The Washington Post - USA (2021-10-23)

B4 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, OCTOBER 23 , 2021

BY ASSOCIATED PRESS

Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgical engineer who put Paki- stan on the path to becoming a nuclear weapons power in the early 1970s and became known as the father of his country’s nuclear bomb program, died Oct. 10 at a hospital in the capital, Islamabad. He was believed to be 85. The cause was covid-19, his family said. Dr. Khan was mired in controversy that began even before he returned to Pakistan in the 1970s from the Netherlands, where he had worked at a n uclear research facility. He was later accused of stealing from the Dutch facility the centrifuge uranium-enrich- ment technology that he would use to develop Pakistan’s first nuclear weapon, according to research by the Carnegie Endow- ment for International Peace. Dr. Khan offered to launch Pak- istan ’s nuclear weapons program in 1974 after neighboring India conducted its first “peaceful nuclear explosion.” He reached out to then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, of- fering technology for Pakistan’s own nuclear weapons program. Still smarting from the 1971 loss of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh, as well as the capture of 90,000 Pakistani soldiers by India, Bhutto embraced the offer, famously saying, “We [Pakistanis] will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will have our own” nuclear bomb. Since then, Pakistan has relent- lessly pursued its nuclear weapons program in tandem with In- dia. Both are declared nuclear weapons states after they conducted tit-for-tat nuclear weapons tests in 1998. Pakistan’s nuclear program and Dr. Khan’s involvement have long been subjects of allegations and criticism. Dr. Khan was accused by the United States of trading nuclear secrets to neighbor Iran and to North Korea in the 1990s after Washington sanctioned Pakistan for its nuclear weapons program. For 10 years during the Soviet occupation of neighboring Af- ghanistan, successive U.S. presi- dents certified that Pakistan was not developing nuclear weapons. The certification was necessary under American law to allow U.S. aid to anti-communist Afghan

rebels through Pakistan. But in 1990, just months after the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, Wash- ington slapped Pakistan with crip- pling sanctions ending all aid to the country, including military and humanitarian assistance. Pakistan was accused of selling nuclear weapons technology to North Korea in exchange for its Nodong missiles, which were ca- pable of carrying nuclear war- heads. A 2003 Congressional Re- search Service report said that while it was difficult to pinpoint the genesis of Pakistan’s nuclear cooperation with North Korea, it probably began in the mid-1990s. At home in Pakistan, especially among radical religious parties, Dr. Khan was heralded as a hero. But Dr. Khan was rejected by Pakistan’s dictator president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, after 2001, when details of Dr. Khan’s alleged sales of nuclear secrets came under renewed scrutiny. He bitterly denounced Musharraf and his at- tempt to distance the state from his activities, always denying that he engaged in any secret selling or clandestine nuclear weapons technology exchanges. In recent years, Dr. Khan most- ly lived out of the public eye. Tributes from fellow scientists and Pakistani politicians began soon after his death. Prime Minister Imran Khan called him a “national icon” whose nuclear weapons program “pro- vided us security against an ag- gressive, much larger nuclear neighbor.” Fellow scientist Samar Mubarakmand said Dr. Khan was a national treasure who defied Western attempts to stifle Paki- stan’s nuclear program. “It was unthinkable for the West that Pakistan would make any breakthrough, but finally they had to acknowledge Dr. Khan’s achievement of making the country’s nuclear weapons,” he said. Dr. Khan was born in Bhopal, India, in 1935 or 1936, and grew up in Pakistan after the partition of India, which created the new ma- jority-Muslim country in 194 7. He studied at a u niversity in Karachi before attending colleges in Eu- rope. He received a d octor ate in metallurgical engineering from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Survivors include his wife, Hendrina “Henny” Khan, and two daughters.

ABDUL QADEER KHAN

Father of Pakistan’s

nuclear bomb program

was mired in controversy

B.K. BANGASH/ASSOCIATED PRESS Abdul Qadeer Khan in Islamabad, Pakistan, in 2013. The scientist, who launched Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program in the 1970s, was also accused of illegally selling nuclear technologies.

