BOB BROWN
Virginia Military Institute’s Board of Visitors voted Thursday to remove the prominent statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson as pressure builds for the state-supported military school to address allegations of racism.
The Board’s vote follows a Washington Post report this month detailing relentless racism at the 181-year-old school in Lexington, which received $19 million in state funds this fiscal year.
[At VMI, Black cadets endure lynching threats, Klan memories and Confederacy veneration]
After reading descriptions by Black cadets of what they endure at VMI, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) ordered an independent investigation into the school’s culture. VMI’s superintendent, retired General J.H. Binford Peay III, resigned Monday in the wake of the controversy.
It is unclear where the statue of Jackson — an enslaver of six people who taught at the school before helping to lead the Confederate Army — will go.
The board’s chairman, John “Bill” Boland, suggested it might be transferred to New Market, the Civil War battlefield where VMI cadets fought and died for the slave-holding South.
“I would rather move the statue once rather than twice,” Boland said, adding that the administration should recommend its final resting spot.
[At VMI, Black alumni want Stonewall Jackson’s statue removed. The school refuses.]
Jackson’s presence in front of the student barracks has always rankled many Black cadets, who make up 8 percent of VMI’s 1,700 students. Up until a few years ago, students had to salute the statue when they passed it. This year, Black alumni launched a campaign to remove the Jackson statue. It was led by Kaleb Tucker, who was a starting cornerback on VMI’s football team before graduating in May.
Tucker created a Change.org petition, asking the school “to acknowledge the racism and black prejudice that still occurs at VMI” and “to tear down” the Jackson statue.
“You feel downgraded as a person, belittled when you walk past the Jackson statue,” Tucker, a business data analyst in Hampton, Va., told The Post last month. He said he tried to ignore the memorial but felt like a “coward” for doing so.
VMI officials resisted, with Peay defending Jackson as a “military genius” and “staunch Christian.” But the board reversed course Thursday, voting unanimously to remove the century-old statue.
VMI was the last public college in Virginia to integrate, admitting five Black students in 1968. It took a 1996 Supreme Court decision to end its resistance to admitting women.
But it remains a difficult place for women and people of color to attend.
One Black graduate filed a complaint last year against a White adjunct professor who reminisced about her father’s Ku Klux Klan membership in the middle of class. In 2018, a White sophomore who told a Black freshman during Hell Week he would “lynch” his body and use his “dead corpse as a punching bag” was suspended, not expelled. A lesbian who left VMI this summer said many LGBTQ students do not come out for fear of the consequences. One male upperclassman compared her sexual orientation to porn addiction, she said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/vmi-stonewall-jackson-statue-racism/2020/10/29/fc3b9490-1a05-11eb-aeec-b93bcc29a01b_story.html
2020-10-29 17:14:00Z
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