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NEWS
—Former police chief RaShall Brackney at a press conference announcing formal complaints against the city
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Tonal shift
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IN BRIEF
Local kids get vaxed
Children ages 5 to 11 are now eligible for COVID vaccination, and there are plenty of opportunities for families in the Charlottesville area to have their kids inoculated. The Blue Ridge Health District is offering vaccines for children by appointment at its Seminole Square space. Both city and county schools are planning to hold drive-through vaccination clinics on their campuses, and some pediatricians’ offices have begun vaccination events, starting with high-risk patients.
Pulling out all the stops
In a bizarre election footnote, Glenn Youngkin’s 17-year-old son attempted to vote for his father in last week’s election, even though the minimum age for voting in Virginia is 18. The poll workers at the Great Falls Library turned the boy away, reports The Washington Post. He “honestly misunderstood Virginia election law and simply asked polling officials if he was eligible to vote,” responded the Youngkin campaign. “Election integrity” was a major plank in Youngkin’s campaign platform.
Brackney’s back
In a downtown press conference on Tuesday, former Charlottesville police chief RaShall Brackney revealed that she has filed formal complaints with CPD’s human resources department, the local Office of Human Rights, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the NAACP, concerning her firing in September. She says city leadership defamed, harassed, and discriminated against her for her efforts to dismantle systemic racism within the department. She is demanding $3 million from the city. If the city does not respond to the complaints soon, Brackney and her attorney say they will take her case to federal court.
Under new management
Charlottesville announced that Marc Woolley will become the city’s next interim city manager. Woolley has spent the last four years as the business administrator of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
“Right now there are certain acute issues that need to be taken care of, namely the budget and the comprehensive plan,” Woolley said at a virtual introductory press conference on Friday. “My role is to sit down with council and stakeholders and plot a course forward for the short term.”
The last city manager, Chip Boyles, resigned in October amid community outcry over his decision to relieve police chief RaShall Brackney of her duties.
“I’m not here to upset the apple cart, unless it’s called for, but I don’t see that as my main charge,” Woolley said.
In Harrisburg, Woolley said he helped get the city’s finances back on track. Harrisburg is Pennsylvania’s capital, a majority Black city with a population of 50,000 and a metro area population of 590,000. Before that, he worked at the Philadelphia Housing Authority, Delaware River Port Authority, and the Hershey Trust Company.
Woolley will become the sixth person to serve as city manager since 2018. On Friday he said the high turnover doesn’t phase him, and that he’s accustomed to “high-stress environments.”
“I’ve been doing this for many, many years, and I’ve been in almost any type of situation.” Woolley said. “Virginia does not have the monopoly on complicated or arcane versions of government. Pennsylvania is right up there.”
The 52-year-old says he helps cope with the stress by spending time with his wife and kids, training German shepherds, and making cheese.
He’s left multiple previous posts under contentious circumstances. Woolley was named in multiple lawsuits against the Philadelphia Housing Authority, though was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing. And he clashed with the board of directors at the Hershey Trust Company, resigning after the leak of a memo he wrote describing dysfunction within the organization.
Marc Woolley, Charlottesville’s new interim city manager, is the sixth person to hold that job since 2018. That apparently didn’t bother the Charlottesville City Council too much—Councilor Lloyd Snook encouraged those on the call to read past “the first page of Google” when looking at Woolley’s background. Woolley was a finalist in council’s search for a deputy city manager for operations job, a position they ultimately went to Sam Sanders in July 2021. Council had previously indicated that it intended to give the community an opportunity for input on the interim city manager hire. Mayor Nikuyah Walker said she still believes that’s the best approach, but “this particular time presented us with some unfortunate circumstances” that made such a process difficult. The city plans to conduct a search for the permanent city manager in April 2022, and Woolley says he intends to apply for that position. In the meantime, he’ll make $205,000 per year, and will begin on December 1.
