The spectacle of racial violence remains central to how white supremacy asserts its public presence in Charlottesville. In August 2017, the Thomas Jefferson statue on the north plaza of UVA’s Rotunda became a rallying point for a group of at least 100 mostly white men, who led a torch-lit parade through the university’s historic grounds — an ominous reenactment of Ku Klux Klan night marches. Members of white nationalist groups descended on the city to protest the proposed removal of Jackson’s statue and Lee’s monument. In February, university leadership terminated an agreement with a student-run group that has provided historical tours to visitors since the 1950s. The Jefferson Council, a conservative alumni group, had been pushing for years to eliminate what it deems unreliable and poor-quality content from the tours. An opinion column on the Jefferson Council’s website claimed guides proselytized a “woke version of UVA history.” The group’s broader pressure campaign against the university and ideological alliance with the White House helped lead to the resignation in July of the UVA president, James E. Ryan, whom the council had criticized for years because of his support for DEI initiatives. And in a further capitulation to the current administration’s ideological program, the university brokered a deal with the Justice Department in late October and agreed to “not engage in unlawful racial discrimination” in programming, admissions, and hiring practices.
But some have been fighting back. In September 2017, as a counterprotest to the white-supremacist march, dozens of protesters — a group that included students, faculty, and residents — wrapped the Jefferson statue in black plastic and draped a “Black Lives Matter/Fuck White Supremacy” banner across its marble base. A coalition of groups initiated a March to Reclaim Our Grounds in an effort to purge the haunting reminders of white supremacy from everyday spaces. Their demands included the denunciation of the university’s connections with racist groups and the removal of two Confederate memorial plaques affixed to the Rotunda’s south entrance. The university student tour guide group has also refused to be silenced from telling the truth about slavery, segregation (the first Black male student was admitted in 1950), gender discrimination (the first coed class was admitted in 1970), and the Indigenous Monacan land that the university now occupies. Some of the student guides gave unsanctioned tours in defiance of the gag order and demotion. In a guest column for the university paper, The Cavalier Daily, the group’s chairs criticized the administration’s treatment: “In the absence of any real justification, we can only see this suspension as a reaction to the anti-history voices who have long been attacking our organization,” they wrote in December 2024. “Shutting down these tours stifles open discourse in a way that damages the contemporary community and the act of producing, contesting and engaging with history.” These actions carry on the legacy of remembrance championed by Gibbons.