(smooth music) - Well, my son is a music artist, J-Willz, and he was performing at the Tom Tom Festival and when he came home to tell me, "Mom I'm gonna be at the Tom Tom Festival" I said, "Okay, well, where's it at?"

He mentioned it was Lee Park.

And I was like, "Ugh!"

you know something in me just didn't rest.

And it really took years later for me to understand what those feelings were.

- These statues speak loudly even though they're not technically talking.

They reinforce a lot of deep and dark thoughts that the South has always reinforced.

I think that this being a part of the Downtown area, this being a part of a public park alerts Black people as soon as they enter in the space that like, "This space is not for you, you're not welcomed here."

And that is highly problematic, but also it's not new.

- I had to remember being a kid with my grandmother.

Walking down that sidewalk and my grandmother grabbing me by the hand and whisking me along and saying, "We don't go over there."

And how she said it and her tone and her voice.

It was History 101, 102, 103, 104.

It was just, that was it.

You say "Yes ma'am" at that time and you walk on.

(smooth music) - Being in elementary and middle school and going to like McGuffey Park and going to Lee Park and then seeing the statue like tower over us was something that really made me want to question one, "What was the statue and two, what was the significance of it being in that space?

(smooth music) - For us, the question that we ask is how does, for instance a community of formerly enslaved people leave enslavement, open a school in 1865 and then begin to buy property by 1870?

- So Reconstruction was a time after the Civil War that lasted until 1877 in which the federal government sent officials to the former Confederate states in order to enforce emancipation, in order to protect the rights of the recently emancipated former slaves.

There's just a wholesale reordering of the racial hierarchy that's going on very early in the years after the war and striving on the part of Black people toward education; there's a Freedman's School that's going on there with a formerly enslaved woman, Isabella Gibbons, who'd been at the University of Virginia, she's a teacher there and Black people are flocking.

There's such a hunger for literacy among not only children, but adults, their parents and uncles and aunts and grandparents, there's this hunger for knowledge.

- From the very moment that emancipation occurs you begin to see African American people, Black people in the community assert themselves politically.

- They're getting registered to vote, mobilizing very quickly.

We're talking 1866, 1867.

There are more Black voters registered in Charlottesville than white voters.

And they coalesce around James T.S Taylor, who was a veteran of the United States Colored Troops He was literate, and so Black voters elected him as one of Charlottesville's two delegates to go to the Constitutional Convention in Richmond.

- Members of the community create a set of demands that include not wanting to pay the poll tax, free public education, trial by their peers, that really specifically articulate their notion of freedom.

- So one of the things that James T.S Taylor pushed for was private ballot, secret ballot.

And this was to avoid intimidation because too often those who were more progressive were intimidated at the polls and they were not allowed to vote.

- [Taylor] The ballot is the palladium of American liberty.

The disloyal men of Virginia are seeking by every means in their power to prevent the free exercise of the elective franchise.

- You also have certain members of the Black community locally like John West, who is buying up property all over.

He is the largest property owner bar none, white or Black, locally.

So Black folks are getting mobilized with respect to property ownership as well.

- The African American population is articulating itself.

It builds First Baptist Church, Mount Zion.

It builds Ebenezer Church, the Jefferson School, it's in the center of all of that church building.

And the African American community is building those things themselves.

And they build it themselves because they are already fearing white retribution.

They don't wanna lose that property.

- You have the formation of the 400 Club, which is a group of middle class Black folks who are pooling their money together: $400 for each household in order to buy property, so there's this collective economic mobilization in Charlottesville, it's very strong.

(upbeat music) - Very early on, you begin to see this level of activism, and that activism is even occurring in the face of a white backlash.

- Local white folks, some of whom had returned as veterans from the Confederate Army, were very sore, did not like this new order, considered emancipation to be an affront to their notion of a racial hierarchy.

The 400 Club is founded in 1889.

Also founded in 1889, though, is the local chapter of the United Confederate Veterans.

And so they're getting organized too, and so you see this struggle for power that's going on in Charlottesville and Virginia, and across the south, as white folks are trying to overthrow the gains of Reconstruction.

That's what's going on here.

There's this chip, chip, chipping away of the rights and the gains that have been made by Black folks.

This is when there's just a full-frontal assault on the gains of Reconstruction.

Black folks are being pushed out of political office.

And a virulent form of racism is taking root in the 1890s.

In Charlottesville, we have the foundation of other neo-Confederate organizations.