CITY OF CHARLOTTESVILLE
Parcel credit
For months, area residents have reported going weeks without receiving mail, largely due to staffing shortages and poor management at the Charlottesville Post Office. Last week, Virginia Senator Mark Warner met with USPS management to discuss recent improvements.
“I think we got their attention,” said Warner during a press conference on the Downtown Mall last Thursday. “From the back office of operation, it looked much more organized, much cleaner, much different from before.”
Since Warner’s last visit on August 15, 22 new employees—four clerks, eight city carriers, and 10 rural carriers—have been hired. Twenty applicants are currently waiting to pass background checks. The office has also recently brought in a new acting postmaster and two additional senior officials.
To handle the holiday surge, the office has recruited 11 retirees and 21 postal employees from around the state.
During a “mail surge” in October, management brought in around 45 additional mail carriers, who helped deliver around 90 percent of backlogged mail. It’s since seen a 90 percent decline in complaints about mail delivery at the post office window.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” said Warner. “It felt like walking around the facility, there was a different attitude, but the proof is going to be in the reaction. I need to hear [from] the community if this is not taking place.”
White nationalists take the stand
Defendants in Unite the Right trial testify during case’s second week
By Lisa Provence and Courteney Stuart
The second week of the Sines v. Kessler trial saw warm praise for Adolf Hitler, AWOL defendants, and a white nationalist antisemite cross-examining a Holocaust scholar.
The lawsuit was brought by a collection of nine plaintiffs who claim the organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally conspired to commit racially motivated violence. The trial opened with jury selection on October 25, and the latter half of the first week was full of testimony from the plaintiffs, who described the effects of the physical and emotional injuries they sustained that day.
In the trial’s second week, defendants began to take the stand.
Much of last Tuesday was spent with defendant Matthew Heimbach, head of the Traditionalist Worker Party in 2017, on the stand. The court has already sanctioned Heimbach for failing to turn over evidence during discovery. Heimbach blamed his ex-wife for destroying his electronic devices and deleting his social media accounts.
Heimbach says he was “partially inspired” by Hitler and that at some events, followers would exclaim, “Heil Heimbach.”
Exhibits showed that neo-Nazis planned the Unite the Right rally on a Discord server called Charlottesville 2.0. The Traditionalist Worker Party had its own server, where Heimbach called for the “total destruction of Jewry.”
The exhibits showed that organizer Jason Kessler and Heimbach discussed the white polo shirt and khakis dress code, and that Kessler worried about KKK members showing up in robes.
In his deposition, Heimbach said Trad Workers had their own dress code: all black, because “black is a good color to hide blood. Blood on white polos is not a good look.”
Defendants in the conspiracy case have tried to distance themselves from each other—despite presiding Judge Norman Moon telling jurors conspirators don’t have to know each other. Heimbach said he’d had maybe one conversation with Richard Spencer, a featured speaker at Unite the Right, and they talked about their families. He also professed to barely know Kessler, Elliott Kline, and “Crying Nazi” Christopher Cantwell. Heimbach had appeared on Cantwell’s “Radical Agenda” podcast.
On Wednesday, the jury saw videos of Robert “Azzmador” Ray. Ray worked for the racist and antisemitic website The Daily Stormer, and hasn’t shown up for the trial. He’s also one of several defendants who have been sanctioned in the case for failure to comply with discov-
EZE AMOS
Defendant Richard Spencer leaves the courtroom on the first day of the trial.
ery, and he’s a fugitive on two warrants, one from the August 11 torch rally and another for failure to comply with a court order last year.
In September, a federal judge sanctioned Ray by authenticating evidence that established as fact multiple allegations, including that Ray “entered into an agreement with one or more co-conspirators to engage in racially motivated violence in Charlottesville, Virginia,” on the weekend of the Unite the Right rally. Ray “was motivated by animus against racial minorities, Jewish people, and their supporters when conspiring to engage in acts of intimidation and violence,” the evidence shows.
In the videos, Ray is seen participating in the torch rally and spewing antisemitic vitriol near the now-removed statue of Robert E. Lee in downtown Charlottesville.
