A20 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAy, MARCH 2 , 2020
In April — a few days before
Jefferson’s birthday — Yates and
other descendants of the e nslaved
laborers who built the university
will attend a private ceremony to
unveil a memorial in their ances-
tors’ honor.
Among them will be DeTe asa
Gathers, Don Gathers’s wife. The
memorial, which is the size of the
university’s rotunda, will be a wel-
come change in a town where
black history is largely out of
sight, s he said.
“When you look at the monu-
ments, signs, memorials, every-
thing that represents the blacks of
the city, they are on the ground,
you can’t read them,” s he said.
When DeTe asa Gathers first
heard that a small plaque in the
sidewalk marking the site of slave
auctions had gone missing, she
worried that a white supremacist
had once again erased her com-
munity’s h istory.
But then she h eard who’d t aken
it, and why.
“I got tickled,” she said with a
laugh.‘they’ll never find it’
richard H. Allan III is white,
but no white supremacist.
“freeman,” as he likes to be
called, sports a boyish grin and a
long white ponytail sometimescapped by a beret. His emails
describe him as an “iconologist”
— or someone who studies sym-
bols — like Professor robert
Langdon from Dan Brown’s nov-
els.
In a n interview a few days after
his confession but before his ar-
rest, Allan told The Washington
Post he felt the plaque was insult-
ing to slaves and their descen-
dants.
“How would you feel if they put
a plaque in the ground to you so
people could stand on it with their
dirty shoes?” he said, adding that
he was trying to atone for his own
ancestors owning slaves.
Allan said he became aware of
the plaque in 2014 w hen he read a
letter to the editor in the local
newspaper from Eugene Wil-
liams, a civil rights leader who,
along with his wife and other
black parents, sued in 1955 to
desegregate the city’s schools.
Williams criticized the marker.
Allan said he complained to
city council members in 2014,
then again in November after the
commission recommended re-
placing the plaque with some-
thing more substantial.
When nothing happened, he
went downtown on the morning
of feb. 6 and pried up the plaque
with a knife and small crowbarbefore disposing of it in a location
he refuses to reveal to police.
“They’ll never find it unless
they put the screws to me like in
the Inquisition,” h e said.
He confessed, he said, because
he worried police would think his
friend richard Parks had done it.
for months, Parks had been
using chalk to alter the plaque
and placing flowers and signs
next to it to draw attention. five
days after the plaque went miss-
ing, the 68-year-old filled the hole
with a replacement he made read-
ing “Human Auction Site” i nstead
of “Slave Auction Site.”
Charlottesville Police Chief
raShall Brackney, who is African
American, has expressed her an-
noyance at Allan and Parks, say-
ing their “stunts” say more about
their white privilege than the in-
adequacy of the plaque.
But others have praised Allan.
“White people are asked all the
time to dismantle racism,” said
DeTe asa Gathers. “Well, he did.”
“That little plaque was so inap-
propriate,” said Yates, chuckling
over “the irony that it took a white
man to dig it up.”
Williams also approved. Asked
whether Allan should have wait-
ed, the 94-year-old scoffed.
“How long should he wait?” he
said. “I’ve been waiting my whole
life for the city, the country to
realize that slavery has been the
foundation for its economic prog-
ress.”
Allan, who declined to speak
for this article but previously told
The Post h e viewed prison as “rep-
arations,” has a preliminary hear-
ing on march 12 that Williams
plans to attend.
meanwhile, the city council has
begun considering what to put in
place of the plaque. one idea,
Schmidt said, is for a statue in-
scribed with a letter from an en-
slaved woman pleading for her
family not to be torn apart.
on Sunday, Liberation and
freedom week began with a vigil
at the site where the plaque once
lay. S chmidt previously suggested
she would play a 1949 recording of
a local centenarian who was once
enslaved.
“my name is fountain Hughes,”
it begins. “I was born in
Charlottes ville, Virginia. my
grandfather belonged to Thomas
Jefferson.”
[email protected]ments.
Weber and 10 others filed suit in
march 2017, claiming the statues
weren’t racist but were war me-
morials, protected by state law. In
July, around 50 members o f the K u
Klux Klan surrounded the Jack-
son statue shouting “white pow-
er” a nd waving Confederate flags.
“Then August 12 happened,”
Gathers said.
In Charlottesville’s shorthand
of sorrow, the date has come to
stand in for the carnage that oc-
curred.
The events of Aug. 11 and 12 also
shone a spotlight on Jefferson,
whose legacy was already being
revisited amid more scholarship
and public discussion about the
fact that the he didn’t just own
hundreds of slaves. He fathered
six children by one of them, Sally
Hemings, starting when she was a
teenager.
“This is very much known as
Jefferson’s town,” Gathers said.
“But Jefferson himself was a slave
owner, a racist and a rapist. So
why glorify him?”
Last summer, the city council
voted to drop Jefferson’s April 13
birthday from the holiday calen-
dar and replace it with Liberation
and freedom Day.
opponents of the move called
city leaders “carpet baggers” on
social media and urged a boycott
of the town.
matthew Amiss, 61, whose 94-
year-old mother is a plaintiff in
the statue lawsuit, said he under-
stood celebrating the arrival of
Union troops, but axing Jeffer-
son’s b irthday goes too far.
“Unless y ou just showed up last
week, somewhere in your family
history is probably someone who
owned slaves,” he said. “So do we
tear y our h ouse d own, too? Where
do you stop?”
