
"It is brave to be involved
To be not fearful to be unresolved."
 - Gwendolyn Brooks¹

The Effect of Returning South

When the movement of Black people to the North slowed to a trickle in the 1970s, a reverse flow back to the South began. Northern White Flight to the suburbs “allowed for the rise of Black ghettos and concentrated poverty as well as…urban disinvestment,” creating a push for outward migration.² The South changed from “a region that their great-grandparents were anxious to leave”³ into a land of opportunity.⁴ Economics and “a cultural attachment of African Americans to the South as ‘place’”⁵ provided the pull.⁶

Black people who left the South during the Great Migration were generally economically disadvantaged and poorly educated, but those who are returning to the South in this reverse migration tend to be prosperous and well-educated.⁷ Of the Black people who left the Northeast between 2005 and 2010, 82% moved to the South. The trend continues for Black people leaving the Midwest, with 71% moving South, and those leaving the West, with 76% moving South. Between 2000 and 2010, eleven out of the fifteen metropolitan areas to see significant growth in their Black population were in the South.⁸ These changes have increased the Black middle classes in these states.

The Devil You Know

In his most recent book, The Devil You Know, Charles M. Blow argues that the reversal of the Great Migration can lead to increased political power for Black people, writing, “The possession of real statewide political power in the South could radically alter the architecture of oppression in this country.”⁹ With increased political power at the state level, laws restricting the removal of Confederate monuments could be reversed, such as occurred in Virginia in 2020.

In 1970, Virginia had a black population of 18.5%, and Loudoun County had a Black population of 12.5%. In 1981, the Washington Post reported that the ethnic diversity of Northern Virginia had changed significantly as the number of non-white residents grew by 74%.¹⁰ In 1970, there were 26,000 Black people living in Virginia who were not born in the South. In 2017, that number had jumped to 363,000.¹¹ Between 1970 and 2020, the Black population in Loudoun County increased by 641%, and the percentage of white people in the county dropped from 87.5% to 66%.¹²

Loudoun Board of County Supervisors, 2016

Loudoun Board of County Supervisors, 2020

While correlation does not mean causation, Loudoun County's changing demographics coincided with the election of the first people of color to the Loudoun Board of County Supervisors. After adding more members of color to the Board in 2019, there was enough pressure to vote unanimously for removing the Leesburg monument. Furthermore, the reversal was made possible when the Democratic Party took control of the Commonwealth’s legislature and Governor’s mansion. When Virginia ceded control of memorials to the localities, the number of Black legislators was at a new high of 15%, up from 12% in 2015.¹³

The Effect of Being an Outsider

The fact that Phyllis was not from the South seemed to increase her indignation and commitment to lobbying for the Confederate memorial’s removal since she had spent most of her life in a city without Confederate iconography. During her quest, she heard from people who wished her well but did not believe the statue would ever be removed. She recalled, “They expressed support but didn't really join me in the effort, just expressed support.” After the statue was removed, some explained their hesitancy to join her, “I got so many phone calls and so many letters and so many ‘I never thought I'd see the day where that thing wasn't gonna be there anymore.’ and ‘Thank you so much.’ and ‘I had to look at that eyesore my entire life and I can't believe it's gone.’”¹⁴

While working for the statue’s removal, she experienced significant pushback from the white community in Loudoun County. “I got one of two reactions: either don't change our history and how dare you when you're new here, who you think you are, you don't know what you're saying, you don't know who you're talking to. I had one guy take out a gun and sit it on the table in front of me while he was telling me, and I was so, so scared. Then I got people saying, ‘Yeah, you're right, but is it really worth it?’ I remember thinking, yes it is, yes it is, yes it is.”

Following the shooting at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, SC in 2015, only 4 Confederate monuments were removed nationwide. After the tragedy at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA, 36 additional statues were removed. Following the killing of George Floyd, approximately 90 Confederate monuments were removed. Twenty-eight of those monuments were taken down in Virginia, more than were removed in any other state.¹⁵ The tipping point that led to the exponential increase in the removal of monuments appears to be the result of many factors, but among them is the increased number of Northern and Western-born Black people residing in the South, challenging the dominant Lost Cause narrative.¹⁶

Catherine R. Squires argues that to understand how the ideas and cultural shifts percolated through Southern culture, a new approach to the concept of the Public Sphere, as conceived by Jürgen Habermas as a bourgeoisie space of public discussion populated by people on a level horizontal slice of society, is needed to give space to marginal publics excluded from traditional public spaces. In her article Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres,¹⁷ she contends that there are three types of marginal publics: enclave, wherein a marginalized public insulates itself from the dominant public space to protect its members; counterpublics, which engage in debate with the dominant public sphere; and satellites, a group that separates itself from the larger public sphere for reasons other than protection.¹⁸ Each of these marginal public spheres emerges within the public debate surrounding the removal of the Silent Sentinel, and using Squires’s theory about marginal public spheres helps illuminate their role and motivation.

