Simeon Booker and Rev. Curtis W. Harris
Stalwarts of civil rights remembered B4
Richmond Free Press © 2017 Paradigm Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
VOL. 26 NO. 50
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
www.richmondfreepress.com
ee Fr
Fr ee
c e l e b rat ing o u r 2 5 t h A nniv e rsar y
December 14-16, 2017
Wrestling with the past CIty Council rejects resolution seeking authority to determine statues’ future
Neo-Confederates again outnumbered at snowy second Monument Ave. rally
By Jeremy M. Lazarus
By Saraya Wintersmith
Was it a victory for white supremacy? Richmond City Councilman Michael J. Jones answered that question with an emphatic, “Yes,” Tuesday, about 12 hours after the 9th District representative watched his colleagues torpedo his resolution dealing with the statues of the slavery-defending Confederates that dominate Monument Avenue. By a 6-2 vote following more than 90 minutes of debate Monday night, City Council killed his proposal to ask the General Assembly to give Richmond the authority to decide the future of the statues that stand as reminders of Richmond’s role as the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Despite the vote, the legislature is expected to take up the issue of local control of such statues at the request of Charlottesville and other communities that want them removed from public spaces. Charlottesville City Council voted earlier this year to remove its own Confederate statuary from publicly owned parks. Mr. Jones is not giving up and pledged Wednesday to introduce a similar resolution after a commission Mayor Levar M. Stoney set up to review the future of the statues finishes its work in May and presents its recommendations. While Mr. Jones on Monday rejected the idea that “a vote against the resolution was a vote for white supremacy,” he changed that position a day later. “Council’s inaction on our right to govern ourselves is indeed a victory for white supremacy and reflective of Richmond’s systematic and
A small band of armed neo-Confederates protesting the possible removal of Confederate statues on Richmond’s Monument Avenue were met last Saturday by a vocal group of counterprotesters rankled by the amount of money the Confederate rallies are costing the city. The four-hour protest, the second in the city since mid-September by the Tennessee-based CSA II: The New Confederate States of America, was muted in part by chilly temperatures and snowy conditions Saturday and the low-key efforts by Richmond Police beforehand to deal with the rally without drawing wider public attention and potentially more protesters. Police largely kept the 15 neo-Confederates and the 30 or so counterprotesters separated as they walked around the state-owned statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Many of the Confederate supporters were dressed in camouflage clothing. Several had assault weapons and other rifles slung over their shoulders. The initial rally on Sept. 16, which drew a handful of CSA II members and several hundred counterprotesters, cost the city more than a half a million dollars, mostly for police overtime and equipment. Richmond Police declined to release information about the number of officers at Saturday’s rally. Even though police presence was visibly reduced compared to the first rally, the expense became a point of contention on Saturday as counterprotesters loudly addressed and taunted the neo-Confederates. “That $570,000 could’ve gone to our schools, to fix our public transportation, to fix our roads,” Joseph Rogers said over a speaker system. “But,
Please turn to A4
Sandra Sellars/Richmond Free Press
A gaggle of counterprotesters make their views known to a neo-Confederate bearing a rifle during the cold and snowy rally last Saturday at the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue.
