Jalane Schmidt, a local activist and professor at UVa, said it was a relief to see the statues come down. “It was really quick ... I’m glad they were able to move them. It’s amazing, because the wheels of government and bureaucracy often turn very slowly,” she said. Schmidt said she doesn’t want the city to rush into determining what should replace the statues. “I think what would be appropriate is to have community discussions about that and take time. These were here for a century, so we can take our time,” she said.
“I literally felt lighter when the statues came down, it was such a relief,” said Jalane Schmidt, a Charlottesville resident and academic who turned out to witness. Schmidt, who is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, said the statues, put up in the wake of the civil war to honor the leaders of the southern rebellion that aimed to maintain the enslavement of Black people, are “propaganda art, an attempt by white civic leaders to enshrine a view of the civil war that denied the humanity of Black people. They are a visual representation of white supremacy.”
John Edwin Mason, a history professor at the University of Virginia, scurried around the perimeter of the park as the removal of the Lee statue was underway to keep a close eye on the proceedings. “I’m really happy it’s a boring morning, and boring means that no bad things happened,” he said, adding, “The ordinariness of this occasion is fine.”
Larry J. Sabato, founder and director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, has balked at an attempt from the Republican Party of Virginia to force an ethics investigation prompted by several tweets critical of former President Donald Trump.
(Commentary) Over the past five years of searching, here’s the most compelling evidence I’ve found that has changed my mind about the great beyond: 1. Past life memory research at the University of Virginia. The research of Jim B. Tucker, M.D., and his mentor, the late Ian Stevenson, M.D., was one of the first things I discovered in my quest. Tucker is a child psychiatrist and professor at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies who researches kids and past-life memories. After children recount their memories of life in the past, Tucker and his team go on to see if the chil...
Doctors at the University of Virginia are tracking the Delta variant of the coronavirus in the commonwealth and the greater-Charlottesville area. That means sampling and sequencing strains of COVID-19 infections to pinpoint the variant. Although it makes up about 11% of all COVID-19 cases in Virginia, the Delta variant is the most common variant in the United States. The variant currently makes up over half of COVID-19 infections nationwide.
The University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center – which VDOE uses to gauge school-age population, defined as between 5 and 19 years old – estimates there are nearly 1.6 million people statewide who fall in this category. This means almost 3 in 4 kids in this age group are not vaccinated, and only about 1 in 5 are fully protected against the virus.
A weekly update from the University of Virginia’s Biocomplexity Institute, which has tracked COVID trends throughout the pandemic, reported on Friday that nine health districts are in slow growth trajectories. UVA researchers acknowledged the risk the Delta variant poses for unvaccinated residents and areas with lower vaccination rates, but noted the projected bump in cases in the next few weeks remains minimal.
Charlottesville has updated information regarding overnight closures of part of Emmet Street. The full nighttime closure will be near Ivy Road on July 9 and 10 and again from July 12 to 16. The road will be closed between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m. while work is underway to relocate a natural gas pipeline. This is part of the ongoing work on the University of Virginia Ivy Corridor Project. A partial lane closure will also remain in place between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.
People at the University of Virginia will see fewer plastics soon, because the university is cutting back on its use of single-use plastics. This action will go into effect on July 21.
Albemarle County publicly bid out for the removal of its Confederate soldier statue, as did the University of Virginia for the future removal of its monument to George Rogers Clark. On Wednesday, UVA awarded the contract to remove the Clark statue to Team Henry Enterprises, a Newport News-based contracting firm owned by Devon Henry that removed Confederate statues in Richmond last summer.
Virginia’s flagship university also joined in, confirming it would on Sunday begin a project to remove a statue of George Rogers Clark. George Rogers Clark was William Clark’s older brother and fought against the British army and its Native American allies during the Revolutionary War, seizing swaths of Native territory for the young nation. “The statue will be placed into storage as the University (of Virginia) continues to work with a committee to determine a suitable location,” a school spokesman told AFP.
(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...