Confederate statues are in today’s Virginia Gazette – not on the front page, but on page three.
Let me give you a little context. The geographic reach of the Virginia Gazette extends to what we call the “Middle Peninsula” – the area between the York and Rappahannock Rivers in eastern Virginia.
Now that you know where you are, let me tell you what this article says. It’s not very long, so I’ll provide you with the entire text.
Mathews County board plans hearing on property with Confederate statue
ASSOCIATED PRESS
MATHEWS – The Mathews County Board of Supervisors is moving ahead with plans to deed the public land under a Confederate statue on the historic courthouse green to a private preservation group to prevent the statue from being taken down in the future.
The Washington Post reported that the board of supervisors planned to call a special public hearing for Tuesday night as it prepared to transfer the property.
The newspaper reported that it was unclear whether a final vote was planned for Tuesday. However, the board has already drafted a deed and voted to waive county subdivision rules to allow it to carve out a 21-by-22 foot plot of public land under the statue.
The local chapter of the NAACP has threatened a lawsuit over any effort to transfer the property. Some reidents have spoken out against the idea of giving public land to a private group, let alone protecting a Confederate monument in perpetuity.
Officials with the state Department of Historic Resources said they are not aware of any other locality in Virginia considering such a step.
Here’s some information about Mathews County that will help you understand why this county is considering this action.
Its population of 8,500 people is 84.96% white and 7.71% African American. In the 2020 presidential election, Mathews County went for former President Trump by a 67-32 percent margin. In the recent midterm elections, the Republican incumbent Congressman, Rob Wittman, beat his Democratic challenger Herb Jones by a margin of 69-28 percent.
Interesting fact – Mathews County is in the same Congressional District where I live – Virginia’s First Congressional District. Here’s what this district looks like:
I think this effort is a “gotcha” attempt by the GOP in Mathews County. Across the country (but primarily across the South) progressive voices are pushing for the removal of monuments to the soldiers of the slaveholding South.
You remember the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville; the planned removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee from a public park provided the motivation for this rally.
In 2021, the statue was finally removed – along with a nearby monument to Stonewall Jackson, another Confederate general. Just a few hours later, the Charlottesville City County voted to remove yet another statue, the one of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. The objections about this statue focused on the submissive depiction of Sacagawea.
Charlottesville does not plan to display the Lee statue in a museum setting, as some have proposed. Instead, it plans to melt down the statue into metal ingots, which will then be shaped into a new piece of public art. A local community team, “Swords into Plowshares” is tasked with selecting an artist or group of artists to design a new public artwork by 2024.
You may not remember another decision about confederate monuments in Virginia. This decision did not compel torch-bearing nazis to parade through the streets, but it brought about significant change in Richmond.
One of the most beautiful and historically important streets in Richmond is Monument Avenue, which runs northwest from Capital Square out toward the western suburbs. Fourteen blocks of this avenue are designated as a historic district.
After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, protesters first toppled a statue of Jefferson Davis on Monument Avenue, and the city soon removed three other statues of Confederate figures there. Busts depicting other ex-Confederates were also removed from the state capitol.
In both the Charlottesville and Richmond situations, the basis for demanding the removal of the statues was that they were on public land, and therefore suggested public endorsement of the monuments and required public funds to maintain them.
So the Mathews County Board of Supervisors hatched their plan. “Aha!” they probably said, although I do not have the transcript. “We can defeat those woke folk by transferring this land to private ownership, so we can continue to worship at the altar of white supremacy.” Again, I do not have the transcript, but I’m pretty sure the discussion went something like that.
This is 2022, people. The Civil War ( which ended 157 years ago) was not the glorified “Lost Cause” lamented by the United Daughters of the Confederacy; it was, rather, a systematic effort by the South to maintain the wretched system of human bondage that underlay its economy. It is nothing to be glorified. We should not hold weddings and “garden weeks” at plantations, which were nothing more than the pre-Auschwitz extermination camps. Nor should we put up statues honoring the people whose goal was to perpetuate this system.
The December 2022 issue of The Atlantic featured an article called “Monuments to the Unthinkable.” The subtitle of the article read “American still can’t figure out how to memorialize the sins of our history. What can we learn from Germany?” Here’s the link: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/12/holocaust-remembrance-lessons-america/671893/.
Here's a plug for The Atlantic. A print and digital subscription costs $75.00 a year – a little more than $6.00 per month. For the price of a monthly Caramel Macchiato (Venti) and chocolate chip cookie at your nearest Starbucks, you can have access to some of the best research and writing around. Alternatively, go read it at your public library.
Without exploring all of the details and nuance in this article, here’s at least one takeaway – there was no organization called the “United Daughters of the Third Reich” to portray this era through the gauzy filter of nostalgia. There was no German version of Gone With the Wind to create an indelible (and false) collective memory of this dark time in German history.
I’m not sure what will happen at the Mathews County Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday night. They may be successful in their little sleight-of-hand maneuver to “own the libs.” Don’t be confused. That’s all they are doing. America’s population is skewing increasingly younger, urban, and multi-ethic; a political party that targets voters who are old rural white folks doesn’t have much of a future. They know it. They don’t expect to win the war; they just want to win enough battles to prolong the war so that they die before it ends.
Well, Karen. My goodness.
Karen, I love the way you tied it all together toward the end of the final paragraph! Seeing what is transpiring is like watching the death throes of a dying animal.