The local camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans gets founded in 1893.

Daughters of the Confederacy are formed in 1894, and by 1898, there is a lynching of John Henry James in Charlottesville.

(soft background music) - [Mitchell] They lynched him, colored man dealt with, taken from the train, a brutal murder.

Mob makes no efforts at disguise.

- And this just showed the impunity with which a white mob could act to murder a Black fellow resident.

This mob was comprised of 150 white men.

None of them were even wearing masks.

The prosecutor never prosecuted anyone from that mob.

So if you can imagine just the fright that that instilled in the Black community here, that just so shortly before had been making such great strides.

So if you can just kind of imagine the conversations after church, in the back, among the deacons, like, "Did you hear what happened?"

Or like hushed conversations around kitchen room tables after the kids have gone to bed, and just the intimidation that is being imposed locally and in just sites all across the South.

One year after this lynching, local neo-Confederate organizations in Charlottesville begin their efforts to acquire and install a Confederate statue at the courthouse downtown.

And the chair of the committee is none other than the prosecutor who didn't prosecute anyone for that lynching.

- Couple onto that the 1902 constitution that is then written that redresses all of the gains of Reconstruction and ultimately places the poll tax as a immediate agent of disenfranchisement, such that this class of people is reduced to a number of only 88 Black men who are capable of voting by 1902.

- And then in 1909, this Confederate soldier statue is installed right on the lawn of the courthouse.

And it's very revealing to look at the installation ceremonies themselves and the kinds of words that were spoken.

- School children are taught the songs of the South.

They're singing Dixie, they're waving Confederate flags.

- The leading clergy of the leading white churches are there and so this is a spectacle.

- None of these things go into the community quietly.

- [Schmidt] So part of what happened around these statues is a kind of broadcasting of the values of the former Confederacy and of the new white supremacist Jim Crow regime.

One instance of this is in 1916 at a Memorial Day service at the University of Virginia Confederate Cemetery.

This was convened around the Confederate soldier statue was there and a pastor there was giving a speech to honor the veterans on Memorial Day and some of the very closing parts of his speech are very revealing.

(upbeat music) - [Dr. H.B Lee] That crisis brought out in the Southern slaves traits of character that call for recognition: their loyalty to master and mistress, their fidelity, watchfulness and courage were great and most surprising.

The teachers of the Negro race, if they would find the best possible exemplars for their pupils, should themselves study the character of the Southern slave of the war period and portray the same as clearly as possible.

I say, God bless you, veterans.

- What's going on in the early 20th century, not only in Charlottesville, but all over the country really is a movement called the City Beautiful movement.

And this was an urban planning movement that sought to kind of order public spaces or ostensibly public spaces because part of the ordering that was taking place was imposing race upon place in order to expel Black people from those spaces, from having access to those spaces and to more firmly establish them as white space.

And so what happens next to the courthouse there, after the installation of Johnny Reb in 1909, is that there is a neighborhood there called McKee Row, which was a Black and mixed race neighborhood.

There were Black property owners, such as John West who had properties there, and a wealthy Charlottesville native, Paul Goodloe McIntire, has made a lot of money on the stock markets in Chicago and New York and he's seen, in Chicago and New York, what this City Beautiful movement has done in those places and he wants that for his own hometown too.

- Paul Goodloe McIntire comes home and begins to exert his philanthropic presence in the community and purchases through an agent this property known as McKee Row.

- [Schmidt] The property owners there are steadily bought out and renters are pushed out, and you have what amounts to basically is a gentrification effort.

- The buildings are leveled.

It's turned into a park.

- And it says right there in the deed that this is to be named Jackson Park for a statue that's to be placed there of Stonewall Jackson.

So what had been a Black and mixed race neighborhood becomes a park that is anchored by a Confederate statue.

- [Lee Hawkins] Another exercise of Mr. McIntire's magic has removed the unsightly pile of buildings known as McKee Block adjoining Courthouse Square.

And there we shall see in bronze an expression of the austere dignity, the heroic spirit, which made our Stonewall Jackson.

- The discussion that begins to ensue about McKee Row is very similar to a discussion that will be used to displace Black people in this community on more than one occasion.

And it is a discussion about how this particular community is noisy or dilapidated, or is out of the bounds of social norm as defined by white culture.

So in purchasing the property where McKee Row stood, he erects an object that is a symbol of the notion of the New South.

