A UVA professor will lead a walking tour of Charlottesville’s Confederate monuments to highlight a public safety concern regarding the monuments.
Jalane Schmidt will lead the 9 p.m. walking tour, and legal observers will be on hand to explain to attendees their legal rights with respect to police stops in public places.
The event will bring attention to what activists who support the removal of the monuments have reported in the form of threats, both online and in the community, from monument defenders, and what they say is a lack of local law-enforcement response.
According to a press release from Charlottesville Anti-Racist Media Leaders (CARML), an unknown individual who claimed to be a law-enforcement officer confronted a member of the public and demanded to know why they were in the park one night last week, and there was another incident just last night a man who appeared to be a private security guard in an unmarked car followed two residents as they alternately drove and walked through the parks and streets of the north downtown area, while several marked police patrol cars repeatedly circled.
Tonight’s walking tour will begin at the Downtown Charlottesville county courthouse on Jefferson Street.