The student paper at my alma mater, the University of Virginia, wants the school to distance itself from its founder, Thomas Jefferson, by removing his name from buildings and memorials to him from the Grounds.
“There is a reason why Charlottesville’s local Klu Klux Klan Chapter hosted its inauguration ceremony at Jefferson’s Monticello tomb. There is a reason why white supremacists gathered with torches around Jefferson’s statue on the north side of the Rotunda. There is a reason why they felt comfortable marching through Grounds,” the editorial board at The Cavalier Daily wrote in an Aug. 11 op-ed.
My best personal analogy to this would be me taking a stand to distance myself from the most important person in my life to me growing up – my grandmother.
Granny, as the grandkids knew her, was born in 1924, almost a century ago now, in Augusta County.
As the family lore goes, she met my grandfather, a Pennsylvania native, at a dance held at the PX at the Aberdeen Arsenal at the beginning of World War II.
Predictably, whenever she got mad at him, she called him a “damn Yankee.”
And when she gave people directions to get to their home on New Hope Road in Staunton, she told them to “turn by the Yankee cemetery.”
That kind of stuff was endearing, but it wasn’t all cute and cuddly.
Granny was a big George Wallace guy back in the 1960s.
Yeah, that George Wallace.
The “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” guy.
She campaigned for him door-to-door, so, ugh, that level.
This is the same lady who is the reason I think the way I do about civil rights.
My grandmother worked at Western State Hospital for 25 years, and I remember tagging along with her to work summer picnics and Christmas parties.
Her co-workers ran the gamut in terms of background – Black, Asian, Latino.
They were all friends, who would stop by for a glass of tea or dinner on weekends when I was there spending the night.
I distinctly remember a Western State Christmas party, when I was four, winning a cake walk, everybody in the room pointing and laughing because I’d won, mine the only white face in the room.
Weekends at Granny’s were why I grew up wanting to be a civil rights lawyer, and why, when I decided the law wasn’t for me, I shifted focus to being a journalist writing about politics and society, with a focus on equal rights for people across racial, gender and sexual orientation lines being paramount.
I had no right to expect myself to be able to do anything meaningful.
I grew up in a trailer park, and eventually came to learn that I was from the other side of the tracks.
The reason I had faith in myself to be able to overcome my upbringing and make something of myself was this fiery little woman known to me as Granny, who told me, often, that “you never, ever, let anybody think they’re better than you, but you also don’t go around thinking like you’re better than anybody else, either.”
If I were to be of the mindset that the kids on the editorial board at The Cavalier Daily have about Thomas Jefferson, I’d look at my grandmother and say, OK, yeah, she did a lot of good things, but, I mean, she tried to get a segregationist elected president, and who knows what else, so maybe I should stop telling the stories about her good deeds, that’s just whitewashing history.
Me, I like to think that my grandmother, had she been born later, grown up in a different environment, would be an even better version of me than I am.
I think the same of Thomas Jefferson.
Look, he owned slaves, could have freed them, didn’t – could’ve done things to end slavery on a much wider, societal, scale, didn’t.
He also played a lot of key roles in helping America move forward from where it was to where it is today.
I can’t think, if he were alive today, that the guy who wrote that “all men are created equal” 246 years ago would be the kind of guy that the KKK and neo-Nazis would be rallying around, and I think the kids at the Cav Daily show their youthful ignorance in insisting otherwise.
We’re all products of our times, and I say that here at the end to remind folks who agree with the Cav Daily interpretation of Jefferson that, in a generation or two, there are going to be things that you’re saying and doing today that you’re going to look back on and say, wow, that was, fill in the blank, racist, classist, misogynistic, whatever.
If you want to cancel Thomas Jefferson, cancel my grandmother, whoever, it’s going to come back around on you eventually.
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Chris Graham