City challenged to find $ for new school buildings By Jeremy M. Lazarus
The likelihood that City Hall will rush to build new school buildings under a plan the Richmond School Board is advancing appeared to dim at an Education Compact meeting Monday with Mayor Levar M. Stoney and Richmond City Council. Under the plan approved last week without a public hearing, a split School Board is calling on the city to provide $224.8 million over the next five years to replace George Wythe High, ElkhardtThompson Middle and Greene, George Mason and Woodville elementary schools. In addition, the plan calls for renovations at J.L. Francis Elementary and the start of renovations at Fairfield Elementary. It represents the first phase of the board’s 20-year plan to spend a projected $800 million to replace or renovate 39 buildings. The issue is a top priority for city residents, who overwhelmingly approved on Nov. 7 a referendum to improve Richmond’s dilapidated schools. One big challenge that was evident at the meeting: Finding the money, still a highly uncertain matter despite widespread agreement from all the Education Compact members that school modernization needs to be dealt with. New School Board member Kenya Gibson, 3rd District, made that point. “We’ve had plans again and again, and nothing’s happened,” she said. “Unless we start to focus our conversation on funding, nothing will happen.” And funding did come up. During the next five years, Richmond would be able to bor-
Please turn to A4
It’s a 3-peat! Highland Springs High School wins third consecutive state football title By Fred Jeter
Highland Springs High School’s talented and determined football Springers have done it again. The Eastern Henrico County squad, aka the “Beast of the East,” is Virginia’s 5A football champion for a breathtaking third straight season. Finishing the season 14-1, the Springers three-peated on Sunday, Dec. 10, with a decisive 40-27 victory over Tuscarora High School of Leesburg at Hampton University’s Armstrong Stadium. The game wasn’t even close. The Springers led 33-6 at halftime before hitting cruise control. The game was played on a Sunday, a rarity for public schools, because of Saturday’s postponement for snow. The skirmish will be remembered not only for what happened during the game, but what happened afterward in a packed communication room. In the postgame press conference, Highland Springs High School Coach Loren Johnson made it abundantly clear his program is about much more than scoring and preventing touchdowns.
Please turn to A4
Please turn to A4
Capturing Reality Photography
Highland Springs High School Coach Loren Johnson, left, and middle linebacker Christian White throw up the 3-peat sign after the “Beast in the East” team wallops Tuscarora High School last Sunday to win the Virginia 5A football championship at Hampton University’s Armstrong Stadium.
Gov. McAuliffe, end new Jim Crow voter suppression tactic By Gary Flowers and Greg Palast
Imagine a wonderful parting gift from Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Imagine if Gov. McAuliffe put an end to Virginia’s strange and inexplicable participation in a GOP voter suppression trick that reeks of Jim Crow. Since 2013, this stealth voter purge program has cost tens of thousands of Virginians of color their right to vote. It’s called Interstate Crosscheck. Interstate Crosscheck is the suspect computer program created by Kris Kobach, former Kansas secretary of
state and a Trump administration appointee as vice chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, also known as the Voter Fraud Commission. President Trump, who is unfit to serve, alleged that millions of Americans were registered or “voting many, many times” in two or more states in the same election — a felony. In June, Gov. McAuliffe laughed off these claims of mass voter fraud as nonsense and denounced the Election Integrity Commission as “a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.”
Furthermore, the governor flatly refused to hand over Virginia’s voter files to Mr. Kobach. What Gov. McAuliffe did not say — and apparently did not know — is that Virginia already had turned over the
Commentary files to Mr. Kobach months earlier. In January, Virginia’s Elections Board sent Mr. Kobach the voting records of 5,629,081 Virginians, including their birth date and Social Security data. Worse, last year, the state Depart-
ment of Elections tagged 73,798 Virginians as “duplicate” voters based in part on Mr. Kobach’s suspect list. Mr. Kobach, using his Crosscheck computer-matching program, has generated a list of an astonishing 3.1 million Americans that he has tagged as suspected “duplicate” voters or registrants. What is not so laughable is that 28 states have removed hundreds of thousands of voters named on Mr. Kobach’s secret lists. Not surprisingly, almost all of the Crosscheck states are Republican controlled. A surprising exception: Virginia.
So who are these Virginians discovered by Mr. Kobach who dare to register to vote in two states at once? Despite official resistance, a Rolling Stone magazine investigations team obtained Virginia’s Crosscheck list of the accused. For example, according Crosscheck, James Cross Barnes III of Arlington is “potentially” the same voter as James Elmer Barnes Jr. of Fayetteville, Ga. And James Anthony Barnes is supposed to be the same person as James Ratcliffe Barnes Jr. Please turn to A4