It is a symbol of the idea of the victorious heroic nature of those soldiers who fought for states' rights as it was being described at that time.

Jackson becomes that personification.

- [Schmidt] For Paul Goodloe McIntire, Jackson, as well as Lee, were part of this Pantheon of Confederate saints and indeed the word Saint was used at the installation ceremony for Jackson in 1921.

(soft music) - [Alderman] It was a war of ideas, principles, and of loyalty to ancient ideals of English freedom.

Jackson rose like a star in the heavens into the inner circle of the soldier saints and heroes of the English race.

- President Alderman was very much concerned about race and he promoted to the medical school at the University of Virginia eugenicists who were writing articles and giving lectures about racial purity and how to maintain the races.

So it's no accident that Alderman is kind of distinguishing Jackson as an exemplar of the English race.

- It is not just simply about statues, but it is a way we're also constructing the ideology of whiteness and that ideology also includes, just like any other ideology, includes ritual, and includes pageantry and includes public demonstration of the rightness and goodness of all of that space as well.

- Now these installation ceremonies for these Confederate monuments were multi-day spectacles and they often coincided with reunions of neo-Confederate organizations.

And so you had all these now dwindling number of now quite elderly Confederate veterans who are coming in for the statewide reunion of the United Confederate Veterans.

So this is quite a showcasing of the organizational strength of neo-Confederate organizations in Charlottesville that they are able to host veterans from all -- hundred of people are coming in from all over the state.

The University of Virginia is closed for the day.

Students and faculty attend.

The Charlottesville public schools are closed for the day and the white kids are in attendance.

Children were often kind of placed at the center of these observances in order to kind of teach them these Lost Cause talking points about why the war was fought and why the Confederate side was honorable and why these principles should be maintained.

The Lost Cause version of the war, which was promoted by white southerners, says that the Civil War wasn't about slavery.

Furthermore, slavery wasn't really that bad, it was benevolent institution of happy slaves who were eager to serve benevolent masters.

- So this African American community is well aware of the dangers of Blackness.

Nonetheless, they are still creating space for themselves.

- [Schmidt] The Black community has been mobilizing, trying for years to get a secondary school for Black children because Black parents who wanted their children to go on past eighth grade had to send them to Richmond or to DC or places far away.

- [Woman] Since the city of Charlottesville offers nothing higher to the Negro youth than the eighth grade, and since sending our children away at the age of 14 years we incur great expense -- besides depriving them of the home training and influences -- we ask that you grant us a high school for the colored youth of said city.

- Education is a very important piece of this discussion.

- [McGinness] It took a long, hard struggle and a lot of agitation to finally get a high school for African Americans.

Reverend Clarence M. Long, the pastor of First Baptist Church at the time, led the fight when such carrying on was very unpopular.

The white people were so enraged with Reverend Long that eventually he moved away from Charlottesville.

- In the 1920s is the era of the New Negro.

It was a significant political and artistic movement among Blacks centered in New York, we talk about the Harlem Renaissance.

This is also during the Jazz Age, so it's just this fomenting of Black creativity as well as politically, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, is mobilizing for Black education and against lynching.

- They are still persisting in their actions of building this community, but the violence is increasing.

The idea that it is unsafe to move is a real and prevalent sense.

And so by 1920 in Richmond, you begin to see the formation of a new Klan, right?

The formation of the Anglo-Saxon Club that is directly tied to the University of Virginia.

- We see notice in The Daily Progress in June of 1921, that the the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan has announced its formation and of all the places that the Klan could have had their cross burning and their kind of inaugural activity, they chose none other than Monticello, than Jefferson's tomb.

And so this is an announcement of who's in charge in case there was any doubt.

A nationally recognized Klan speaker comes to the courthouse, and there are just hundreds of people in the audience, filled the halls of the courthouse, the chamber of the courtroom.

They're hanging on every word that this Klansman is uttering.

- [Colonel Nolan] The foundation stones of our order are the perpetuation of the memory of our fathers, the Confederate soldier and his fathers and the supremacy of the white race forever.

- So 1924 in Charlottesville was another kind of high water mark in terms of the Jim Crow era and marking racial hierarchy.

The Virginia General Assembly passes into law the Virginia Racial Integrity Act.

And this was a statute that defined the races in Virginia as either white or colored.

Anyone with any discernible drop of colored blood is defined per the law as colored.

What this did was it allowed for very strict separation of public spaces into white or colored and also codified the anti-miscegenation laws that Blacks and whites were not to marry one another.

