When someone testifies in court, they swear to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
For some reason, we don’t apply this standard to our history lessons.
One of the reference books I keep within easy reach is my seventh grade history textbook, which I often cite not for its accuracy but for its inaccuracies — and omissions.
I’ve written before about how that textbook disparaged the short-lived Readjuster Party, a biracial party that won control of the state in the 1880s and instituted many civil rights measures that were quite progressive for their day. That textbook also praised the state’s 1902 constitution, which disenfranchised about half the voters in the state and helped codify Jim Crow.
It’s no wonder that many members of my generation have trouble accepting some of the things we’re now learning about our past — we were essentially indoctrinated in our youth with propaganda about much of it.
I grew up in Rockingham County, where we were taught that Turner Ashby was a glorious Confederate hero, worthy of having a high school named after him. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I stumbled upon some history we weren’t taught: that before the Civil War, Ashby was a vigilante leader who forced Virginia’s most prominent abolitionist of the day to flee the state for his own safety. I often wonder whether, when students at Turner Ashby High School are warned against bullying, they are told that their own school’s namesake was guilty of bullying on a much more violent scale.
William Faulkner, who specialized in Southern themes, famously wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
That certainly seems true.
Three recent events from one end of the state to the other remind us of this.
The Defense Department recently removed a Confederate monument from Arlington National Cemetery (which might wind up at the New Market Battlefield), part of a series of actions the department had taken to purge recognition of the secessionists who made war on the United States. In Virginia, Fort A.P. Hill has become Fort Walker (in honor of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, a Civil War surgeon and the first woman to win the Medal of Honor), Fort Lee has become Fort Gregg-Adams (in honor of Arthur Gregg, a former general, and Charity Adams, the first Black officer in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, later Women’s Army Corps, in World War II and leader of the only unit of predominately Black women to serve in the war’s European theater), Fort Pickett has become Fort Barfoot (in honor of Van Barfoot, a Medal of Honor winner from World War II).
In Danville, a judge has ordered a portrait of the 1960s-era Judge Archibald Aiken removed from the courtroom, pending a review of just who should be honored with portraits hanging there. Aiken was the segregationist judge who presided over the trials that came out of “Bloody Monday,” a Danville civil rights protest in 1963, and did so in a manner that one modern-day law professor says are considered extreme “even by the standards of what one might expect in a Southern, segregationist courtroom.” For instance, he banned spectators from the proceedings, prohibited discussion of the legality of an injunction he issued restricting public gatherings and ordered one white critic of his rulings arrested. There’s still a bridge in Danville named in Aiken’s honor.
Then there’s the case of the Charlotte County Board of Supervisors, which voted in November to withdraw its pledge to help pay for replacing damaged historical markers about two historic sites in the county because the Virginia Department of Historic Resources intended to amend them to make mention that enslaved people once labored there.
“If they want to edit it to suit the woke people in the country, now that’s up to them — it shouldn’t be on the taxpayers,” said Supervisor Gary Walker. “If they’re going to edit these signs, then we should retract our obligation to pay for the signs.” The motion passed unanimously. Perhaps it should be noted that while 29.7% of Charlotte County’s population is non-white, the county has an all-white board of supervisors.
Still, Charlotte County is an odd place for this to be happening because, up until now, it has been at the forefront of trying to present a more complete record of its history. In 2021, a historical marker went up recognizing one of the most shocking events of the Reconstruction Era in Virginia: the murder of a Black politician on the courthouse steps. In 1868, Joseph Holmes represented Charlotte County in the constitutional convention that wrote a post-war constitution for Virginia. The following year, he was gunned down. Four men were charged but none ever faced trial. Historian Kathy Liston has found that one of the men later became a police officer in Roanoke, another a banker in Tennessee. News stories about Holmes’ killing — his assassination — were published around the world (as far away as Australia), but the event was never officially recognized in Virginia until just over two years ago.
Last year, Charlotte County made the news in a different way, when it become the first locality in the state to add “contextualization” to the Confederate monument outside the courthouse: a four-part display that tells the history of the county between the Civil War and when that monument was erected in 1901, around the same time that Virginia was preparing to ditch that post-war constitution that Holmes helped write and instead disenfranchise about half the state’s voters, white and Black alike.
Keep in mind that all these Charlotte County examples are quite different from the previous ones I cited involving the Confederate memorial in Arlington National Cemetery or the portrait of the segregationist judge in the Danville courtroom. Nothing here is coming down, which sometimes raises complaints about “erasing history.” This is about something being added, to provide a more complete history lesson.
However, helping pay for new state historical markers that simply say the obvious — that Southern plantations before the Civil War involved enslaved labor — is apparently too much history to acknowledge.
Liston, the historian who has been involved in all these projects, wrote an opinion piece published in The Charlotte Gazette, the county’s weekly newspaper, headlined: “Black history is not ‘woke’ history.”
She chastised the supervisors for their vote. For the Holmes marker and the courthouse display, “the supervisors were lauded publicly by DHR, the press, and others for these broad-minded projects that exposed past injustices towards the Black community.” Now, she wrote, the supervisors “have taken a giant step backwards.”
What’s wrong with acknowledging that slavery once existed?, Liston wondered. “These DHR historic markers have nothing to do with ‘woke ideas,’ they have to do with factual history,” she wrote. “It is only right that we tell the stories of ALL our citizens, no matter how uncomfortable that may make some. To do anything less is an insult to us all.” This is the “whole truth” part of that “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” formulation.
Julie Langan, director of the Department of Historic Resources, confirms that DHR likes to update its markers when they need to be replaced. She told me by email: “While DHR does not have a policy per se, the Highway Marker Editorial Committee and the Board of Historic Resources, along with DHR staff who review and draft proposed texts, recognize that over the history of the program, many, if not most, markers fail to recognize the contributions of those enslaved. That being the case, and with a commitment to historical accuracy, they are inclined to recommend and approve texts that correct the record and present a more inclusive version of history.”
The Virginia Department of Transportation has since agreed to pay for the markers in Charlotte County, even if the county doesn’t, so a fuller history of the county’s history will still get told. The larger question is how much history can we handle?