Weber, one of the other plain-
tiffs, said abolishing Jefferson’s
birthday was part of a bigger proj-
ect to “rewrite our history.”
Like the Confederate monu-
ments, however, a purely heroic
version of Jefferson isn’t histori-
cally accurate, Schmidt said. It’s
propaganda.
“Who the heck do you think
built the University of Virginia?”
agreed Charlottesville resident
Cauline Yates. “The slaves did. my
ancestors did.... I’m almost posi-
tive that Jefferson ne’er lifted a
brick.”ganize the events, which, despite
the name, stretch all week. “To
take Thomas Jefferson’s birthday
off the calendar and add this is a
big deal.”
The switch is the latest sign of a
city struggling to come to grips
with i ts past. The reckoning b egan
with the legal fight over Charlot-
tesville’s Confederate monu-
ments, which inspired white su-
premacists to stage the deadly
2017 Unite the right rally. But the
debate has moved far beyond it —
to the consternation of s ome long-
time residents.
“I have a problem expunging
Thomas Jefferson from our histo-
ry,” said Charles L. Weber Jr., a
local attorney and one of a dozen
plaintiffs in a lawsuit to keep the
city’s Confederate statues. “Ex-
punging him is not the right an-
swer, just like taking the statues
down is not the r ight a nswer.”
Across the country, especially
in the South, communities are
arguing over how to tell more
inclusive and a ccurate histories.
Nowhere has this clash been
more fraught than in Charlottes-
ville, where parks have been re-
named, then renamed again,
streets have been re-christened,
and stickers bearing white su-
premacist slogans go u p as quickly
as activists can remove them.
Ye t the Confederate monu-
ments that drew neo-Nazis to
town remain standing. After a
judge ruled last year that the stat-
ues should remain, protesters
have covered them in graffiti and
attacked them with hammers. The
monuments’ defenders began lit-
erally defending them with late-
night patrols. And someone even
put up a hidden camera and trip-
wire t o catch vandals in the act.
The latest assault on the city’s
contested historical terrain came
last month, when a man stole a
slave auction marker from the
sidewalk because he felt it was
insulting to the slaves it was sup-
posed to honor.
After confessing to a local news
website, the 74-year-old amateur
historian and activist was arrest-
ed on two felony counts and now
faces up to 30 years i n prison.
Like the statues and the deci-
sion to skip Jefferson’s birthday,
the saga of the stolen plaque has
again split the t own. But it has a lso
spurred the city to finally look into
upgrading a memorial that most
agree was inadequate. And it has
drawn attention to the plight of
the enslaved on the eve of Libera-
tion a nd freedom Day.
The event c ould mark a turning
point for the town, which is part
hip university tech hub and part
old South. for some, including
many African American resi-
dents, the question is how far a
city built by slaves, filled with
Confederate statues and host to
white supremacist rallies, is now
ready to go t o make things right.
“White Charlotteseville wants
to claim the label of progressive
and moving forward and awake,”
said Don Gathers, a local deacon
and activist, “but it’s still very
much sleepwalking through
what’s going on.”
‘Where do you stop?’
on the e vening before the Unite
the right rally, dozens of white
supremacists lit tiki torches and
marched across U-Va.’s campus
shouting racist slogans before
reaching their t arget.
Jefferson’s s tatue.
“That was no accident,”
Schmidt said of the marchers’ at-
tempt to claim — or reclaim —
Jefferson as one o f their o wn. “ The
local Klan chapter’s inaugural
cross b urning w as at m onticello at
Jefferson’s t omb.”
The city had once been ranked
the happiest in the country — a
title linked to the legacy of its most
famous inhabitant.
“To the residents of Charlottes-
ville, it is a fitting coincidence that
Thomas Jefferson, principal draft-
er of the Declaration of Indepen-
dence that installed ‘Life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness’ as
three inalienable rights, lived o nly
seven miles away,” began a 20 14
article praising its hiking and res-
taurants without ever m entioning
its Confederate monuments.
A year later, when white su-
premacist Dylann roof murdered
nine African Americans inside a
church in Charleston, S.C., Con-
federate statues across the South
suddenly became unavoidable.
Days after the massacre, the
statue of Gen. robert E. Lee in
downtown Charlottesville was
tagged with “Black Lives matter”
graffiti. A local high school stu-
dent l aunched a petition t o get rid
of the monument.
The city council authorized a
commission to study the idea. Af-
ter the commission recommend-
ed removing or re-contextualizing
the statue — along with a nearby
bronze of another Confederate
general, Thomas “Stonewall”
Jackson — the council eventually
voted to take down both monu-
chArlottesVille from A
Charlottesville’s new holiday divides its residents again
PHOTOS BY NORM SHAFER FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTtoP: Deteasa and Don
Gathers stand in front of
the statue of confederate
Gen. robert e. lee in
charlottesville’s
emancipation Park. in
April, Deteasa Gathers
will join other
descendants of slaves
who built the University
of Virginia as it unveils a
memorial in their honor.
ABoVe: Activist
richard h. Allan iii
pried up a plaque
marking a slave auction
site in court square. he
confessed to the crime
but refuses to tell police
where he stashed the
plaque, which he called
insulting to slaves and
their descendants.
BeloW: richard Parks,
a charlottesville artist
and friend of Allan,
places a paper version of
the plaque in court
square. it reads “human
Auction Block” instead
of “slave Auction Block.”
Before Allan removed
the plaque, Parks had
been changing the
wording with chalk.