Front Royal Unite’s statement on Warren County’s Question 3 results

The results of Question 3 mark the beginning—not the end—of the debate on Front Royal’s Confederate statue. They do not give us a decision; rather, they tell us what we knew all along upon founding Front Royal Unites: that the time is ripe for a challenging but crucial conversation about our grim history of racial inequality.

And they remind us that what we need right now from our elected officials is for them to do their job: to serve as leaders for all of our residents, especially those most affected by this harrowing history and its devastating effects, which linger to this day. The Founding Fathers created a representative democracy, rather than a direct democracy, for a reason: for elected officials to exercise their wisdom and experience to legislate for the benefit of all citizens, even when those decisions conflict with the majority opinion; otherwise, why have elected officials like our Board of Supervisors at all? Let us note that this referendum was no consensus, and the Board has a duty not to turn its back on the almost one quarter of our citizens who are calling for change, many of whom have long been marginalized and ignored.

At this moment, it is worth reflecting that our greatest moments of progress for justice and equality came not through “nonbinding referendums,” but only after long struggles undertaken by committed groups of citizens—often in the minority—to hold their representatives accountable, from marching in the streets to testifying in Congress and, when all else failed, even litigating in the Supreme Court.

Perhaps one might call these trailblazers “troublemakers,” but we know that had Rosa Parks simply given up her bus seat that fateful day, or had Martin Luther King, Jr. wrung his hands instead of marching in the streets of Washington and sharing his Dream with the world, we might not have the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and now sexual orientation. Had 300 people not gathered at the Seneca Falls Convention to kick off a decades-long crusade for women’s right to vote in 1848, and then persisted despite failed congressional proposals, many of us might still be relegated to the kitchen instead of heading to the ballot box with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. And after white leaders in the women’s suffrage movement refused to incorporate Black women into their fight, had Ida B. Wells just accepted her place at the back of the nation’s first-ever women’s suffrage parade, perhaps Black women would have been left behind.

Had these historical heroes acquiesced to a simple majority vote, we’d have quietly given in to the status quo—slavery, disenfranchisement, segregation—time and time again. Without such perseverance by the few to keep the government working for all, democracy “of the people, by the people, and for the people” will fail.

We know from our own harrowing history that Warren County has left its Black citizens behind before, being one of the last localities in the entire state to desegregate during Massive Resistance. When one searches online for “Massive Resistance,” Warren County appears at the top of the Wikipedia page, forever cementing our reputation for the world. Across the country, more than 100 Confederate statues have been taken down or moved since the 2015 Charleston church massacre. In another 50 years, does Warren County want to be remembered as a champion of civil rights, or yet again as the lone holdout that refused to recognize the damage inflicted by the institution of slavery and the Civil War?

Proponents of the statue remaining in place have attempted to rewrite history to conform to their idyllic fantasies of the Confederacy. However, there is no denying the true history of the Confederate States, which waged their war against the United States for the express purpose of preserving slavery. This disturbing truth resounds in the words of Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens in his “Cornerstone” speech: “Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”

Like hundreds of other Confederate monuments located on public property such as town squares and courthouse lawns throughout the South, Warren County’s statue was erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). Despite its assertions that it has “stayed quietly in the background,” the UDC has a long history of promulgating the dangerous “Lost Cause” ideology that downplays slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War, leaving more than 42 percent of Americans believing this false narrative. The UDC’s disinformation campaigning played a major role in thwarting even meager protections for Black Americans during Reconstruction. In the early 1900s, the UDC continued to assert white supremacy and terrorize Black people during the Jim Crow era through the construction of Confederate statues and, dissatisfied with their success, actually put up a monument to commemorate the KKK in 1926.

Thus, despite claims to the contrary, Front Royal’s statue isn’t serving to enlighten anyone on the Confederacy’s dark history. In its more than 100 years of existence, it has only further obfuscated the reality that the Civil War was fought for the South’s quest to uphold the institution of slavery.