So the Racial Integrity act goes into effect in early 1924 and then what you have in early May of 1924 is the installation of the Lee statue.

This ceremony, again, coincided with the statewide reunion of the United Confederate Veterans.

You see these accounts, this delegation from Roanoke has come in, or this dignitary from Richmond and you see this kind of this buildup that's going on, and you can just imagine, this is a small Southern town in the 1920s.

So this is a big deal, to kind of make Charlottesville the center of Lost Cause nostalgia and neo-Confederate organizations.

- [Rev.

Jones] The dark days of Reconstruction were worse than war.

The social triumph for the South was a reincarnation of the spirit of Lee.

- One of the speakers at the 1924 Lee statue unveiling was W. McDonald Lee.

He was the commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

And he was also a Klansman, which is to say that 1924 white Charlottesville elites were not averse to rubbing shoulders with a known Klansman.

In the days after the Lee installation again there's just this this uptick in Klan activity.

And you have a Klan march that's going down Main Street and ending at Vinegar Hill, this Black neighborhood, which must have been very intimidating.

You had a bombing, the Klan set off a bomb outside a Black church, out in the county.

And John West, who was this Black man who was a property owner, he was also a barber and he had his house there on West Main and he's out on the porch watching this Klan parade go by.

And John West says to his family, "Even though they had their hoods on, I knew who everyone was.

I recognized their shoes."

He is working for tips and he knows that some of his clients are Klansmen and that kind of intimidation and having to make your way could not have been easy.

There are these markers that are going on that are kind of presenting Charlottesville's public spaces with a white supremacist narrative.

I mean, you have this settler colonialist narrative of subduing Indian lands.

And in the case of George Rogers Clark, the conqueror of the Northwest, it's a literal genocidal campaign, and this is what's being lifted up as honorable, as worthy of memorialization in our public landscape.

- The ways in which you approach all of these objects, you're approaching them in a kind of ritualistic fashion, that they are placed on high, that the parks that that they're placed in are built-up pieces of the landscape.

They're not level with the ground.

They create even this ritualistic relationship between the body that suggests that you're looking up at them in this monumental way, and that you've approached them in a kind of pilgrimage fashion - But most people chose to look the other way or just, it was so built into the environment of the place and kind of like built into the integrity of Downtown, that there were a lot of people who had become comfortable and complacent with how Charlottesville was and I think that there are a lot of people who say, "This is just how it's always been.

That statue is isn't bothering anyone."

But it really taught me the lesson that this thing is much bigger than what I thought it was.

- In the day when things really changed for me was having a conversation with Zyahna Bryant and her saying she wants to write a petition in her class because she believes the statue should be moved and asked, "Could I help in some regard?"

- It was first a school paper.

So I wrote about something I could change.

But then my teacher was like, "This is good."

And I told some other people and they were like, "Oh, you should make this into a petition."

Like you can just get signatures and present it to City Council.

Once we had a press conference and we talked about how we wanna get the statues taken down then there was a lot of very hateful energy towards myself and other activists.

And that went on pretty much throughout the rest of my high school career.

- And then when August 11th and 12th comes it really puts us in the forefront of there is no hiding.

There is no more pretending that this isn't real.

So now we have to do something about it.

- It just showed me how fragile the Lost Cause narrative is.

It showed me how fragile white supremacy is.

And it just shows the very two distinct sides, right?

There's the side of people who want to tell more stories, who wanna see people as human, and then there's the side of people who will do everything in their power to silence those said people.

- So when you ask, why take this on?

Five years later, this is why.

To show our community that we don't have to be afraid.

And when we fight and when we fight together, I believe with every ounce of blood in my body that we will win.

And we won.

- Thank goodness in the year 2020 and 2021, these statues are kind of one by one being removed and we're able to kind of rethink as a community what we want public space to look like that expresses democratic values.

- My grandmother was born in 1910 and thinking about her life that she was approximately a teenager when those monuments went up, but she knew that we didn't go over there and telling her granddaughter that we don't go over there, years later, that's all that resided with me.

But then fast forward to my granddaughter or the future generation.

I want her to understand all the symbols, all the holidays, all the events that took place and to have the meaning behind them so that she could properly tell the next generation or learn how to be even an activist for herself, for rights and for things that are unjust.

(thoughtful music) (crowd cheering) - [Man] Let's go!

(cheering continues) (upbeat music) (cheering continues)