a pass," jalane asks. why is it different from toppling monuments to other oppressive regimes? "why do confederate statues get to hold public space?"

jalane suggests this is partly due to an empathy gap - americans are unable to have the same empathy for african americans that they have for victims of faraway regimes.

here is the area's first confederate monument. it was installed in the UVA confederate cemetery in 1893.

the statue in front of the albemarle county courthouse is also one of the mass produced, catalogue-purchased statues, but "this one is more bellicose," jalane says. he's at the ready.

his placement at the courthouse is meaningful - this isn't about commemorating the dead, like the statue placed in the cemetery. a courthouse, especially at that time, was like a public bulletin board. this was about sending a message.

the johnny reb statue honors about 3000 local men who fought for the confederacy.
at least 240 black residents of albemarle county served in the union army, but there is no local monument to union troops.

a little over half of the local men who served in the confederate army served in the 19th virginia infantry. before the war, they functioned as slave patrols.
one of them, the monticello guard militia, was present at john brown's execution.

the placement of this statue isn't historically accurate - the 19th virginia infantry did not muster at the albemarle county courthouse. they mustered up in culpeper county. jalane says the only real mustering of soldiers at the courthouse was enslaved people forced into serving.

the 19th massachussetts infantry captured the 19th virginia infantry flag & cut out the "19th" to keep as a trophy

lol no choice but to stan a petty union soldier

"lest we forget"

the johnny reb statue was erected in 1909. civil war veterans were starting to die off. but what is the message being conveyed to new generations?

jalane has taken primary sources - journals & letters from confederate soldiers, and cross referenced them with historical documentation about slave raids.
confederate soldiers would steal free black people & return them to slavery.

"confederate soldiers, as part of their war time assignments, went on slave raids," force marching enslaved people further south, away from union lines. free black communities near the border were decimated by the raids.

"free blacks in a free state were captured and sold into slavery," jalane says. particularly well documented incidents of this occurred around gettysburg.

john singleton mosby, an albemarle native, was one of the worst offenders in this arena. his cavalry unit, mosby's raiders.

mosby is a complicated figure, jalane says. he supported grant after the war, was opposed to confederate veteran reunions & monuments, and freely admitted the war was about slavery.

a local brewery even had a beer named after mosby.

"an ambush of dry hops," the ad reads. "they also ambushed black civilians," jalane says.
"the problem with this is that it normalizes & draws the consumer into participating in a terrible thing."

thankfully, three notch'd was responsive to criticism. a consumer asked the brewery about the name, which pushed them to look a little more closely at what they were implying with their branding.
(these cans contain the same beer, the can on the right is the current product)

the reconstruction era state constitution was very progressive! charlottesville even had a delegate, james t.s. taylor, at the convention who had served in the US colored troops during the war.
this... didn't last long.

our johnny reb statue was installed in 1909, right at the peak of the craze.
the statue was unveiled on the anniversary of the founding of the monticello guard slave patrol.

at the installation of the statue, a speaker warned the crowd, "beware of the potential tyranny of the majority."

jalane says the audience at the time would've understood this to be a reference to a coalition of poor whites & free blacks that made up the majority of the reconstruction era electorate.

"anytime there is a compromise, it's black people's lives that are getting compromised," jalane says. "compromise after compromise in our collective lives has always compromised black humanity. there's no compromise to be had between slavery and freedom."

this is what happens when you compromise. real 90s kids remember getting this day off from school in virginia.
virginia celebrated "lee-jackson-king day" for 17 years.

jalane talks about the "moral timidity" of placing contextualizing plaques as some kind of compromise position about confederate statues.
"if your plaque requires a small font and a lot of excuses..." the plaque doesn't even visually disrupt the effect of the monument.

to the "we don't want to forget our history" argument for keeping the statues, "this is just really bad civic pedagogy."
maintaining bad examples in public spaces doesn't teach anyone anything.
"medical students don't shadow surgeons who've lost their license."

placing additional markers in the same space doesn't fully mitigate the effect. this plaque remembering john henry james' lynching is overshadowed by a confederate monument put there by the prosecutor who let the mob get off without charges. https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1282394001249906691?s=20

never let anyone look at this statue without thinking about this fact. https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1155108690690760712?s=20