August 11 and 12 reminded us that histories of slavery, anti-Semitism, and nativism are part of our present—in Charlottesville, around the nation, and the world. We in the College must put forth our undaunted determination to speak the truth as well as our unflinching resolve to build a place where all are free to speak and think together, free of violence and intimidation. On these next pages, faculty members respond to that weekend in August and show how their work helps create a more open, just, and free world.
—Dean Ian Baucom
We at the Nau Civil War Center join with the UVA community in deploring the white supremacist assaults of August 11th and 12th. As Civil War scholars, we have a unique responsibility and opportunity, in this moment, to illuminate history, drawing on the expertise and good will of our colleagues across Grounds, on our state’s peerless network of archives, museums and national battlefield parks, and on our students’ curiosity and idealism. Our mission at the Nau Center has been to grapple with Civil War history in all its complexity, with programs that make the most rigorous modern scholarship accessible to the public. We are more committed than ever to that mission, and eager to work with UVA and Charlottesville on projects, such as our research initiative on central Virginia men, black and white, who fought for the Union, that will help us to reimagine local history and bring new Civil War sources and stories to light.
—Gary W. Gallagher, Director of the Nau Civil War Center and John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War
—Elizabeth R. Varon, Associate Director of the Nau Civil War Center and Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History
Nearly every semester, I begin my course with the story of a student protest held at the University on February 18, 1969. At the rally, student leaders denounced the entrenched racism within and beyond the Grounds, demanded better wages for non-academic employees, and insisted that the Black Studies program be established by the fall of 1970. Their broad demands reflected their belief in the inextricable connection between the racial politics of UVA and those of Charlottesville.
In the years that followed the 1969 protest, UVA remained a site of political activism as young women and men rallied around such issues as U.S. military action in Southeast Asia, racial apartheid in South, and the state’s compliance, or lack thereof, with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
It is this tradition of rich political activism and civic engagement that many students will draw on as they return to Grounds and confront new challenges as well as old ones that existed long before the horrific events of August 11th and 12th.
Lest my invoking of this tradition of activism be misconstrued, I don’t mean to ignore the reality of racism on and beyond Grounds. Students fretting over and or preparing for the next round of attacks from white supremacists should not be normalized, expected, or rationalized. But I take comfort in knowing that many of our students are not political blanksheets with no roadmaps. One of the things that I have attempted to do in my lecture course, “Black Fire,” is give students a sense of that important aspect of UVA history.
Through readings and discussions and interviews with alums, we attempt to show how the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not the culmination of political struggle but just the beginning of another phase. Let’s not forget, a decade after the CRA’s passage, the University was embroiled in controversy over the fact that dozens of administrators and faculty belonged to the all-white country club, Farmington. Thanks to the actions of a coalition of black and white students, the University had to confront, once again, its racism.
We have a long way to go as a university, city, and nation and it’s an uphill battle. But I have hope. Hope rooted not just in my Christian faith, but in my students.
As we prepare for another academic year of learning and growing, my students and I look forward to confronting the intellectual, political, and moral challenges that await us.
— Claudrena Harold, Professor of African American and African Studies and History
In the wake of the events of August 11 and 12, the faculty charged with launching the College’s new general education curriculum pilot have an even sharper sense of our responsibility, and of the purpose and power of this new model. Last week, the 600 students in the pilot gathered in the Amphitheater with the 27 College Fellows faculty for our inaugural Opening Convocation. Our ability to come together with our entering students and to speak directly to them about white supremacist attacks on our students and community and about our shared sense of purpose going forward was only possible thanks to the structure of the Engagements curriculum, which brings together faculty from around the College to design and teach first year classes. We reflected together about what is at stake in the work of the University, and its relationship to democracy and equality. This semester and next, students in the new curriculum will have myriad opportunities to reflect further on these issues in their Engagements courses: Lisa Woolfork’s “Race, Racism, Colony, and Nation,” to Debbie Roach’s “How has Evolution Shaped Who We Are?” and Hanadi Al-Samman’s “The Aesthetics of Trauma,” just to mention a few. Finally, over the course of the year students will have the opportunity to focus on the University as an object of study by way of an Engagements-wide annotation project focused on one of the University’s founding documents, the Rockfish Gap Report of 1818.
— Sarah Betzer, Associate Professor, Art History, Co-Director, College Fellows Program
Citizenship has never faced as great a challenge in my lifetime. As we step back and consider the rage, the violence, the hate and the denial of basic humanity and dignity that those who invaded Charlottesville displayed on August 11 and 12, we have to recognize the urgency.
This imperfect republic has struggled for 241 years to be more perfect, and the expansion of the definition and responsibilities of citizenship have been at the core. Now we find ourselves moving backward, deepening divisions, denying the basic worthiness of our neighbors. To save this republic we must chart a path forward to inclusive and expansive citizenship. To do that we must generate norms and forums that can unite us. Our current forums—especially Facebook only fracture us and deepen our inability to recognize and value our fellow citizens. If we really want to quash violence over the long term, fostering a spirit of engaged citizenship is the only way.
— Siva Vaidhyanathan, Director, Center for Media and Citizenship, Robertson Professor of Media Studies
August 11 and 12, my research and my life collided in ways I am still finding hard to process. I am a white southerner, born and raised in Atlanta with parents who migrated to that boom town from the Deep South of the Mississippi Delta region of Arkansas and the piney woods of Mississippi. It was my Mississippi grandfather that taught me to love history, to understand that knowing something about the past transformed the buggy, hot pastures and swampy woods of Jefferson Davis, County into a complex landscape full of people, animals, and buildings I could not then see. Driving the backroads in his yellow GMC truck, he would point out the open window to a spot where the jonquils bloomed in a line in an empty field and tell stories of the old Magee place. Or he would pull onto the sandy shoulder of the dirt road and bushwhack back through a tangle of blackberry bushes and saplings to uncover an old, choked spring where we would miraculously, to a city girl, drink the cool, crisp water straight from the ground.
