This essay represents an update of a social media post I did in 2017

Back in fall 2017, I spent a lot of time going through over 26,000 digitized images from UVA history (thanks to the Library for having such a fine and accessible collection of digitized materials!). The project was really about tracking down historic photos, lithographs, etchings, postcards, and the like that revealed some of UVA's pre-1865 history (or were good visual references when talking about a specific space in the old Academical Village). It was an eye-opening experience, especially as it related to the University's history post-1880 that I have only recently begun to systematically study as part of my ongoing work co-chairing the UVA President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation (PCUAS). The Jefferson statues, the Rotunda, and the Lawn have been sites of community protest for nearly two hundred years.

Back in September 2017, while the horror of August 11 and 12 were still quite fresh in this community, students and faculty held a night protest at the Jefferson statue north of the Rotunda. The protest generated a lot of news coverage and some suggested that the students, by daring to "question" Thomas Jefferson and shrouding the Jefferson statue in a symbolic gesture echoing the shrouding of the Confederate statues in Charlottesville, had somehow done something wrong, had sullied "our sacred Grounds."

I can attest to the fact that here in Charlottesville, no statues have as of yet been harmed--they all (but one) still stand and do so uncontextualized (happily, statues do not have feelings and are not actually sacred--they are but stone and metal objects). There’s one exception: the At the Ready standing soldier guarding the Albemarle County Courthouse, dedicated just over a hundred years ago at the height of the age of segregation. That Lost Cause monument, better known locally as “Johnny Reb,” was taken down and delivered to a Civil War battlefield commemoration group in the Shenandoah Valley. Sadly, it wasn’t harmed either, but it at least no longer sends a clear message to non-white people in our community about their likelihood of receiving a fair hearing before the bar.

That 2017 debate about student self-governance, student protest, and how different groups define the limits of respectable protest , had me revisiting so many of those thousands of digital images then. That September 2017 student protest was important and part of a very long student tradition here. Three years later, the UVA community is once again having a similar conversation, this time on just what we might mean by “contextualizing” the Jefferson statue and what we might mean by a commitment free speech, even when that speech offends some.

The Rotunda, the Lawn, and the Jefferson statues have always been deeply politicized sites. For two centuries, students have taken to the Lawn and gathered at the Rotunda to speak truth to power, to validate and re-validate the meaning of community, and to voice specific sets of contemporary demands. Some of these events were frankly light-hearted: witness the 1995 UVA football victory over FSU, when students rushed the field, tore down the goal posts, and deposited the pieces at the Jefferson statue's base. Others, including UVA students in the 1830s marching armed and in pseudo-military array on the Lawn in protest of faculty rules governing their behavior, terrified faculty then and would similarly terrify us today.

Yes, those spaces are in some way sacred to the UVA student tradition, but not quite in the way some may currently think. They are not sacred because Jefferson designed them. They are not sacred because they are old and beautiful. They are not sacred because Jefferson's spirit lives on in bronze and granite. They are not sacred because with Monticello, they’ve been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Instead, the symbolic power of those spaces comes from something else. They are exactly the spots that everyone has always gone to when they want to make political statements or demand change. Students, when they seek redress at UVA, start with protests on the Lawn, at the Rotunda, or the Jefferson statue. Many of these protests have been greeted by some administrators, alumni, and even faculty as “uncivil” or outside the bounds of “respectable” speech. Neither student political protests nor reactionary responses by older generations are new. Those student protests do not in any way violate the supposed sanctity of those spaces. Instead, the protests re-affirm the sanctity of those spaces; re-claim those spaces as ones “owned” by students; and re-affirm how they are powerfully symbolic of this university's educational mission—seeking the truth wherever it may lead us.

Using the Lawn and Rotunda as sites of UVA political protest dates back to shortly after the opening of the University. It was in those spaces that early students resisted the imposition of what they saw as draconian disciplinary rules governing their behavior. It is where many UVA students in 1860, in a hurry to support the emerging Confederate cause, met to run a Confederate flag up the flagpole at the Rotunda. It is where suffragettes in the early twentieth century marched in a pageant in support of expanding voting rights to include women. It is where protesters gathered in 2012 to demand the reinstatement of President Sullivan. Three years ago, 7,000 people held a candelight vigil on the Lawn to reject white supremacy, remember those injured or even killed August 11 and 12, and reclaim both the Lawn and Rotunda for the community.

Protesting and using Jefferson, the Rotunda, and the Lawn are a very old UVA tradition. UVA students (as well as faculty and alumni) have always returned to these so-called sacred spaces as they attempt to shape the University to fit their contemporary world—that's student self-governance at its best. This university belongs to the current student body—we should be listening to their demands and mentoring them on how to work with faculty or administrators to create positive change.