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Cynthia Bond: The UVA Class the White Supremacists Didnt Take
In 2001 Richard Spencer received his B.A. from the University of Virginia. Jason Kessler graduated in 2009. My cousin Julian Bond, the erudite, firebrand civil rights icon, taught at the school from 1992 through 2012. He traveled from D.C. to Charlottesville for twenty years, educated nearly five thousand students.
Julian’s class, The History of the Civil Rights Movement, was an elective. It seems almost a certainty that neither Spencer nor Kessler would have taken it.
Perhaps back then Kessler, the organizer of Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally, and Spencer, at the time not yet a Nazi, were already steeping hate like tea and crafting a new society on the Lawn. Or dreaming of a purely white nation as they passed UVA’s Rotunda — all while Julian opened volume after volume of his life and the lives of others he had known.
Julian would have spoken about SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which he helped organize. The sit-ins at the whites-only lunch counter. The Freedom Rides, the group of armed white men who met his car on the road one night. He would have discussed co-founding the Southern Poverty Law Center and chairing the NAACP, although I’m quite certain he would never have mentioned how the Library of Congress named him a Living Legend in 2008.
Kessler and Spencer may have passed Julian and his wife, Pam, on the grounds, may have eaten one table over at Christian’s Pizza. Maybe Jason liked the same kind of bottled root beer my cousin Julian did or, less likely, anchovies with pepperoni on his pizza. One of them may have stood behind Julian at the New Dominion Bookshop.
Julian’s class, The History of the Civil Rights Movement, was an elective. It seems almost a certainty that neither Spencer nor Kessler would have taken it.
Perhaps back then Kessler, the organizer of Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally, and Spencer, at the time not yet a Nazi, were already steeping hate like tea and crafting a new society on the Lawn. Or dreaming of a purely white nation as they passed UVA’s Rotunda — all while Julian opened volume after volume of his life and the lives of others he had known.
Julian would have spoken about SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which he helped organize. The sit-ins at the whites-only lunch counter. The Freedom Rides, the group of armed white men who met his car on the road one night. He would have discussed co-founding the Southern Poverty Law Center and chairing the NAACP, although I’m quite certain he would never have mentioned how the Library of Congress named him a Living Legend in 2008.
Kessler and Spencer may have passed Julian and his wife, Pam, on the grounds, may have eaten one table over at Christian’s Pizza. Maybe Jason liked the same kind of bottled root beer my cousin Julian did or, less likely, anchovies with pepperoni on his pizza. One of them may have stood behind Julian at the New Dominion Bookshop.
https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/08/22/the-uva-class-the-white-supremacists-didnt-take/