BY MEAGAN FLYNN

State Sen. Bryce Reeves (R- Spotsylvania) will seek the GOP nomination in a b id to challenge Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D) in Virginia’s 7th Congressional Dis- trict, he announced Friday. Reeves, a veteran and former narcotics detective who is now an insurance agent, has served in the Virginia state Senate since 2012, having unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for lieu- tenant governor in 2017. In a c ampaign ad released Fri- day, Reeves noted his A+ rating from the National Rifle Associa- tion, slammed Democrats for “reckless spending and assaults on police,” and accused Spanberg- er of “enabling all of it, doing nothing.” (A spokesman for Span- berger declined to comment.)

“I believe the hard-working people of the 7th District deserve to be represented by someone who will stand up for their interests and not the interests of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and the tax and spend, cancel culture that is poi- soning our education system and destroying our economy,” he said in a statement. The 7th District race has proved highly competitive in recent election cycles, after Spanberger flipped the district blue in 2018 and won reelection by less than two percentage points last year. But its contours in the 2022 election are up in the air. The bipartisan Virginia Redistricting Com- mission has struggled to agree on a new congressional map and is on the brink of giving up completely, which would leave the state Su- preme Court in charge of drawing a new map. Republicans, in any case, have been energized since 2018 to try to turn the seat red again, as national GOP groups have spent millions of dollars targeting Spanberger. And this year’s field of GOP candidates seeking to unseat her is growing.

Contenders for the GOP nomination include Taylor Keeney, former press secretary to Virginia’s last Republican governor, Robert F. McDonnell; Tina Ramirez, an international religious freedom advocate and small business owner, who unsuccessfully sought the nomination last year; Derrick An- derson, a f ormer Army Green Be- ret who served in Afghanistan; and two candidates who only recently moved to Virginia: John Castorani, also a military veteran, who unsuccessfully ran for Con- gress in a R epublican primary in Alabama last year, and Gary Barve, an immigration hard-liner, who last year unsuccessfully ran for city council in Santa Clara, Calif. Reeves said in an interview that what distinguishes him is a track record in the state Senate, citing his work on veterans’ issues, fos- ter-care overhaul and rural issues such as broadband access that he said he wanted to continue in Washington. He argued that he would be best suited to ta ke on Spanberger in 2022, after having defeated a 28-year incumbent

Democrat Edd Houck by a razor- thin margin in 2011 and besting Democrat Amy Laufer in 2019 in a tight race. “I have a p roven track record of winning in a Democrat district, running against a female Demo- crat, and I t hink we’ve done a lot of good bipartisan things and work for the people in my community,” he said. Reeves’s platform taps into the some of the same issues that have riled up the GOP base during the state’s gubernatorial race. He warns that the “left is infecting our schools with anti-American ideals like Critical Race Theory” and puts “election integrity” at the top of his platform. Reeves said he did not believe voter fraud was a problem in Virginia affecting the 2020 presidential election but said he could not say for sure at the federal level because he did not know. In Congress, he said, he would push for policies such as requiring voter ID while opposing bills such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Act supported by Demo- crats. So far, no Democrats have filed

VIRGINIA

Reeves is latest candidate hoping to oust Spanberger

State senator is sixth Republican to enter the competitive race

to run in a primary against Span- berger, who has more than $2.4 million on hand. Of the GOP contenders, Ramir- ez leads the field in fundraising, having pulled in a total of $343, 742 with $249,541 on hand. Keeney has raised just over $160,000 with $102,303 on hand, and Castorani has raised $263,812 with roughly $48,000 on hand. Barve has no cash on hand, having raised about $1 0,000. Anderson, having en- tered the race only recently, did not file a campaign finance report this quarter. [email protected]

BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST Bryce Reeves (R-Spotsylvania) has served in the state Senate since 2012 and on Friday announced a run for Congress.

