B4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, OCTOBER 25 , 2021
BY ANDREW JEONGAn African American museum
has proposed melting down a stat-
ue of Robert E. Lee that was
recently removed in Charlottes-
ville, then using the bronze ma-
terial to create new artwork that
could be put on public display in
the city.
The Jefferson School African
American Heritage Center’s bid
for the sculpture comes after
Charlottesville officials said in
September that they were seeking
new owners for statues of Lee and
Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, an-
other Confederate war leade r. Do-
nors had committed $500,000 for
the proposal, said Jefferson
School executive director Andrea
Douglas.
The Lee monument, which has
been a rallying symbol for white
supremacists, was at the center of
a deadly weekend of violence in- Months after Charlottesville
officials voted to remove the Con-
federate iconography, far-right
activists held a demonstration in
the city to protest the statues’
planned dismantlement. White
nationalists clashed with counter-
protesters and a n eo-Nazi drove a
car through the crowd, killing
32-year-old Heather Heyer.
The Lee statue was r emoved in
July.
Other would-be owners, which
include arts groups and historical
societies, have offered to pay as
much as $100,000 for the two
statues, though the Jefferson
School is only seeking the Lee
monument.
Gregory Downs, a historian at
the University of California at Da-
vis, praised the Jefferson School’s
proposal as a creative way to “con-
front the past and help people
better understand the past.”
While some advocate for put-
ting removed Confederate iconog-
raphy in a museum, he noted that
there were too many such monu-
ments for institutions to physical-
ly hold. “There’s also the dangerthat a museum or park holding
Confederate statues could turn
into a shrine” for extremists,
Downs said.
Lee’s 26-foot-high Charlottes-
ville monument was installed in
1924, at a t ime when the Ku Klux
Klan was undergoing a revival
and Jim Crow laws that legalized
racial segregation were wide-
spread across the nation. Such
iconography has also caused sig-
nificant pain to Black residents of
Charlottesville.
“You have armed vigilantes up
there guarding a piece of property,
these two statues, as though it is
the water of life,” Ang Conn, a
Black activist in Charlottesville,told The Washington Post before
the sculpture was removed. “It
hasn’t ended. We’re targeted all
the time. We have to watch what
we’re doing.”
Close to 170 Confederate sym-
bols were taken down in 2020,
according to the Southern Poverty
Law Center, a sharp increase from
the 114 symbols removed from
public view between June 2015
and February 2019.
But some historians expressed
concern about the increasing
number of statue removals.
Replacing such monuments
might fuel far-right activists to
vengeance without doing any-
thing practical toward eliminat-ing racial inequity, said Peter Car-
michael, a Civil War historian at
Gettysburg College.
“I ask what’s next in terms of
meaningful steps toward dealing
with economic inequality, hous-
ing inequality, Black incarcera-
tion or education?” he said.
Downs, the California profes-
sor, said there were many other
Civil War heroes Virginians could
admire. He suggested they look
into John Mercer Langston — a
prominent Black abolitionist who
helped recruit African American
troops into the U.S. military, or
other Virginians who had stayed
loyal to the Union.
[email protected]THE REGION
Black museum suggests melting R obert E. Lee statue, making new art
tion.”
Miyares won his own election
to the Virginia House of Del-
egates in 2015, winning in a
landslide in a Virginia Beach
district, running on transporta-
tion, education and job creation.
He currently lives in Virginia
Beach with his wife and three
daughters.
Miyares, who is now in his
third term, said he’s most proud
of three pieces of legislation he’s
carried. One provided free in-
state college tuition for youth in
foster care, another cut regula-
tions that made it difficult for
small businesses to open on-site
child care for employees, and the
thir d — a constitutional amend-
ment — extended property tax
relief to the spouses of perma-
nently disabled veterans.
Herring has highlighted other
aspects of Miyares’s record in the
legislature. Miyares voted
against expanding Medicaid in
2018 and has opposed new gun
safety measures, such as univer-
sal background checks and a
red-flag law that allows the tem-
porary removal of firearms from
people deemed a d anger to them-
selves or others.
Herring also claims Miyares
improperly took a series of votes
that benefited a family real estate
business that is a major source of
Miyares’s income. Miyares’s cam-
paign said Miyares was never
advised by ethics counsel to re-
cuse himself from any of the
votes.
Quentin Kidd, director of
Christopher Newport Univer-
sity’s Wason Center for Civic
Leadership, said the attorney
general ’s race will probably come
down to whether voters are more
motivated to select a traditional
tough-on-crime candidate like
Miyares or someone who has
pushed criminal justice reform
like Herring.
“That’s where the fault line is,”
Kidd said.
[email protected]not Jason Miyares.”