The established Black community unwilling to engage in the campaign to remove the Confederate statue can be understood as an enclave. Overlaying the concept of the “mental map,” which moves beyond the physical location and designates areas as safe or dangerous based on the overlay of power dynamics, as articulated by Flather,¹⁹ illuminates why this group believed the risk to be too great. The established power dynamic of the space, as defined by the placement of the Confederate memorial, was perceived as so entrenched as to be immovable. This sentiment is evidenced in the comments like, “‘I never thought I'd see the day where that thing wasn't gonna be there anymore.”

The people threatening Phyllis, like the man who put a gun on the table while discussing the Confederate memorial, are indicative of a satellite. An overt gesture that threatens violence goes beyond the accepted behavior norms of civil debate; therefore, this behavior places anyone who would perpetrate it as being on the fringes, the domain of the satellite. Furthermore, a satellite group “desires separateness in order to remain pure,” and, therefore, “does not envision broadening the constellation of publics to include itself in harmony.”²⁰ Members of this group are motivated by a sense of group identity and the strengthening of established institutions; they do not feel “compelled to hide or change cultural particularities.”²¹ This mindset helps explain why when the issue of removing Confederate monuments is brooched, some groups will express extreme devotion to the status quo that favors an exclusive power dynamic.

The counterpublic, however, is the space that will interact directly with the dominant public sphere.

The counterpublic is signified by increased public communication between the marginal and dominant public spheres, both in face-to-face and mediated forms. Counterpublic discourses travel outside of safe, enclave spaces to argue against dominant conceptions of the group and to describe group interests. Counterpublics reject the performance of public transcripts and instead project the hidden transcripts, previously spoken only in enclaves, to dominant publics. Counterpublics test the reactions of wider publics by stating previously hidden opinions, launching persuasive campaigns to change the minds of dominant publics, or seeking solidarity with other marginal groups.²²

Phyllis’s efforts to remove the Confederate statue established the counterpublic and put it in conversation with the dominant public sphere. Engagement, however, is not always fruitful as the dominant culture can subvert the desires or silence the discourse of the counterpublic, as seen in the first failed attempt to get the Loudoun Board of County Supervisors to petition the Virginia legislature regarding the removal of the memorial.

The scrutiny of these marginalized publics regarding the physical space of the Courthouse Square is necessary to understand the motivations of those challenging the dominant narrative and those resisting that change. In the case of the Courthouse Square, the dominant public sphere attempts to control the discourse by controlling the space's design. Leaving the enclave and demanding representation for counternarratives like that of Charles Craven could put Black communities at risk. So, in this manner, the placement of the Confederate statue provides a metaphorical barrier that does not allow the Black community to leave the space of the enclave. As more Northern and Western Black people move to the South, they are more likely to create a counterpublic sphere that challenges the dominant sphere because by leaving the North and returning to the South, they have acclimated to the risk of leaving the enclave. Changes in both the physical space and public narrative regarding Southern culture and history will continue to change as the number of Black elected officials and the Southern Black population increases. These shifts will enable Black communities to leave the countersphere as they enter the dominant sphere, as occurred when more people of color were elected to the Loudoun Board of County Supervisors.

The notion of where something takes place connotes more than a point of latitudinal and longitudinal intersection. When a narrative figuratively takes the place of a physical space, that physical place becomes an ideological conduit between the past and the future, collecting time within that moment. Breaking the “perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place”²³ can necessitate removing the material objects tethering the ideology to the space in order to break through the temporal dam blocking the collective narrative from being present. In the Leesburg Courthouse Square, that physical impediment was the Silent Sentinel, and its removal has allowed space for a more inclusive view of the history of the space.

Adding the Context of Time to the Space
of the Courthouse Square

Through the Silent Sentinel, Anna Thornton Miller Murray sought to focus the accepted narrative of the Lost Cause by creating a space in which it towered over all other events. By removing the statue, Phyllis Randall flattened the space, creating room for alternative narratives to flourish.