Further, our courthouse is our County’s seat of justice, yet the statue celebrates the so-called patriotism of the Confederacy—whose existence, by its very nature, was an act of treachery—through the lettering on its base. The statue supposedly honors veterans, yet its prominence at our courthouse insults the memory of the other veterans honored there, who fought for the United States of America while the Confederacy fought against it. Though many of the names on the statue were unlikely slave owners themselves, America’s unique outlook is one of aspiration. Countless soldiers fought for the Confederacy not because they owned slaves, but because they supported the institution of chattel slavery, hoping one day to be prosperous enough to have their own plantation that would have required slave labor.

Importantly, advocates for the statue remaining in place have failed to demonstrate that they would face real harm from its relocation to a more suitable location, such as a museum or Confederate graveyard, where they could continue to visit it as often as they desire. Rather, they have relied on the argumentum ad antiquitatem fallacy that the statue has stood at our courthouse for over 100 years and therefore should remain, which is not an argument at all, but the absence of one. Would they say the same of slavery?

The costs of the statue remaining on public land, on the other hand, are clear. Every day that it stands, it serves as a perpetual reminder to Black folks that they were once considered mere property themselves. Just recently, a Richmond circuit court even declared that efforts to stop the removal of the Robert E. Lee monument there actually conflict with our state’s current public policy, recognizing that “testimony overwhelmingly established the need of the southern citizenry to establish a monument to their ‘Lost Cause,’ and to some degree their whole way of life, including slavery.” Yet Virginia continues to spend up to 9 million in taxpayer dollars maintaining Confederate graves, including hundreds of thousands being funneled directly to the UDC. The danger of the UDC, and our government’s funding of them, are elucidated by Professor Jalane Schmidt of the University of Virginia: “They created an ideology which glorified the ‘Old South,’ and dressed this up in seemingly harmless cotillion balls and bake sales. What is harmful about them is that for generations, they vetted textbooks, which were adopted into Southern public schools. These books promoted a false Lost Cause version of history to impressionable young white students, who then grew up to enforce segregation.”

We now turn to present-day Warren County to address the false notion that racism, like slavery, is a relic of our past. Take, for example, the case of former Warren-Page NAACP President Suetta Freeman who, even after surmounting being locked out of schooling by Massive Resistance at Warren County High in 1958, went on to graduate here and embark on a career in auditing, yet had to commute for decades to Northern Virginia because she was unable to secure fair and equal employment in Front Royal. Her experience illustrates the racial inequality that is endemic nationally: on average, Black people only make 62 percent of white people’s salary. Or this year, when a truck drove past the home of a prominent member of our Black community and its driver shouted, “White power!” Or this summer, when a mixed-race child accidentally dropped a hand wipe at Applebee’s and her mother found it returned to their car with the writing, “You asked for this wipe, then left it laying (sic) right where that little peckerhead half-breed dropped it so everyone else could step on it. Though I’m sure your home is filthy and cluttered, we try to keep our town clean.” Or the people of color who visited our town for a work retreat in 2017 and awoke to an effigy of a lynching in their rental’s yard. Or the possibility that if we don’t take action to address injustice now, a name like George Floyd’s could someday be ringing from our own Blue Ridge Mountains.

Now it is time for a decision. Will the Board simply concede to the bandwagon fallacy promulgated by the statue’s defenders, or will it stand up for the marginalized and oppressed? If the latter, it must decide to relocate the Confederate monument to a more appropriate venue, and perhaps replace it with a monument that instead honors the resiliency and contribution of the slaves whose stolen labor drove economic growth in Virginia, as our neighbor Manassas has done. Front Royal Unites urges the Board to take this immediate step for a more inclusive, equitable, and just Front Royal.

Front Royal Unites is a social activist organization dedicated to making sure that regardless of one’s complexion, you aren’t feared, you feel safe, and you get an equal footing. Together we are United. Together we are Front Royal. For more information, visit FrontRoyalUnites.org.