Deborah McDowell, UVA’s Alice Griffin Professor of English, taught students about Southern nostalgia for the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy in the early 20th century, which inspired Charlottesville’s statues of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. McDowell, director of UVA’s Carter G. Woodson Institute of African-American and African Studies, said Virginia politicians who helped establish Charlottesville’s Confederate memorial parks also backed laws that prevented racial integration, and permitted the forced sterilization of people with disabilities.