Monday, December 05, 2005
Editorial: A most civil nod toward civil rights
Hats off to Virginia's first lady for honoring the movement.
From the RoundTable blog
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Much of the history of the United States is Virginia's history, from Colonial times and the nation's founding, to the Civil War, through the 20th- century movement for civil rights that made good, at last, on America's promise that all men are created equal.
Statues on the Capitol grounds in Richmond honor figures from George Washington to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson to Sen. Harry Byrd Sr., whose support of "massive resistance" to school desegregation is a stain on the state's past.
How appropriate, then, that a civil rights monument will be erected on those grounds, a memorial to Virginians whose challenge of school segregation played a large role in the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, a decisive victory in the cause of racial justice.
The memorial, the brainchild of first lady Lisa Collis, will mark a chapter of the state's complex story essential to understanding its past, and what it means to be a Virginian today.