Obituaries

BY GILLIAN BROCKELL

The Charlotte County, Va.,
courthouse has a long history,
with plenty of historical markers
to show for it. There’s one for
Patrick Henry‘s last public debate,
which took place there in 1799.
There’s a s tatue honoring Confed-
erate soldiers and a replica of a
19th-century cannon to commem-
orate veterans. There are two big
bronze plaques in front of oak
trees planted to memorialize the
1902 Virginia Constitutional Con-
vention.
The small town surrounding
the courthouse is itself a kind of
historical marker, renamed Char-
lotte Court House to highlight the
198-year-old brick building, de-
signed by Thomas Jefferson him-
self.
But look around for a sign
marking the 1869 murder that
took place on the courthouse
steps — a murder that made inter-
national news — and, until recent-
ly, you would have come up empty.
That will change Saturday, with
the unveiling of a new historical
marker honoring Joseph R.
Holmes, the first Black man to win
an election in Charlotte County,
who was born enslaved and shot
down in broad daylight.
The unveiling ceremony will in-
clude a c hoir singing spirituals
and remarks by his descendants.
“[The ceremony] is recognition
of his accomplishments,” said
Kathy Lee Erlandson Liston, a lo-
cal resident and retired archaeol-
ogist who has spent years delving
into Holmes’s story after a request
from one of those descendants. “It
is justice for him — revealing the
names of his killers — a nd it ’s a
homegoing for a man who never
received the proper funeral and
what he should have received.”
Holmes was born enslaved
around 1838. Liston’s research in-
dicates he was likely enslaved by
the Marshalls, a wealthy White
family — possibly by Judge Hunt-
er Holmes Marshall, who owned
the Roxabel plantation, or his
cousin, John H. Marshall.
It is unknown how exactly
Holmes gained his freedom, but
by the late 1860s, records show he
was working as a shoemaker and
had married and started a family.
He could read and write and even
bought 11.5 acres of his own land,
not far from where he used to toil
unpaid.
He also became active in the
Republican Party. He served as a
delegate at party conventions,
wrote op-eds pushing White Re-
publicans toward more radical re-
forms guaranteeing Black civil
rights and was elected to the Vir-
ginia Constitutional Convention
of 1867-1868.
Formerly Confederate states
were required to pass new state
constitutions guaranteeing civil
rights before they were allowed to
be readmitted to the Union, and
Holmes helped write Virginia’s.
He reliably voted for the most
radical reforms, and as a member
of the Committee on Taxation and
Finance, he probed and tried to
stop corruption, earning him vo-
cal enemies in White newspapers.
(The Constitutional Conven-
tion of 1902 — t he one with the
two plaques and the memorial
oaks at the Charlotte County

courthouse — was held largely to take back all the rights Black people had gained in the previous one.) In early 1869, Holmes was back in Charlotte County, working on getting schools built. On May 3, four local White men were heard bragging that they had shot a Black man and threatening to kill Holmes. When Holmes found out, he went to the courthouse to get warrants for the men’s arrests. Instead, he encountered the men there. One struck him with the butt of his pistol and then shot him in the chest. At least two more shots rang out from the group of four men. Holmes crawled from the steps and died just inside the courthouse doors. Lisa Henderson is a direct de- scendant of Holmes’s brother, Jas- per Holmes, who fled the county shortly after the murder. While

growing up in North Carolina, she heard about the distant relation who was killed in Charlotte Coun- ty. She tried to learn what she could about him online, but she suspected there was more. Liston, the archaeologist, moved to Charlotte County in the 1990s after purchasing a former plantation there. As she went through old papers that came with the property, she noticed the last names of people enslaved there were the same as many of her current neighbors. She started gathering their oral histories and sharing what she could find. She worked with community members to identify people bur- ied in the Black cemetery on her property. Liston, who is White, posted her discoveries on Black genealo- gy websites. She began to be con- tacted by African Americans across the country looking for details on ancestors from Charlotte County. That’s how she heard from Henderson in 2012.