Rigell also gained notoriety for
opposing Donald Trump’s nomi-
nation as the Republican candi-
date for president in 2016, calling
him a “con man” and a “bully.”
Miyares was more circumspect in
his take on the former president
and decried the “coarse” nature
of contemporary politics.
“There’s policies he’s support-
ed that I agree with, but I can’t
say I was a fan of his social media
habits,” Miyares said of Trump. “I
think Joe Biden won the elec-“I think he’ll surprise people,”
Rigell said. “I think a pragmatic,
center-right candidate is what’s
lost in our country right now....
The extremists are what have
gripped our country, and that isForce One and breaking with
Grover Norq uist, whose support
for slashing taxes is sacrosanct in
the party.
Rigell said Miyares backed
those decisions.over a decade ago. Miyares said
he handled about 600 cases, in-
cluding sexual assaults, violent
offenses and drug cases.
Miyares said what has stuck
with him are the victims. He
recalled the ongoing anxiety of a
young girl whose home was bro-
ken into and ransacked. The
victim of another crime constant-
ly checked doors at night to make
sure they were locked.
“That gave me such a great
sympathy for victims and what
they go through,” Miyares said.
His interest in the law sprung
from stories his mother told him
of Cuba, where he said the rule of
law was often a pipe dream.
Miyares said his uncle, Angel,
opposed Fidel Castro and was
arrested during the Bay of Pigs
invasion, although his uncle did
not participate in the military
action.
Miyares said his mother re-
called the terror of watching her
brother pulled from their Havana
home by security forces and later
subjected to a mock execution.
Miyares said the experience
helped convince his mother to
depart for the United States.
After her arrival, Miyares said,
she married and had children,
and his family eventually moved
to Virginia Beach when he was in
elementary school. Miyares said
he was a teenager when his father
left the family. Miyares went on
to earn his college degree at
James Madison University and
law degree at the College of
William & Mary.
After his stint as a prosecutor,
Miyares went to work as a politi-
cal adviser for Republican Scott
Rigell, who was campaigning for
a Virginia Beach-area congres-
sional seat that he would go on to
win in 2010.
Rigell recalled during his stint
in Congress that he made a
number of decisions that were
unpopular with fellow Republi-
cans, including meeting with
President Barack Obama on Airthe first Latino to serve as attor-
ney general in Virginia.
Miyares has paired his uplift-
ing personal story with a sharp-
er-edged message that incum-
bent Mark R. Herring and other
Democrats in Richmond have
failed on crime, pointing to a
two-decade-high spike in the
murder rate. That trend has been
mirrored in a number of other
states across the country and
overall crime is mostly down in
Virginia.
“There’s been an upside-down
mind-set at times in Richmond,”
Miyares said in an interview. “I
call it a criminal-first, victim-last
mind-set.... Some policies I
don’t think have made Virginians
safer. They have made us less
safe.”
Miyares cited a bill that died
during a recent legislative ses-
sion that would have given a
judge or jury the discretion to
reduce the charge of assault on a
police officer from a f elony to a
misdemeanor and a push to end
mandatory minimum sentences
for certain offenses. Both efforts
were championed by criminal
justice reformers in Virginia.
On the campaign trail, Miyares
has specifically attacked Herring
for not doing more to stop the
early release of a handful of
violent felons by the state’s parole
board and ha s cr iticized Her-
ring ’s endorsement of liberal
Northern Virginia prosecutors,
who Miyares said have been too
soft on domestic violence offend-
ers and child sex predators.
Herring said he has no control
over the parole board’s decisions,
a contention backed by a nonpar-
tisan fact-checking site that la-
beled the attack by Miyares false.
Miyares said he is well-
equipped to tackle public safety
because he spent roughly three
years as an assistant prosecutor
in the Virginia Beach common-
wealth attorney’s of fice a little
MIYARES FROM B1
Miyares pairs uplifting personal story with sharp criticism of incumbent
ERIC LEE FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTAMANDA VOISARD FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTABOVE: Del. Jason S. Miyares,
the GOP nominee for Virginia
attorney general, speaks at a
diner in Arlington on Oct. 4.
LEFT: Miyares, seen at an
Oct. 13 debate in Leesburg, has
made a tough-on-crime
approach central to his
platform. He spent roughly
three years as an assistant
commonwealth’s attorney.sity of Virginia in 1980. He quick-
ly apologized.
Herring dropped out of the
governor’s race in September
2020 , shortly before McAuliffe
announced his entry. Few attor-
neys general have served a third
term in Virginia’s recent history,
but Herring said he still has more
to accomplish.
Herring said gun-control mea-
sures would be a top priority in a
third term and that he would
work to enact new restrictions on
assault rifles and strengthen
background check laws. He said
he would also make fighting hate
crimes a priority.
