Across Virginia
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) – The millionaire founder of an “alt-right” think tank may be dismissed as a defendant in a lawsuit related to a deadly white nationalist rally in Virginia.The Daily Progress reports Judge Richard E. Moore on Tuesday heard arguments about whether to dismiss William Regnery II.Regnery is the publisher of a far-right website and founder of the National Policy Institute led by white nationalist Richard Spencer. Spencer helped organize the 2017 rally that killed a woman and injured several people, including two sisters who later sued more than a dozen people connected to the rally.Plaintiff attorney David Dickens says Regnery should have known violence was planned for the rally as articles encouraging violence were published on his website. Regnery’s attorney says his client wasn’t involved in the rally’s planning.
Photo: Justin Fairfax Facebook
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Virginia Republicans are renewing their push to hold a bipartisan hearing into sexual assault allegations two women have made against the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor. Their effort looks doomed, as Democrats quickly opposed it and called it a political stunt. GOP Del. Rob Bell sent a letter to Democrats on Monday saying an upcoming special legislative session on gun laws could double as an opportunity for a bipartisan hearing on Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax’s behavior. Two women earlier this year publicly accused Fairfax of sexual assault and said they want to testify before the legislature, but only if both political parties participate. Fairfax has denied any wrongdoing. “We respectfully ask the Democratic Caucus to agree to something — anything — that would allow bipartisan public hearings to take place,” Bell said in his letter. Republicans currently control the General Assembly, but Bell said GOP leaders would agree to create a special committee equally split among Republicans and Democrats for the hearing.
Virginia lawmakers weren’t originally scheduled to return to the Capitol this year. However, in response to a mass shooting last month in Virginia Beach, Gov. Ralph Northam called a special session for July 9 to debate gun laws. Democratic leadership have previously rejected a GOP proposal for a hearing on Fairfax and quickly shot down Bell’s latest request. “We will not participate in House Republicans’ political games, nor will we turn such serious allegations into a partisan sideshow,” House Minority Leader Del. Eileen Filler-Corn said in a letter Tuesday.
In February Vanessa Tyson publicly accused Fairfax of forcing her to perform oral sex in his hotel room during the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004. Meredith Watson has also publicly accused Fairfax of sexual assault. She issued a statement accusing him of raping her two decades years ago while they were students at Duke University. The Associated Press generally does not name people who say they are victims of sexual assault, but both women have come forward voluntarily.
Democrats have been divided on how best to respond to those allegations, caught between supporting the only African-American elected official in statewide office and the #MeToo movement that gained steam after allegations of sexual misconduct arose against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Several Democratic House members have said they don’t believe the General Assembly is the best place to investigate the allegations and said they don’t want to impede possible criminal investigations. But other Democrats have said lawmakers should prioritize the wishes of the alleged victims and allow a public hearing.
Photo: VSP
State Police are looking for a 71-year-old man who they say eluded troopers during two recent high-speed chases. Willie Elmore is believed to be living somewhere in Pittsylvania or Halifax Counties. Police say both pursuits were discontinued because of the danger his erratic driving posed to other drivers. Elmore is also wanted on warrants from Danville.
NEWS RELEASE: PITTSYVANIA, Va. – The Virginia State Police are asking for the public’s assistance with any information regarding the location of Willie Junnie Elmore, 71 years of age. Elmore is believed to be residing in Pittsylvania County or Halifax County, VA. Elmore is wanted on multiple charges resulting from two high speed chases by the Virginia State Police and the Pittsylvania County Sheriff’s Office, which were both discontinued do to the danger posed to the public by Elmore’s erratic driving. Elmore is also wanted by The City of Danville Police Department for Felony Shoplifting, (3rd offense) and Felony Failure to Appear. Elmore is known to drive a black 2001, two door Dodge Ram pickup truck, displaying VA tag number UUL-8175 and is known to frequent the City of Danville. Elmore does not have a driver’s license and does not pose a danger to the public unless he is driving a vehicle. If you have any information regarding Elmore, please contact the Virginia State Police, Area 43 office, in Chatham, VA. Phone # (434)432-7287, or #77. You may also contact the Pittsylvania Sheriff’s or Danville Police Department.
MGN
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is siding with the state of Virginia in a case about the state’s decades-old ban on mining radioactive uranium, and ruling that a lawsuit challenging the ban was properly dismissed. The high court announced its 6-3 ruling Monday. Virginia has banned uranium mining since the 1980s. The owners of a massive uranium deposit in Virginia’s Pittsylvania County sued in 2015 to challenge the state’s ban.The deposit’s owners argued that the state’s purpose in passing the ban was improper. Virginia argued that nothing in the federal Atomic Energy Act kept it from banning uranium mining. The Supreme Court agreed. The Pittsylvania County deposit is the largest known uranium deposit in the country.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Voters will elect lawmakers to the Virginia House of Delegates using a map seen as favorable to Democrats, under a ruling from the Supreme Court. The justices’ 5-4 decision Monday was perhaps telegraphed by the fact they previously allowed election planning to go forward using the map. Virginia held its primary last week. Republicans control the House by a slim 51-49 margin. The Republican-run House had urged the Supreme Court to let the state use an election map previously struck down by a lower court as improperly factoring race into the drawing of some districts. This is the last time the state will use the map to elect lawmakers to the House because that map will need to be redrawn following the 2020 census results.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The first thing white people did after Nat Turner’s violent slave insurrection in 1831 was round up more than 120 black people and kill them.