Back home in Atlanta, it was hard to understand how the affluent suburban world I lived where my classmates were the children of black doctors and Atlanta University professors could coexist with this rural, segregated and seemingly dying place that did not integrate its schools until the early 1970s. This contrast and my need to understand how people that I loved could be so racist made me a scholar. It seemed as important as breathing to know how they convinced themselves that the culture of segregation they created to secure their racial supremacy in the aftermath of emancipation was moral and modern and true. Confederate statutes as well as lynchings were key tools in this project then. These statues and violent acts remain a part of this project today. As I start my twentieth year of teaching at UVA, understanding this history has never seemed more relevant in the work of building a democratic future.
— Grace Elizabeth Hale, Commonwealth Chair of American Studies and History
If the study of religion has any particular expertise to offer in our moment of local and national crisis it is in the examination of myth—the framing stories that cultures, societies and individuals use to given meaning and shape to both their own lives and to history. Race is one such myth; America—as a civilization or project or ideal—is another; the South a third, a myth often called the Lost Cause. We have seen how seductive and dangerous all of these can be. Theologians might call them idolatries, but as a historian I teach about them as aspects of American civil religion—a religion powerful enough that some are willing to kill, or die, for it. A few years ago, I added a unit on civil religion to the Introduction to American Studies course l co-teach with Professor Grace Hale from the history department, and never has it felt more urgent. I am adding new readings on civil religion to the graduate seminar in American religion I will teach this fall.
— Matthew S. Hedstrom, Associate Professor, Religious Studies and American Studies
As we have done time and time again in the face of national and local crises, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies reaffirms the moral and intellectual value of our commitment to diversity, tolerance, civility and justice, both at the University of Virginia and beyond. It helps to be reminded of the words of journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who devoted her life to campaigning against racist violence. Writing in Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases (1892), she makes two instructive points: 1) “the people must know before they can act” and 2) “the way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” Armed with knowledge of Charlottesville and its history, we need not resort to the simplistic question posed by journalists, politicians and pundits alike—“How did we get here?” Rather, we must ask, “What next?” Answering the latter question often requires that we “know” before “we act.”
The Citizen Justice Initiative of the Carter G. Woodson Institute, sponsored by UVA’s Strategic Investment Fund, is a digital storytelling project. Its student research team recently published “The Illusion of Progress: Charlottesville’s Roots in White Supremacy, a project that establishes that the legacies of slavery, segregation and white supremacy in our community are yet to be conquered, despite signs of incremental progress. Looking forward, we must do our part, individually and collectively, to battle those forces that bid to set us further back, working in solidarity with groups and coalitions on initiatives already underway.
— Deborah E. McDowell, Director, Carter G. Woodson Institute
We who teach and study Jewish civilization, history, and culture, are acutely aware of the dangerous ramifications—both for democratic societies and for innocent individuals and communities—of the ideas and actions of the hate-inspired groups that besieged Charlottesville. In light of these acts of violence and horrific expressions of ignorance, intolerance, and hatred, we rededicate ourselves as educators to fostering learning environments in which all students—regardless of skin color, place of birth, faith, gender, sexual orientation, political views, or heritage—feel welcome and able to engage in civil and productive discourse in a spirit of mutual respect. What we teach—from the Hebrew Bible to Jewish religious principles, thought, traditions, cultures, literatures and history, including the Holocaust—is more relevant than ever to the sustenance and development of an ethical and hopeful society.
— Gabriel N. Finder, Ida and Nathan Kolodiz Director of Jewish Studies, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
As our eyes, hearts and minds absorb the unconscionable violence we witnessed on August 11 and 12, we know that our mission at this historic University had been irrevocably changed. This is an opportunity for us to seize the narrative and transform Charlottesville into a national touchstone for intellectual, moral, cultural and political reawakening. Our programs and courses at the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures offer informed hope that humans have more in common than deranged politicians and hate-filled ideologues are willing to allow. Our curricular and research initiatives on the Global South are expressly aimed at addressing questions of cultural differences, political violations and social justice. We explore histories of religious pluralism; we offer global perspectives on art, performative, literary and media cultures; we address the urgency of climate change and study the effects of rapid technological change. In a world so saturated with violence, and so bereft of ethical conduct, the pursuit of the humanities, we believe, is not a luxury. It is our moral compass and a reminder of our common humanity.
— Debjani Ganguly, Professor of English, Director, Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, Alice Griffin Professor of English
I have been teaching Anthropology 2250, Nationalism, Racism, Multiculturalism to large groups of undergraduates since the late 1980s. Given some of the heated racial rhetoric of the 2016 presidential election, I scheduled the course for this fall, knowing it would be more relevant than ever. While I could not have foreseen the events of August, ANTH 2250 will provide an admirable forum for our students to grapple with what happened.
Nationalism and racism are ideologies, or belief systems, that have been salient for the past two centuries. We can show students that given what we now know about human societies, the central propositions of these ideologies are false. We can teach students to recognize those propositions as they continue to be circulated in contemporary U.S. politics. And we can present empirical and ethical arguments as to how they do damage to human dignity and social cohesion.
It is our responsibility as teachers to mediate between the knowledge of our disciplines and the events that matter in students’ lives. This is the work of the liberal arts.
— Richard Handler, Professor of Anthropology. Director, Global Development Studies Program