RICHMOND — Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has appointed a historian to the state Board of Historic Resources who has defended the state’s Confederate monuments and condemned their destruction as a “dangerous” rewriting of history.
Ann Hunter McLean of Richmond, the former head of a Christian school, told an online publication that she believes Virginia’s heritage is “under attack” as she begins serving on the board, which oversees state historic-site designations.
Last year, as the last vestiges of Richmond’s Confederate monuments were being taken down in the wake of social justice protests, McLean lamented the loss.
“This whole tragedy is that these statues were built to tell the true story of the American South to people 500 years from now,” McLean said to a Richmond radio host on Dec. 23, 2021, after state archivists opened a time capsule found under the site where the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee once stood on Monument Avenue. “People want to destroy the evidence of that story,” she continued, saying the Civil War was fought for the “sovereignty of each state and constitutional law.”
Then-Gov. Ralph Northam (D) had taken down the Lee statue as a racist symbol erected to honor a war that was fought to preserve slavery. McLean said Northam’s actions amounted to “lawlessness.”
Last year, Youngkin acknowledged Northam’s authority to take down the statue under a decision by the Supreme Court of Virginia.
Macaulay Porter, a spokeswoman for Youngkin, said Friday via text that “the governor supports preserving the history of Virginia and believes that the referenced statues should be preserved in a museum or other facility.”
McLean did not respond Friday to an email and a phone message requesting comment. She was quoted in the online publication Virginia Star as saying in an interview that she was uncertain whether her role on the board would involve decisions regarding monuments.
“But I am not into destroying people’s fine art. I think there’s something cosmically wrong with doing that under any circumstances,” she said, adding that she is particularly interested in overseeing the language on state historical markers.
Approving and revising those markers is one of the primary functions of the historic resources board, which consists of seven people appointed by the governor. The board meets jointly with the State Review Board four times a year to consider nominations to the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places. It also holds easements at historic sites around the state.
Del. Lamont Bagby (D-Henrico), the head of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, said McLean’s appointment showed Youngkin’s “callous attitude toward Black history in Virginia and the lingering effects of institutional racism.” Via text message, Bagby said Youngkin seems intent on “erasing our voices, images, and pain without flinching. He must believe that no one is paying attention to his appointments or he’s just that brazen to repeatedly thumb his nose at us.”
Virginia has taken dramatic steps in the past few years to wrestle with its troubled racial legacy. The former capital of the Confederacy boasted more Confederate memorials than any other state, but began dismantling many of them after the racial justice movement sparked in 2020 by the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police.
The city of Richmond has taken down all of its Confederate statues save one — a monument to Gen. A.P. Hill that stands in a traffic intersection atop the soldier’s grave. City officials are negotiating to relocate the remains and get the statue down later this year.
Many longtime defenders of the monuments, including Confederate heritage groups such as the Virginia Flaggers, conceded that public sentiment called for removal but argued that the statues should be relocated to places such as museums and battlefields.
The enormous statue of Lee, festooned with protest graffiti, became an international protest symbol until Northam had it taken down last year. In December, when the first of two Lee time capsules was unearthed and opened, McLean spoke with host John Reid on WRVA radio in Richmond to lament the whole process.
After Reid complained that the movement to take down statues was being driven by “vehement hatred” toward people who lived 50 to 100 years ago, McLean said she agreed “completely — spot on.”
McLean then seemed to suggest that state officials had a nefarious plan for using a possible photograph of President Abraham Lincoln in his casket that was rumored to have been placed in the Lee time capsule but was not actually found.
“The dead Lincoln photograph seems to be the thing they are blisteringly interested in achieving and getting,” she said, “and I am very concerned when they get that, what are they going to do with that? You know, central planning is so a part of this, and it’s almost like there’s a folder and a plan they pull out every two or three days or two or three weeks … And we see it with the mandates for the [coronavirus] vaccines but we also see this with history and what they’re doing to our culture.”
In the introduction to her 1998 doctoral dissertation, McLean wrote that the Confederate statues erected from the late 1800s through the 1920s “were created primarily as vehicles of moral uplift at a time of rapid urbanization and social change, when idealism typified the American portrayal of martial art.”
She goes on to acknowledge that the African American perspective on the statues “is one of several complexities inherent in the subject.” She wrote that the Lee statue was “erected to inspire virtue in the public, and as a tribute to Lee around whom grew a heroic myth embraced by both North and South, [but] today reminds some in society of the open wound of racism.”
McLean also writes for Bacon’s Rebellion, a conservative commentary site, and serves on the board of the Jefferson Council, a group aimed at preserving Thomas Jefferson’s heritage at the University of Virginia. In a recent article for the Jefferson Independent, a student-run conservative website, McLean blasted “cultural Marxists” for tearing down the legacies of Lee — a “Christian soldier” — and Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, “a Sunday School teacher for a class of young black children.”
Youngkin made one other appointment to the historic resources board: Aimee Jorjani, who served under President Donald Trump as chair of the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.
Meanwhile, another Youngkin appointee who has drawn criticism — Casey Flores on the state’s LGBTQ+ Advisory Board — has stepped down, the governor’s office said Friday. Flores attracted criticism for crude and vulgar postings on social media, but now has “resigned from the Board as he is accepting a professional opportunity outside of the Commonwealth,” Porter said via text message.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/15/youngkin-mclean-confederate-statues-historic-board/
2022-07-16 00:58:00Z
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