But the next thing white people did was surprising.
Hundreds of them sent petitions to the Virginia General Assembly calling for an end to slavery.
Richmond’s newspapers argued fiercely in favor of abolition. President Thomas Jefferson’s grandson pushed a plan to free slaves and help them settle in the new African nation of Liberia. Even a leader of the militia that put down Turner’s rebellion called for a gradual end to slavery.
In other words, the insurrection almost worked. More than 50 white men, women and children had died in the bloodiest slave revolt on U.S. soil. It forced Virginians to confront the evil that was at the root of their society, and it just plain scared a lot of people. Thanks to public pressure, the General Assembly considered taking radical action.
But the votes fell short. Instead, lawmakers passed harsher laws that made African Americans’ lives even worse. They also aggravated divisions that erupted, 30 years later, in the Civil War.
“It’s, like, one of the saddest moments in American history,” historian Erik S. Root said, “because of the missed opportunity.”
This year, Virginia marks the origins of slavery in the English colonies. The first captured Africans arrived at Virginia’s Point Comfort in August 1619. The debates prompted by Turner’s insurrection were “the most public, focused, and sustained discussion of slavery and emancipation that ever occurred in … any … southern state,” historian Eva Sheppard Wolf wrote.
The process laid bare how deeply conflicted white Southerners were about the topic. There were slave owners who favored abolition and abolitionists who just wanted to get rid of black people. Petitions poured out from every corner of the state — about 40, signed by more than 2,000 people.
In Charles City County, between Williamsburg and Richmond, a group of Quakers sent an eloquent plea for Virginia to remember the ideals that sparked the Revolution.
Slavery was “a system repugnant to the laws of God, and subversive of the rights, and destructive of the happiness of man,” the Quakers wrote. “We, therefore, solemnly believe that some efficient system for the abolition of slavery in the Commonwealth and restoration of the African race to the inalienable rights of man is imperiously demanded by the laws of God, and inseparably connected with the best interests of the Commonwealth at large.”
In Loudoun County, a group of women wrote that they were afraid for their safety. They called for a gradual end to slavery but also the removal of all blacks from Virginia, free and enslaved. A group in Buckingham County wanted an end to slavery out of fear that blacks would soon outnumber whites.
About 30 of the petitions aimed to get all people of color out of Virginia, Root found as he researched his dissertation on the subject. But not all of them wanted to end slavery; several called for purging the state of free blacks so that enslaved workers wouldn’t be influenced by them. Root found most of the petitions in newspaper coverage and compiled them in a book titled “Sons of the Fathers.”
The sentiments were so strong and so numerous that the General Assembly appointed a select committee to consider them. Proslavery legislators fought to keep the committee from taking up the issue of abolition and, in particular, tried to stop the Quaker petition from getting a hearing.
But the House of Delegates voted 93 to 27 to refer the Quaker petition to the committee. And for two weeks in January 1832, the Virginia legislature toyed with the idea of abolishing slavery and emancipating people of African descent.
Thomas Jefferson Randolph, a delegate from Albemarle County, invoked his famous grandfather in calling for a plan to resettle freed slaves in Liberia. The third president, of course, had been shamefully contradictory on the subject. His first act as a young Virginia delegate had been to seek an end to slavery, but he later wrote in his “Notes on the State of Virginia” that blacks were an inferior race. Jefferson also wrote that blacks had been degraded by their treatment by whites. While he maintained in letters that slavery was wrong, he deferred action to future generations.
Randolph proposed letting the people of Virginia (well, the white males) vote on whether to consider abolition. His plan called for a gradual emancipation; the first slaves wouldn’t go free until 1858. But as Wolf noted in her book “Race and Liberty in the New Nation,” the emancipation would begin on July 4, a proposal that “unmistakably recalled Virginians’ attachment to the ideal of universal liberty and the glowing words of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.”
One Jeffersonian sentiment that carried power during the 1832 debates was the idea that bondage corrupted master and slave alike. Many of the calls to end slavery argued that it had weakened the work ethic among whites and that it hamstrung Virginia’s economy.
William Brodnax, a delegate from Dinwiddie County who led the militia that put down Turner’s rebellion, owned more than 100 slaves but argued to the Assembly that the institution had caused “the decay of our prosperity, and the retrograde movement of this once flourishing Commonwealth.”
