The Democratic candidates for governor and lieutenant governor and Sen. Tim Kaine and his wife Anne Holton stopped at University Democrats at the University of Virginia’s game day event Saturday to talk with students about the November election.
Lieutenant Governor and the democratic gubernatorial nominee Ralph Northam, Kaine, Attorney General Mark Herring and democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax stopped by the Lawn at UVa to reassure voters that Virginia is a welcoming state despite what happened in Charlottesville the weekend of Aug. 12.
“They came here because they don’t like the direction that Virginia is going,” Kaine said, referring to the thousands of white nationalists who descended on Charlottesville. “Some of these people have a fantasy about the past and in their psychosis Virginia plays a role. And when they see a Virginia that is moving ahead, that’s getting more inclusive, that’s it’s grappling with telling our story and our history in a more authentic, inclusive and historically accurate way. When they see a community of Charlottesville that is about love and tolerance and coming together, it makes them mad.”
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The Unite the Right rally was said to be a rally in support of the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Emancipation Park. While it was scheduled to begin at noon, it fell quickly into chaos as white nationalist groups entered the park hours earlier. Police declared an unlawful assembly after ralliers and counter-protesters clashed.
That afternoon, area resident Heather Heyer was killed near the corner of Fourth and Water streets after a car drove into a group of counter-protesters. Later in the day, two Virginia State Police troopers died when their helicopter, which had hovered over the rally for much of the day, crashed in Albemarle County.
On Aug. 11, rally attendees gathered with tiki torches at Nameless Field on UVa grounds and marched down the Lawn to the Rotunda chanting “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.”
“What did that have to do with statues?,” Kaine asked. “Nothing. It was not about statues. It was about hatred, it was about violence, it was about bigotry, and it was even about murder.”
Northam said the first step to making sure that doesn’t happen again is for leaders to step up and denounce racism and intolerance.
“It starts with a strong message, and I regret that the president of this country has not called it out for what it is, that it was a group of white supremacists, that there weren’t two sides, that these weren’t fine people and we don’t need them here in Virginia, and that starts with leaders,” he said.
Herring said that his office will be part of investigating how the city and the state prepared for the rally.
“The governor’s got a commission established that our office will be a part of to identify what might be able to be done going forward,” he said.
“I think we need to take a look at when there are demonstrations by groups that have a known history of advocating violence, that we take a look at what conditions might be appropriate for those types of permits,” Herring said.
Kaine said he’s dealt with monument, statue and name issues as mayor and governor. He said he gives the same advice to localities still.
“It starts with the quality of listening you do. If you’re not listening to the community, no solution will work,” he said. “If you do engage in honest listening, that gets you toward an acceptable result.”
He said it’s not only about subtraction, but also about addition.
“There wasn’t a one size-fits-all answer, but what we decided is that it wasn’t just about what you took down, it was also about what you put up and who’s story you told,” he said.
First year student Avery Gagne, who has worked on Democratic campaigns, said he was impressed by how the candidates and Kaine were actually answering questions from students, not just walking by and shaking hands.
Gagne said he agrees with moving many of the confederate statues.
“You should take down these statues when they’re in this position like in a park, where it’s obviously about celebration and placed in a museum because it is history, but you learn about history in a museum,” Gagne said.
Allison Wrabel is a reporter for The Daily Progress. Contact her at (434) 978-7261, awrabel@dailyprogress.com or @craftypanda on Twitter.