“THIS CLASS OF PERSONS”

When UVA’s White Supremacist Past Meets Its Future

LISA WOOLFORK

What we view as racial progress is not a solution, but rather a regeneration of the problem in a
particularly perverse form.
—DERRICK BELL

The past and the future merge to meet us here / what luck / what a fucking curse.
—WARSAN SHIRE, “INTUITION”

Charlottesville faced a two-pronged assault from white supremacists who rallied in the city
on August 11 and 12, 2017. Their strategy of attack was to strike at the heart of Charlottesville by
breaching the Rotunda, the University of Virginia’s symbolic center, and by violating the center
of the city itself with incursions in parks, parking garages, and downtown streets. That weekend,
an allied group of Nazis, neo-Confederates, fascists, white supremacists, and unaffiliated racists
converged on Charlottesville to ostensibly protest the removal of a Confederate monument from
the city center. The August 2017 rallies were the culmination of what some local antiracist activists
called the “Summer of Hate.” Beginning in May 2017 Charlottesville faced monthly white
supremacist rallies with varying degrees of spectacle and severity. Leading white supremacist and
UVA alum Richard Spencer held what has now become known as a “torch rally” in May. Several
dozen white supremacists holding lit torches and chanting “white heritage” slogans surrounded the
Robert E. Lee statue. In June 2017 a small group of neo-Confederates convened at the Lee statue
only to be met by clergy and local residents who joined hands for songs, chants, and prayers. In
July 2017 a Ku Klux Klan group from North Carolina rallied in Justice Park to protest its recent
renaming. (The park was formerly called Jackson Park in honor of the Confederate general
Stonewall Jackson, whose statue is installedthere.) These events and their mobilization around the
removal of Confederate monuments that enshrine white supremacy laid the foundation for the
more prolonged action scheduled for August 11 and 12, called Unite the Right. The Unite the Right
participants, orchestrated by UVA alum Jason Kessler, assembled in Charlottesville for a weekend
of sustained pro-white activism. It all culminated on Saturday, August 12, when pro-white protest-
ers prompted skirmishes with antiracist activists and black community members, resulting in
injuries to dozens of people and the death of one counterprotester, who was killed when a white
supremacist drove through a crowd of counterprotesters in a deliberate act of terror.
The most significant precursor to the lethal attack of August 12, however, was the violent
white supremacist spectacle at the UVA’s Central Grounds on the evening of August 11. The white
supremacists’ fire-fueled march though Grounds and the university’s official responses to it are
the focal points of this essay. Specifically, I ask: Why has the university arrested more people for
protesting white supremacy than for promoting white supremacy? And what might this
discrepancy reveal about the weight that white supremacy continues to bear on university life?
Why were three UVA students arrested for trespassing—two black and one white—during the
university’s bicentennial celebration, when three hundred white supremacists (not currently
enrolled students) brandishing lit torches could march unimpeded to seize the symbolic heart of
the university? The university’s official statement explains that because the students disrupted a
“ticketed event,” they were subject to ejection and legal consequences: “The UVA Bicentennial
Launch yesterday on the Lawn was a ticketed event. Any person who interrupts an invited speaker
or event shall be requested to leave and removed if they refuse to leave or persist in interrupting
any speaker or event.” This seemingly neutral preference for order and civility attempts to conceal
an important issue that students were trying to address. At the time of their arrest, the students held
a large, carefully crafted banner. Styled in a graphic theme similar to the official university
bicentennial promotional materials, the banner proclaimed “200 years of white supremacy.” When
three currently enrolled students are arrested for trespassing but approximately three hundred white
supremacists are allowed to march unimpeded through Central Grounds—bearing lit torches and
ultimately attacking students and staff in full view of law enforcement—it raises the provocative
suggestion that the students’ banner had the right of it after all.
My essay turns to documents to better understand the persistence of white supremacy at
the university. Some of the texts I consider emerge from the historical record, while others are
recently written responses to pro– and anti–white supremacist rallies on Grounds. My purpose here
is to use the literary studies skills of textual analysis and close reading to better understand how
these texts create a discursive landscape that remains complicated by, if not indebted to, the white
supremacy from which the university was stamped at its beginning. In addition, careful study of