Brodnax submitted a detailed plan for abolition and resettlement. He would have charged a tax of 30 cents per white person and used the proceeds to relocate 6,000 free and formerly enslaved black people from Virginia every year. He calculated that “in less than 80 years there would not be left a single slave or free negro in all Virginia.”
As racist as the Randolph and Brodnax plans were, they were benign compared with the rhetoric that flowed from the other side. The revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality that flowered in Virginia had become twisted and gnarled.
William Roane, a delegate from Hanover County and the grandson of Patrick Henry, argued that slavery was an inescapable fact of human society. “I think slavery (is) as much a correlative of liberty as cold is of heat,” he said. Or if that’s not stark enough for you: “The torch of liberty has ever burnt brightest when surrounded by the dark and filthy, yet nutritious atmosphere of slavery.”
Root said that kind of sentiment was what drew him to study the Virginia debates. “I was looking at the drift from the American founders, the drift from the Declaration,” he said. “And, in Virginia in this one moment, you had a prime chance to do something that may have staved off the Civil War.”
But this was not the founding generation of Virginia leaders. Slave owners from Tidewater held most of the power in the legislature. West of the Blue Ridge Mountains, whites were much more indifferent toward or even opposed to slavery — leading to the eventual separation of West Virginia during the Civil War.
Instead of rising to the founding principles of freedom for all, Virginia’s lawmakers stooped to a new idea of slavery as a positive good. Thomas Dew, who at the time was a professor at the College of William & Mary, wrote an essay called “Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature,” arguing that blacks and whites could never live together, that slavery was just part of human existence and that everyone was better off because of it.
Over the next 30 years, his essay became a major underpinning of the case for secession.
Ultimately, the General Assembly passed a resolution that was impotent with compromise. While it acknowledged “the great evils arising from the condition of the coloured population of this commonwealth,” it concluded that it was “inexpedient for the present, to make any legislative enactments for the abolition of slavery.”
Having come so close and failed, the legislature followed up by passing a slate of harsh restrictions on people of color, free and enslaved. They cracked down, for example, against preaching, gathering to worship and learning to read.
The outcome managed to “put Revolutionary-era dreams of a free Virginia firmly in the past,” Wolf wrote.
With that passing, of course, the way was cleared for Virginia’s role as the capital of the Confederacy.
In Southampton County, where Nat Turner carried out his rebellion, generations of residents have struggled with how to regard the bloody chapter of their history. Rick Francis, who is white and who lost several ancestors to Turner’s men, said it’s important to remember the impact of the rebellion. That gives him a sense of pride mixed with tragedy.
“Insurrection got it close, got it tight, but nobody could carry it across the finish line and end slavery,” Francis said. “We became in tune with the hardcore slave states from that point on. And we lost our opportunity to end slavery. But the insurrection got us to a point closer than we’d ever been before.”
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VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) — Virginia prosecutors say a middle-schooler is charged with threatening to bomb his school and hurt a teacher after an administrator found disturbing web searches on a school-issued laptop.
The Virginian-Pilot reports a warrant filed this week shows police learned about the threats when a Salem Middle School classmate heard the student talking about wanting to build a bomb and bring it to school.
The warrant says an administrator checked the student’s school-issued laptop and discovered searches for school bombings, assaulting a teacher and average bail for a first-time murder offense. The newspaper reports the student also looked up the family history of one of their teachers online.
The student is being held in juvenile detention. It is unclear when court proceedings will begin.
LEESBURG, Va. (AP) — The president of a northern Virginia NAACP branch is calling for a town councilman’s resignation after he wrote a negative message on a Juneteenth proclamation rather than sign it.
The Leesburg Town Council passed a resolution proclaiming June 19-20 as Juneteenth and urging residents to recognize “this celebration in African-American history.” Juneteenth celebrates slavery’s end in the U.S.
The resolution also recognizes lynchings that occurred in Virginia, including one in Leesburg.
Councilman Thomas Dunn didn’t sign the proclamation, instead writing “This is a celebration lynchings are not” in his signature line.
Loudoun County NAACP President Michelle Thomas said Dunn’s remark is a clear insult. Dunn told news outlets he won’t resign and criticized groups for refusing to accept differing opinions.
He has written similar messages on proclamations related to gay rights and gun violence.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A Virginia agency has issued permits for three new solar projects.Gov. Ralph Northam announced Wednesday that the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has signed off on two new projects in Halifax County and one project in Orange County. Combined, the new projects are expected to generate more than 200 megawatts, or enough energy to power about 25,000 homes.Virginia has seen a dramatic increase in solar facilities in recent years, driven largely by large technology companies seeking carbon-free energy sources for data centers.
The tractor trailer accident happened in Botetourt County this morning at mile marker 151 near the Troutville exit on I-81 . Currently the right northbound lane and shoulder are closed. WDBJ-7 reports one person was taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries