(Transcript) The city of Charlottesville has taken down statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It was almost four years ago that demonstrations over plans to remove the statue of Lee turned deadly. Among those interviewed are UVA professor Jalane Schmidt and third-year student Zyahna Bryant.
There is another contested statue still standing in Charlottesville on grounds at the University of Virginia: the George Rogers Clark statue. It is set to come down sometime Sunday morning, making it the fourth statue to be relocated in just 24 hours.
The George Rogers Clark statue at the University of Virginia will come down Sunday from its pedestal in a park at the intersection of West Main Street and Jefferson Park Avenue, officials confirmed Saturday.
(Editorial) In less than 48 hours, Charlottesville’s – and UVA’s – agonized relationships with their McIntire-legacy statues were largely severed. All that remains now is to tie up some loose ends. But that rapid denouement followed literally years of argument, anger, division and, yes, death.
Sunday morning, when the day was still new, a crew removed the bronze statue of George Rogers Clark from its pink granite plinth on West Main Street, on University of Virginia Grounds near the Corner.
The removal of the George Rogers Clark statue at the University of Virginia on Sunday was for some a symbolic first step toward repairing the harm the monument represented over the course of its 100-year history.
Shortly after the city carted away a monument to Confederate general Stonewall Jackson and a statue of Robert E. Lee that triggered a deadly weekend of violence in 2017, workers carried off two more statues that critics said depicted Native Americans in a racist and disparaging manner. One statue, which sat in a grassy park on the University of Virginia campus, showed Revolutionary War general George Rogers Clark riding a horse toward three unarmed Native Americans as two frontiersmen waited behind him, one of them in the act of raising his rifle. The pedestal declared in engraved letters, “CO...
The Republican Party of Virginia has publicly criticized the social media posts of UVA politics professor Larry Sabato as partisan lambasting of former President Donald Trump and requested the University investigate them. Sabato called the criticism “silly but predictable,” and a University spokesman said the professor’s opinions are protected free speech.
(Commentary co-written by Laurent DuBois, co-director of UVA’s Democracy Initiative and author of “Haiti: The Aftershocks of History”) The assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse on Wednesday was the first slaying of a Haitian leader in more than a century. But the scripts that dominate interpretations of Haitian politics, with its cycles of political upheaval abetted by foreign actors, can seem relatively unchanged over time. Often lost in this narrative are the root causes of the alienation of the Haitian people from their government.
(Commentary by Elizabeth R. Varon, Langbourne M. Williams professor of American history and author of “Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War”) On Saturday, Charlottesville will remove two equestrian statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from the city’s public squares. That removal will not “erase history,” as the statues’ defenders have repeatedly charged. It will instead allow us a clearer view of the complex Southern past.
Smith Mountain Lake Democrats hosted Allison Carter, operations director of the University of Virginia Center for Effective Lawmaking, at its general meeting June 28. Carter, who is a native of SML, introduced the club to the work of the center, which seeks to advance new knowledge about the effectiveness of individual lawmakers and U.S. legislative institutions.
Observers say voters are unlikely to base their decision at the ballot box based on who endorsed the candidate. Unless it's Trump. "I can guarantee you that Trump’s name ID is better in this district than Stivers’ is," said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
It’s not clear that Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet is vulnerable. University of Virginia’s Sabato’s Crystal Ball lists Bennet’s seat as safely Democrat and a June poll from research firm Global Strategy Group had Bennet leading a Republican challenger 48-40%.
Experts say the data dramatically underlines how crucial vaccines are, even as officials scramble to convince more people to receive the shots. “I mean, gosh, get vaccinated,” said Dr. Bill Petri, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Virginia. “But it also shows we should continue to make big outreach efforts to get to these populations that, in many cases, have historically not received adequate medical care.”
The French considered Algeria part of France, and around a million Europeans had settled there by the time war broke out. “If we look to the period of decolonization, settler colonies in the world are the most violent and the hardest to decolonize,” said Jennifer Sessions, a University of Virginia historian.
I spoke with a few Black women about their own take on what happened to Hannah-Jones and how it connected with their own experiences in the academy. Their responses have been edited for length and clarity. Lisa Woolfork, associate professor of English at the University of Virginia: Something I’m incredibly grateful for is Professor Hannah-Jones saying “no.” I think it is a powerful reminder that we all have that choice. It seems as though we don’t, and it seems as though we must accept second-best.
A professor who represented a Louisiana family in a civil lawsuit against the Baton Rouge Police Department has filed a federal lawsuit against the city, alleging that it retaliated against him for releasing police body-camera footage to the media. University of Virginia law professor Thomas Frampton filed the complaint in the Middle District of Louisiana last month. The complaint noted the city petitioned a Baton Rouge juvenile court to hold Frampton in contempt for releasing video depicting how officers strip-searched 23-year-old Clarence Green and his under-age brother after a traffic stop.
Haiti officially declared its independence from colonizer France in 1804 after a revolutionary war staged by enslaved laborers and inspired by the American Revolution. But the French “never quite gave up on reconquering their former colony,” according to Marlene Daut, a historian of Haiti at the University of Virginia.
“He had obviously many enemies,” said Robert Fatton, a professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia well-versed in the Haiti situation. “There might have been some degree of complicity on the part of those protecting the president. The past 30 years have been one calamity after another, and now it is getting more serious. We have two individuals vying for the position of prime minister. The economy is in terrible shape. The covid situation is deteriorating. No one is vaccinated. And then you have the security situation. The police are completely fragmented, and som...