these documents, statements, and counterstatements produced by, within, and against the
university is part of a moral inventory prompted by the challenges of the white supremacist
violence that occurred on our campus and in our city. An examination of select archival and
contemporary documents allows us to evaluate the meaning of white supremacists marching on
campus. Is this act best described as an anomaly, an invasion, or a homecoming?
It is useful to start at the beginning. On August 1, 1818, the commissioners for the
University of Virginia met at a tavern in Rockfish Gap on the Blue Ridge. The assembled men had
been charged to write a proposal that would be titled the Report of the Board of Commissioners
for the University of Virginia to the Virginia General Assembly, also known as the Rockfish Gap
Report. This document would articulate the university’s unique and robust educational mission,
which included “to develope the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds cultivate
their morals, & instil into them the precepts of virtue & order.” The collective also articulated a
vision of education that specifically affirmed racial and racist hierarchy for its students and the
commonwealth. Relying on a horticultural metaphor of a “wild & uncultivated tree” that is
ameliorated by merging the “savage stock” with a “new tree,” the report declares that “education,
in like manner engrafts a new man on the native stock, & improves what in his nature was vicious
& perverse, into qualities of virtue and social worth.” The horticultural symbolism quickly gives
way to the racist and eugenic dimensions of education. The commissioners promote the value of
higher education by comparing its benefits to those who lack it: “What, but education, has
advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbours? and what chains them to their
present state of barbarism & wretchedness, but a besotted veneration for the supposed supe[r]lative
wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous idea that they are to look backward for better things
and not forward, longing, as it should seem, to return to the days of eating acorns and roots rather
than indulge in the degeneracies of civilization.” The rhetorical nature of this question—“What,
but education, has advanced us?”—leaves little room for the possibility that structural, ideological,
and economic factors “advanced” these scions of the white, wealthy, master class who composed
this document. A careful inspection of this report suggests that white supremacy, in theory and in
deed, was a requisite foundation for the educational benefits essential to progress.
White supremacy was not only useful for helping to promote the value of the educational
mission of the university. This belief system also played a crucial role in locating the physical
space that the university would occupy. As the Rockfish Gap Report suggests, in addition to the
educational project of the university, the commissioners were required to structure other formal
protocols, such as the living arrangements represented by the Pavilions, Hotels, and the Lawn.
 Though they considered the power that resided in constructing a radical educational vision
previously unknown during their time, the commissioners were also committed to finding the ideal
geographical location for this undertaking. Three choices were identified as the most propitious
venues: Lexington in Rockbridge County, Staunton in Augusta County, and Central College
(Charlottesville) in Albemarle County. Ultimately, however, Central College was deemed the best
site on which to build. As the report claims, Staunton and Lexington were also suitable since “each
of these was unexceptionable as to healthiness & fertility.” The deciding factor that led the
commissioners to choose Albemarle County as the site for the university was exclusively its
proximity to white people. The commissioners observed, “It was the degree of centrality to the
white population of the state which alone then constituted the important point of comparison
between these places: and the board, after full enquiry & impartial & mature consideration, are of
opinion that the central point of the white population of the state is nearer to the central college,
than to either Lexington or Staunton by great & important differences, and all” (emphasis mine).
The Rockfish Gap Report lays the literal and figurative groundwork for the university’s interests
in and promotion of white supremacy.
The report reveals the practical ways in which white supremacy was the single most
important attribute that explains the university’s current location in Charlottesville. The
commissioners made the determination, based on research that was “impartial” and “mature,” to
privilege Albemarle County over Lexington or Staunton. Simply put, the University of Virginia
was located in Charlottesville because Charlottesville was the site most easily accessed by most of
the state’s white people. These white supremacist foundations constitute a fundamental element of
the university’s history that curiously anchors expressions of white supremacy on its grounds
today.