Within two days, Liston had found the original statements made by witnesses of the murder, which had been misplaced for more than a century. She went on to discover most of what’s known about Holmes’s life and death, and even what happened to his killers. The killers, according to witnesses, were the brothers John Marshall and Griffin Stith Mar- shall, their cousin William T. Boyd and a friend named Macon C. Morris. The brothers were the sons of Judge Hunter Holmes Marshall and grew up on the Rox- abel plantation. Three of the men were even- tually indicted for Holmes’s murder, but none ever stood trial. They all fled, and authorities never looked too hard for them, Li- ston said. News of the killing made head- lines throughout the country, and even reached Australia, Liston has found in her research, but most people she knows in Char- lotte County had never heard of it. Charlotte County has fewer than 12,000 residents and just one stoplight, Liston said, “which we’ve only had for a few years.” For the most part, county residents have supported her efforts to get the marker put up, she said. But there has been some push- back. A few residents have ques- tioned why she is bringing up such an unflattering moment in the county’s history. And at a M arch 2020 board of supervisors meeting where Liston had requested a letter of support for her historical marker application to the Virginia Department of Historic Resourc- es, one board member, Gary Walk- er, suggested the courthouse lawn had enough plaques and monu- ments already. “I’m just wondering how many other requests we open the door to, that Uncle So-and-So or Grand- daddy So-and-So did a lot for Charlotte County 160 years ago, too?” Walker can be heard saying on an audio recording of the meeting. “Not that he’s not a worthy recipient, don’t anybody get me wrong, I’m not saying that.” Walk- er was the only board member to vote against the letter of support for the marker. In 2006, Walker was among the board members who voted to ap- prove the cannon’s placement on the courthouse lawn by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a fact first reported by Cardinal News. He is also a c o-owner of the Roxa-

bel plantation — w here two of the killers were raised — which is now being marketed as a wedding ven- ue. Reached by telephone, Walker said his co-ownership of the plantation did not influence his deci- sion on the Holmes marker. Rath- er, he felt there were other Black residents who were also worthy of a marker, including Dabney N. Smith, who was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1881. “I certainly think Mr. Holmes is worthy, and I think he’s fine, but what are we going to do about Mr. Smith?” he said. “Other than the fact that Mr. Holmes was killed on the square makes it exciting to talk about, that doesn’t mean he meant more to Charlotte County than Mr. Smith.” Walker said the community is discussing what to do about its Confederate soldier memorial, and at a r ecent meeting, Walker requested the board get a price quote on what it would cost to move it behind the courthouse. Holmes died on the courthouse steps because he believed in American ideals like the rule of law, Henderson said. He was “working within the system” and was at the courthouse trying to obtain a warrant when he was killed, she noted. Liston said Holmes’s murder wasn’t the only thing that made him noteworthy. “He was so much more than that. That murder should not define Joseph Holmes,” she said. Fittingly, the unveiling coin- cides with the anniversary not of Holmes’s death, but of the day he won election to the constitutional convention. Walker said he’ll be there Satur- day “with bells on,” ready to “cel- ebrate this plaque.” Henderson said she is grateful to Liston for her work, and her family is proud of the marker. But the marker also makes a broader statement, she said: that while Black histo ry and its national heroes are important — Martin Lu- ther King Jr., Rosa Parks and the like — there are a lot of other heroes people don’t ever hear about. “Eve rywhere that we lived, ev- erywhere we were enslaved, ev- erywhere we were freed, there are these incredible stories, and men and women who made choices and risked their lives to make a better way,” she said. [email protected]

RETROPOLIS

Giving a pathbreaker his ‘justice’

Marker to honor first Black man to win an election in Va. county

KATHY LEE ERLANDSON LISTON In 1869, Joseph R. Holmes was murdered on the steps of the Charlotte County Courthouse. The new marker honoring Holmes is in the center, still covered in plastic, and will be unveiled on Saturday.

“It’s a homegoing for a

man who never

received the proper

funeral and what he

should have received.” Kathy Lee Erlandson Liston, a local resident and retired archaeologist

BY MARTIN WEIL

Four months since summer’s
official start, two months before
winter’s, Friday seemed a day of
transition, frequently displaying a
sky of wintry gray, while lavishing
adequate autumnal warmth upon
Washington.
Friday seemed almost symbolic
of a month that may so far have
slid with little fanfare into our
meteorological memory.
It was another of the 70-degree
days that have dominated the
month and that seem to cause
little complaint in any season.
Even if the autumn sun smiled
only fitfully upon us, the high tem-
perature of 71 degrees came in at
four degrees above average.
The morning’s low of 61 pre-
vented us from receiving prema-
ture p revi ews of winter’s chill. It
was 11 above average.
Many trees seemed to remain
fully dressed in green and leafy
garb, although curbside trash
bags bulged with the fallen brown
leaves of willow oaks.
[email protected]

THE DISTRICT

An in-between

autumnal day

The Washington Post - USA (2021-10-23)

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