“We need to make sure all
Virginians feel safe regardless of
their background, where they
come from and what they look
like, how they worship, and
whom they love,” Herring said.
[email protected]the Loudoun County Board of
Supervisors. He then served three
terms in the Virginia Senate, be-
fore squeaking by state Sen. Mark
Obenshain to win his first term as
attorney general.
Herring had initially an-
nounced in 2018 he would be
running for governor during this
election cycle, but that was before
he was tripped up by a blackface
sca nda l a nd former governor Ter-
ry McAuliffe announced he
would again seek the state’s top
office.
In February 2019, Herring
called for Gov. Ralph Northam’s
resignation after it was revealed a
photo of a man in blackface ap-
peared on Northam’s yearbook
page from medical school years
earlier. But days later, Herring
acknowledged he appeared with
his face darkened at a c ollege
party when he was at the Univer-statues of prominent minority
Virginians, such as Virginia’s first
Black governor, L. Douglas Wild-
er.
Herring has also hit Miyares
over his antiabortion stances and
talked up his own defenses of
Planned Parenthood and chal-
lenges to restrictive abortion
laws around the country. Miyares
said he favors restricting abor-
tion, except in cases of rape,
incest or when a mother’s life is
threatened by a pregnancy.
Herring was born in Tennessee
but spent the latter part of his
childhood in Loudoun County,
where he was raised by a single
mother. Herring still lives there
with his wife and has two adult
children.
Herring first entered politics
in 1999, when he won a spot onan impressive set of accomplish-
ments and has been a good part-
ner on fighting gun violence, as
well as working on issues of
mental health and prisoner reen-
try.
“Once you go through his rec-
ord over the first four years, you’ll
see he wasn’t sheepish,” Morgan
said. “A lot of politicians like to
stick their fingers up to the wind
before they get involved in some-
thing. That’s not Mark.”
Herring has also sought to
highlight the differences between
himself and Miyares on a number
of current issues as well.
Herring criticized Miyares for
not supporting the recent remov-
al of a statue of Confederate Gen.
Robert E. Lee in Richmond. Mi-
yares said he supported keeping
the statue up, while also addingly Muslim-majority nations.
Herring made more waves in
his second term taking on Presi-
dent Donald Trump. He repeated-
ly intervened to help save the
Affordable Care Act when it faced
legal challenges and sued the
Trump administration over ef-
forts to reorganize the Postal
Service and roll back rules gov-
erning greenhouse gas emissions.
Herring has also touted the
work his office has done to elimi-
nate the backlog of more than
3,000 untested rape kits in Vir-
ginia, establish the Office of Civil
Rights to investigate patterns of
discrimination, defend gun-con-
trol measures in court and push
for marijuana decriminalization.
Newport News Sheriff Gabe
Morgan, a longtime Herring sup-
porter, said Herring has amassedare being fought out in court: gun
violence prevention, voting
rights, women’s reproductive
rights, health care,” Herring said
in an interview. “On all of those
issues, my opponent is wildly out
of step with where Virginians are.
There could not be a clearer
contrast between the two of us.”
While Miyares molds his ap-
peal to voters around a personal
story of his mother’s flight from
Cuba, Herring prefers to stick to
the issues and hard numbers,
rattling off highlights of the ex-
tensive record he’s built during
nearly eight years in office.
He began almost immediately.
Herring thrust himself into the
spotlight shortly after narrowly
winning the attorney general ’s
office in 2014, when he refused to
defend Virginia’s ban on same-
sex marriage. Herring was at-
tacked by Republicans for violat-
ing his oath, but later won vindi-
cation when a federal appeals
court struck down the prohibi-
tion as discriminatory.
A few months later Herring
again grabbed headlines, when
he announced some undocu-
mented immigrants brought to
the United States as children
could receive in-state college tu-
ition. That infuriated Republi-
cans because the move came after
the state legislature declined to
enact the idea.
Herring also scrapped a legal
ruling by his Republican pred-
ecessor that would have shut-
tered most of the abortion clinics
in the state by forcing them to
comply with onerous building
standards meant for hospitals.
In addition, Herring won the
nation’s first preliminary injunc-
tion against the Trump adminis-
tration’s controversial ban on
travelers from a handful of most-
HERRING FROM B1
Herring hopes to build on ‘progressive powerhouse’ he says he’s created
CRAIG HUDSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTERIC LEEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTLEFT: From left, Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring;
former Virginia first lady Dorothy McAuliffe; Terry McAuliffe,
Democratic nominee for Virginia governor; Vice President Harris;
and Hala S. Ayala, Democratic nominee for Virginia lieutenant
governor appear at a rally Thursday in Dumfries. ABOVE: Herring
participates in a debate in Leesburg on Oct. 13.