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[caltrek]

Virginia Judge at Heart of Monument Takedown Fight Linked to College Op-Ed Blasting Desegregation

 

https://www.courthou...-desegregation/

 

Introduction:

 

RICHMOND, Va. (Courthouse News) — Four decades ago, a young man wrote an opinion piece critical of school desegregation and instant voter registration for his college newspaper. That op-ed resurfaced Friday, and Virginians discovered the author is now a Richmond judge who in recent weeks blocked the removal of Confederate monuments during the nationwide re-examination of symbols still tied to the institution of slavery.

 

Elected officials spent the day condemning the piece written by Brad Cavedo in The Collegian, the University of Richmond’s newspaper, in 1977.  

 

“This is highly problematic,” said Delegate Lamont Bagby (D-74), in a tweet which included a screengrab of the op-ed. Bagby also chairs the state’s Legislative Black Caucus. 

 

In “What does U.S. Life Offer Me?” Cavedo — at the time the editor of The Collegian’s editorial section — wrote about his desire to leave the United States after graduation.

 

“I will be leaving the solicitous paternalism of the federal courts, which among other things nearly wrecked my high school education by instituting a massive busing plan that caused more upheaval in my school and life than most people could imagine,” he wrote. 

[caltrek]

Defend History. Tear Down the Confederate Statues.

 

https://www.motherjo...nts-iconoclasm/

 

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) After the Civil War, Edward Virginius Valentine returned from Europe to his hometown of Richmond, Virginia—the former Confederate capital—and began using his training in classical sculpture to enshrine the myth of the Lost Cause. Over the next few decades Valentine made a career of sculpting monuments to defenders of slavery, building tributes to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, among others. And he made the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Richmond—unveiled on Monument Avenue in June 1907 by Davis’ last remaining child and toppled in June 2020 by protesters against systemic racism after the death of George Floyd.

 

Over the past few months, protesters have spray-painted, damaged, torched, and toppled symbols of white supremacy around the country. Critics have decried the acts as shameful attempts to erase the country’s history. The president demanded that protesters who took down a Confederate monument in Washington, DC, be “immediately arrested.” But the destruction of our cultural legacies is itself part of our cultural legacy, reaching back to ancient history. It is as old as the act of honoring false gods.

 

The Symbolism

 

Valentine, working with an architect, made the monument “overwhelmingly tall” and depicted Davis in a “heroic” pose, delivering his famous 1861 speech about quitting the US Senate to the join the Confederacy. Like all the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue, it was erected during an era when white Southerners were rewriting the story of the Civil War. According to the propaganda of the Lost Cause, the Confederates hadn’t betrayed their country; they’d fought gallantly for the principle of states’ rights. And Davis wasn’t the treacherous leader of a failed state that had rebelled to protect slavery; he was a hero fighting a tyrant in vain to protect a “way of life.” But how to show all that? Valentine, and other artists, looked to a previous empire: Rome.

 

The article goes on to quote a highly racist remark by Thomas Jefferson.  As often happens with Jefferson, it does not go on to explain that Jefferson later changed his mind regarding his assessment of the potential capabilities of  blacks.

 

The remaining article also underlines the point that destruction of historic icons is very much a part of an historic process that has been repeated many times in the past.