Selective Outrage Over Statues

This is curious.

In their breathless hurry to shroud or dismantle monuments to Confederate generals, Virginia’s Democrats have been oddly uninterested in demolishing an especially repulsive Richmond statue.

That of former Democratic governor and U.S. senator Harry Flood Byrd Sr. 

Lawmakers can’t say they’re unaware of the image of Virginia’s most notorious bigot because it’s right there on Capitol Square.

Yep, Virginia’s staunch segregationist stands within spitting distance of the state capitol, in a double-breasted suit and holding a book.

For those who are unfamiliar with the founder of the powerful Byrd Organization that thrived in Virginia for much of the 20th century, this man from the Shenandoah Valley was the architect of Massive Resistance and a promoter of the Southern Manifesto.

Here’s Byrd’s initial statement on the landmark Brown v The Board of Education Supreme Court decision that desegregated public schools:

To Byrd, reversing the doctrine of separate but equal was “cruel,” but separating school children by race wasn’t.

Under the tyranny of Byrd’s political machine, Virginia successfully used poll taxes and literacy tests in order to keep African Americans from registering to vote. Eventually schools closed rather than integrate, thanks to Byrd.

Shameful.

Byrd was a racist and a partisan. Few Virginians did more to make life miserable for blacks than Harry Byrd.

In 2016, after protests from students and parents, Henrico County schools stripped a middle school of Harry F. Byrd’s name.

Yet the statue remains.

The Richmond monument is without merit or historical value, other than to remind us of how long racism persisted in the Old Dominion. The statue was erected in 1976. Just eight years before Gov. Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook page featured the future governor in either blackface or a Klan robe.

Freshman Republican Del. Wendell Walker of Lynchburg wants the monument to Byrd gone and he’s introduced HB1305 to do that.

Walker was unavailable when I phoned for a comment Thursday evening, but an aide sent this statement from the delegate: 

Governor Byrd was the architect of Massive Resistance. Through his actions, African Americans were treated as less than human, denied an education, and forced to live in fear. Virginians are in the middle of a broad conversation about how we memorialize the past. If we are to truly come to terms with that past, we cannot turn a blind eye to recent history.

Walker’s measure ought to enjoy broad bipartisan support. Especially since the  Richmond Times-Dispatch, reports that Northam is pushing legislation to give localities the power to remove statues and memorials. Oh and the governor’s also “backing a proposal for the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in the U.S. Capitol. “

So where does he stand on the Byrd statue?

The Washington Post reports that Northam seems weirdly uninterested in it.

“There was one memorial, though, on which Northam hesitated to take a position: the statue of former Virginia governor and U.S. senator Harry F. Byrd on Capitol Square. Byrd, a Democrat, was the architect of Virginia’s “massive resistance” strategy against the racial integration of schools in the 1950s.

Newly elected Republican Del. Wendell S. Walker (Lynchburg) has submitted a bill calling for that statue’s removal.

“There are over 2,000 pieces of legislation. They’ll be vetted by both the House and Senate,” Northam said when asked about that bill. 

“Rather than get into hypotheticals, I will give it consideration if it gets to my desk.”

He’ll “give it consideration”? Why isn’t the governor leaping at the chance to topple Byrd’s statue?

Partisanship, perhaps? Something else?