Jun 7, 2017 - CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — A city council in Virginia has voted on the new names of two parks formerly named after Confederate generals.
News outlets report Charlottesville’s Lee Park becomes Emancipation Park and Jackson Park becomes Justice Park per Monday’s decision. The renaming of the parks fulfills a recommendation from the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces convened last year to study if Charlottesville should move statues of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
http://wavy.com/2017/06/07/2-virginia-parks-shed-confederate-general-names
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At their regular meeting on May 6, 2016, the Charlottesville City Council passed a resolution forming the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces. To read the resolution in full, please click here.
On June 6, City Council appointed the following members to the Blue Ribbon Commission:
Gordon Fields, Human Rights Commission representative
Rachel Lloyd, PLACE representative
Margaret O’Bryant, Historic Resources Committee representative
Andrea Douglas
Frank Dukes
Don Gathers
Melvin Burruss
Jane Smith
John Mason
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Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces - Report to City Council - December 19, 2016
The commission wishes to acknowledge and assert the following as fundamental to our work contained in this report:
• that far too often African American history has been ignored, silenced or suppressed;
• that far too often our public spaces and histories have also ignored, silenced or suppressed the story of white supremacy and the unimaginable harms done under that cause;
• that the narratives that supported white supremacy that began as long ago as 1619 in Virginia, although challenged by many, continue in various forms today;
• that the impacts of those narratives today are evidenced around us in the loss of African American population and in racial disparities involving health, employment, family wealth, public safety, education, and more;
• that to tell a more complete racial history and to transform these narratives in order to be come the community we want to become, it is necessary for us use our public spaces to
promote understanding of all of our history, good and bad.
http://www.charlottesville.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=48999
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about your original push to have the Robert E. Lee statue taken down and what you ultimately got, that isn’t talked about as much, which is some kind of—
WES BELLAMY: Equity package, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —some kind of funds for reparations?
WES BELLAMY: Yeah, so, this all started nearly a year and a half ago, in March of last year. I received several different phone calls, emails. There was a petition from a local student here in the area about an effort and a push to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee. People in Charlottesville have been talking about this for some years, but just last year there was a nuance in a bill that was vetoed at the state House by our governor that essentially said that if you want to move these kind of statues and things of that nature, it’s a local issue, so you have the right to be able to do so. My colleague and I, Ms. Kristin Szakos, we both decided to push really hard.
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And in the midst of all of this, we also got an equity package passed, which I presented in January, before we had our first vote—and it was unanimously passed—which gave us $950,000 to our African American Heritage Center, $250,000 to build onto one of the parks in the local African-American community. We got $2.5 million to public housing redevelopment, $50,000 annually for anyone who lives in public housing to get free GED training, another $50,000 to anyone who lives 80 percent below the AMI, which is the annual median income, as well as public housing, to have scholarships of sorts to go to our local community college. We got a position for black male achievement, which we’re calling a youth opportunity coordinator. So, I mean, in all, in all, it was about $4 million, basically, from funding, put specifically into marginalized communities to help bridge the gap and create equity.
All of this is about equity. We need equity, and not equality. Those are two different things. Equity is giving everyone what they need in order to have the same playing field. Equality is just giving everyone the same thing. I don’t want equality. I want us to have equity. And we’re going to push for equity in every space, whether that’s public parks, whether that’s in our city budget, no matter where it is, as long as I’m on council. And I’m going to push for it until the day I die.
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/7/charlottesville_va_backs_reparations_fund_for