The plaintiffs presented extensive evidence from the Discord web platform showing Ray’s communications with other white nationalists in the months leading up to the rally.
“Our guys need to get a grip on the fact that they’re probably going to have to physically fight these people,” Ray wrote on August 7, less than a week before the rally.
Ray’s other posts expressed his hatred of Jewish and Black people and his desire to inflict physical harm.
“I just got done with an hourslong chat with some of the event organizers,” Ray wrote. “The plan is the same. Gas the kikes.”
In what may have been the most surreal exchange of the week, Cantwell, who’s rep-
DEBORAH LIPSTADT, EMORY UNIVERSITY
resenting himself, cross-examined one of the nation’s leading experts in Holocaust denial.
“There’s a template of charges that you find, if not all of them, in present antisemitic rhetoric,” said Deborah Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University who has authored numerous books and peer-reviewed articles on antisemitism and Holocaust denial.
Those charges, she said, include Jewish people having “inordinate financial power,” being “clever, conniving, crafty,” “controlling a large portion of society,” and finally, “being the devil,” working to harm the public for their own benefit.
“Antisemitism is ubiquitous,” she said, noting the logical fallacy of Holocaust denial.
Spencer, the one-time poster boy for the alt-right, was on the witness stand for over four hours on Thursday. Much of his testimony involved quibbling over what he’d said in a 2020 deposition, texts, and other public statements.
“Do you believe the races should be separated?” asked plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Bloch. “No,” said Spencer.
Bloch pulled up Spencer’s July 2020 deposition, in which he agreed that the races should be separated.
“That’s a semantic issue,” insisted Spencer from the witness stand.
Spencer conceded he was an advocate for a white ethno-state, but disagreed that such a move would result in a race war. “I was trying to effect social change,” he said.
Bloch introduced a video in which Spencer proclaimed his ownership of a white America, and said, “For us it is conquer or die.”
The antisemitic rhetoric carried into the next day, when League of the South founder Michael Hill took the stand.
“One hundred and nine times in the history of the world, the Jew has been banished from our midst. Lord, we ask that you make 110 come soon for our southland,” said Hill in a video played for the jury. In the video, Hill, an adverse witness for the plaintiffs, calls the Holocaust “that hoax that the Jew has been perpetrating for 80 years now,” before he burns the Israeli flag, a copy of the Talmud, and The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx.
Levine also questioned Hill about his role in helping to organize the rally.
“I did speak with Mr. Duke, and I put him in contact with Mr. Kessler and they made the arrangements,” Hill said of David Duke, the infamous white supremacist, longtime KKK leader, and one-time candidate for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana. Duke was present at the Unite the Right rally, and spoke briefly in McIntire Park after the rally was officially canceled.
Plaintiffs, too, shared testimony. Marissa Blair narrowly missed getting hit by James Fields’ car when he plowed into a crowd of counterprotesters on August 12. Heather Heyer, her best friend, was killed, and her then-fiancé Marcus Martin was injured.
On Monday, she described the terror, chaos, and confusion that followed the attack. “We didn’t know what had happened,” she said. “I was looking for Marcus. I went to where we had been. I saw his red baseball hat.”
Her voice choked with emotion. “It was covered with blood.”
People led her to Martin and she went with him to the hospital. There, she said, she learned Heyer was dead.
“I dropped to my knees and sobbed,” she said.
Blair said she could count her friends on two hands, and Heyer was one of them. “She said I was an optimist and she was a realist. She cared about people.”
Reports of hazardous conditions in regional jail persist
By Brielle Entzminger
reporter@c-ville.com
“T his is very unhealthy in here for all,” reads one letter. “No one deserves this kind of punishment.” In dozens of letters written over a period of months, people incarcerated at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail reported that shoddy COVID containment procedures, poor general hygiene, and strict visitation policies have plagued the facility. These complaints are not new. Since last year, the Charlottesville chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has been corresponding by mail with more than a dozen people in the ACRJ. In January, C-VILLE published a story detailing the unhygienic conditions and other issues at the facility. According to recent interviews with C-
VILLE—and additional letters collected by
DSA—very little has changed at the jail.
Poor COVID management
In recent months, the ACRJ has failed to properly treat COVID cases and keep the deadly virus from spreading, according to multiple sources from within the facility.
Over the summer, Terrence Winston says that his entire cell block contracted coronavirus, even though most of the men were fully vaccinated.
“One person had to go to medical, and we quarantined, but they never came and COVID tested us,” explains Winston, who has been incarcerated at ACRJ since 2019. “The only thing they did was check our blood pressure, check our temperature, and gave us this cough and cold medicine.”
“Some people just had the sniffles, but others had the cough, sore throat, congested head cold, lost sense of smell and taste, body aches,” he adds. “I still really don’t have my full sense of taste and smell back.”
According to ACRJ Superintendent Martin Kumer, there are currently three active COVID cases at the jail. Around 47 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, and 55 percent have received at least one dose of the shot.
In September, Deryck Brown claims the jail added a new person to his block in the middle of a lockdown. The man soon started exhibiting minor COVID symptoms, and the whole block had to get tested. Four people tested positive and were put into quarantine, but “we all had it, all 12 of us,” wrote Brown.
Over the next few days, he and another man started to experience COVID symptoms too. They were tested again and moved to a quarantine block. However, they were later moved to the medical unit due to issues with a “problematic bunch,” then back to quarantine.
SKYCLAD AERIAL
Inmates at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail say conditions at the facility are unhealthy, with complaints ranging from poor hygiene to unacceptable COVID containment procedures.
“Initially I praised ACRJ’s handling of COVID, but now I’m simply appalled,” wrote Brown. “[Jail administration is] moving all these people around, potentially exposing healthy people to sick people and making a huge mess out of this whole situation.”
When he wrote his letter, Brown was still experiencing severe symptoms of the virus.
“Now it hurts to breathe, I can’t smell anything, my whole body aches, and I feel like shit, all because they forgot the meaning of the word ‘lockdown,’” he wrote.
Incarcerated people also report that jail leadership hasn’t addressed their complaints about the building’s numerous health and sanitary issues.
One woman, who asked to remain anonymous, claims that the older part of the jail, built in the 1970s, is filled with cockroaches and spiders. The showers get backed up regularly, and the faucets don’t work properly.
“We are always getting watered down cleaning solution,” she wrote of the women’s quarters. “And the towels that we get to exchange once a week ALWAYS smell bad.”
The men—housed in the newer part of the jail, which was built in 2000—report similar conditions, including black mold in the showers, cells, and air vents. There are also leaks in the ceiling. One letter writer reports that the heat hasn’t been turned on yet, either.
“There is a bag full of poop water hanging from a pipe from the ceiling,” wrote Winston. “It’s filthy as fuck.”
“This is a nightmare,” wrote Allan Via, who has been incarcerated at ACRJ for four years.
Men also report cockroaches, maggots, spiders, silverfish, and fruit flies running rampant in the facility.
While heading to bed one night in August, Winston realized he had a small bump on his left arm. When he woke up, his entire arm was swollen and filled with fluid. Though the nurses told him it was a staph infection, he believes it was a spider bite.
“I’m sitting there playing spades, and it just busted. This stuff just starts bleeding out of my arm,” explains Winston. “It was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“I had a humongous hole in my arm. They were supposed to treat it every day, then they wanted to stop,” he continues. “Once the hole finally closed, it still was swollen...they kept putting me on antibiotics instead of just checking on it to make sure it was fine. They just gave up.”
Other men in the jail have also gotten spider bites, including on their faces, claims Winston.
“We reach out, we ask for help...and we pretty much get treated like shit,” he says.
Little to do
Since the start of the pandemic, the jail has banned in-person visits, which has taken a heavy toll on the population’s mental health.
“The ban was horrible,” wrote one man, who wished to remain anonymous. “I only gotten to see my kids in pictures.”
“The ban on visits takes away from your spirit, your hope, adding to your loneliness and the great hurt you already have being separated from your loved ones,” wrote Via.
After months of waiting, every person in the jail now has their own tablet, which they can use to do video visitations with those outside, as well as watch TV, listen to music, and send emails. However, it costs $15 per video call, and 5 cents per minute for other tablet activities. Want to catch a football game? It’ll cost you around $9.
And the tablet system doesn’t work for everyone. “My papa has no smartphone or computer, so even video visits are not [worth it] for some of us,” wrote the incarcerated woman.
Kumer says the jail will allow in-person visits again “as soon as it is safe to do so.”
With classes and programming also still on pause, people at the jail are left with little to do. They are not allowed to go outside, and have limited indoor recreation time each week. They are also banned from ordering books online, meaning they can only read books already inside the jail. The jail says this rule was put in place because people had used books to smuggle drugs into the building.
To pass the time, many people feel they have no choice but to become trustees, says Winston.
“Without the trustees, this jail would be fucked. Right now they’re short staffed,” he says. “[Trustees] fix the jail, they help clean the jail, they help keep the jail presentable, they cook...They work like slaves down there.”
Though they do not get paid or receive any special benefits for their hard work, they at least have “something else to do for the day,” Winston says.
Winston himself has not been allowed to be a trustee due to his charges.
“I’ve been sitting up in this jail for almost three years. There’s no programs that will help me,” he says. “It’s like I can’t do nothing. I just gotta sit here.”
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Painting the town red
Looking ahead at a GOP-controlled Virginia
The Republican ticket of Glenn Youngkin, Winsome Sears, and Jason Miyares prevailed in Tuesday’s election.
By Kristin O’Donoghue
“W hen I was a young man… I’d get so wrapped up in elections,” says state Senator Creigh Deeds, who represents Charlottesville and some surrounding rural areas. “But an election is not an event, it’s part of a process. The work continues after the election.”
Still, it was a consequential election: For the last two years, Democrats controlled all three branches of state government. Then, on Tuesday, Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe by 2 percent, ending a losing streak for Republicans, who haven’t won a statewide Virginia election since 2009. The GOP also flipped the House from a 55-45 Democratic majority to a 52-48 Republican advantage. Democrats hold a slim 21-19 majority in the state Senate.
The change in party control of the legislature could have huge consequences for the state’s future.
Despite the losses, Deeds remains hopeful that there’s legislation the Democrats can get passed with a Republican House of Delegates and a Democratic Senate. Deeds has spent 29 years in the state legislature, and he’s been in the minority for 16 of those years. “Democrats won’t put the breaks on anything, they’ll just temper policy goals with a little realism,” he says.
Delegate Sally Hudson, meanwhile, is concerned that some of the progress of the last two years will slow or halt. For example, meaningful change Democrats had made on criminal justice reform risks being undone by Republicans.
“Virginia still has draconian laws that Democrats were trying to unwind,” Hudson says. “I worry that work will start slowing down.”
Some new initiatives, too, are suddenly in jeopardy. “Marijuana legalization is still a work in progress and there’s a lot to be determined,” Hudson says. “Democrats and Republicans have a very different vision for that.”
On the bright side, “we still have a lot of energetic members of the House—there’s been a sea change in the past few years and we now have a diverse and vibrant body of members in the House,” Hudson says.
Rob Bell, a Republican delegate representing parts of Albemarle County, declined to comment.
Shenandoah Republican Delegate Todd Gilbert is set to move from House Minority Leader to Speaker. In a recent statement, he claimed that for the past two years, “the Constitution and the rules and our procedures have been run over.” Republicans are going to try to “run a more open process,” and fix some of the institutional damage they claim was caused by the Dems.
Gilbert said in a news conference that Republicans’ top priority will be education and that they’ll also work on “tweaking, not scrapping” the recently implemented marijuana legalization bill.
Many of the promises Youngkin made on the campaign trail, such as slashing the transportation budget, privatizing public education, and limiting women’s access to safe and legal abortions, will likely be “hugely unpopular” in Virginia, says state Senator Ghazala Hashmi, a Democrat representing District 10, which contains parts of central Virginia from Powhatan to the outskirts of Richmond.
“We know that Virginians have no desire to replicate the failures of other GOP-led states such as Texas and Florida,” she says.
Looking around the country, Youngkin’s win could change the way Republican candidates approach their 2022 races. In particular, other GOP candidates might borrow from Youngkin’s education playbook, according to J. Miles Coleman of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
In the final stretch of the campaign, Youngkin promised more parental involvement in the educational process and emphasized his opposition to critical race theory, a high-level framework for understanding race, which is not taught in any primary schools in Virginia.
“By the end of the 2021 campaign, Youngkin was very clearly the ‘education’ candidate. Perhaps the bigger lesson there is that candidates would be smart to pick one or two signature issues like that and stick with them,” Coleman says.
Virginia’s 11 U.S. Congressional representatives are up for reelection in 2022. Democrats currently hold seven of those seats, but at least two will be very competitive elections. Democrats need to “communicate their successes better,” Hashmi believes, pointing to the recent federal infrastructure bill as an example of the kind of thing worth emphasizing.
UVA politics professor Jennifer Lawless agrees, saying that “Democrats need to focus on what they have delivered to everyday Americans.”
“No politics is local,” Lawless says. “In recent decades, national issues have dominated local political agendas. National figures endorse and stump for local candidates. And money for state-level candidates floods in from national donors. Despite talking points to the contrary, that’s exactly what we saw this time around.”
Hudson says delegates have to push back on this trend. “Candidates who prevailed did the best job connecting with their community, and addressed issues at the top of their constituents’ minds,” she says. “There is something very small-d democratic about running for delegate.”
Democrats won’t change their policy priorities given the new landscape, say Hashmi and Deeds. The party will continue to prioritize public schools, higher education, infrastructure, the environment, support for small business, and access to health care.
“We’ll get through this,” Deeds says. “We just have to work harder.”
Kind of blue
Charlottesville City went 82.9 percent for McAuliffe and 16 percent for Youngkin, and McAuliffe took Albemarle County 61.9 to 37.4. Those might sound like Democratic blowouts, but it’s a lower margin of victory than other Democrats have enjoyed here in recent elections. In total, McAuliffe won the combined Charlottesville-Albemarle area by 36 percent. In 2020, Joe Biden won the area by 46 percent, and in 2017, Ralph Northam won here by 40 percent. Cutting down Democratic margins of victory in super-blue areas was one key to Youngkin’s victory.
Additionally, turnout fell from the 2020 presidential election, as always happens in off-year elections. Biden got 17,500 more votes in Charlottesville and Albemarle in 2020 than McAuliffe did last week.
Local winners and losers
Republicans Chris Runion, Rob Bell, and Matt Farris, and Democrat Sally Hudson, the four House of Delegates members who represent Charlottesville and Albemarle, each easily won re-election for another two-year term.
Locally, former school board member Juandiego Wade and UVA planner Brian Pinkston cruised to victory in the City Council race, earning 42.5 percent and 36.9 percent of the vote, respectively. Independent candidate Yas Washington finished third with 12.5 percent. Current Mayor Nikuyah Walker, who dropped out of the race in September, after her name had already been printed on the ballots, earned 7 percent of the vote. The vote split between council candidates was remarkably even across the city’s voting precincts; no candidate had particular strengths or weaknesses in any part of town.
Lisa Larson-Torres won re-election to the Charlottesville school board, where she’ll be joined by newcomers Emily Dooley, a former teacher, principal, and realtor, and Dom Morse, a teacher at Community Lab School. In Albemarle County, incumbent Graham Paige dispatched a write-in challenge from conservative Randy Zackrisson.—Ben Hitchcock
