After removing the statue of a famed Revolutionary War hero in 2021, the University of Virginia (UVA) plans to replace it with a park that will serve as a de facto land acknowledgement to an Indian tribe, The Federalist has learned.
The Federalist obtained the school’s plans for the site that once held the statue of Brigadier General George Rogers Clark, which indicate that the new park will celebrate “the Virginia landscape and Indigenous stewardship practices.”
“The politicization of the university has reached a level of absurdity as it has gleefully destroyed statues of Virginians,” Ann H. McLean, a lifelong Virginia resident who received her doctorate in art and architectural history from the University of Virginia, told The Federalist. “Rather than celebrating the courage and problem-solving of exploration represented by the George Rogers Clark sculpture, cultural Marxist city leaders and academics are choosing to celebrate those who had no written language, no concept of private property, no trial by jury, or many other improvements brought here by western civic life and Biblical practice.”
Charlottesville, Virginia, became ground zero for the left-wing drive to destroy American culture and history when the city decided to remove the statues of Confederate Civil War generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson from their respective places in the historic downtown.
Clark was not a Confederate general, not that it should matter, but these leftists wanted to remove his statue anyway. Like President Donald Trump said in 2020, noting that the leftist movement wants to tear down our Founding Fathers as well, “They’re tearing down statues, desecrating monuments, and purging dissenters. It’s not the behavior of a peaceful political movement; it’s the behavior of totalitarians and tyrants and people that don’t love our country.”
It is a crime against Americans, and the people behind the removals — school leadership, city leadership, and everyone else — belong in prison for those crimes.
For most Americans, statue removal and the related Unite the Right rally are basically the only thing the city is known for at this point. That the city is also home to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello or the university he founded is an afterthought.
Charlottesville city leadership made sure that was the case, as just days after President Donald Trump was sworn into office in his first term, then-Mayor Mike Signer, an unrepentant leftist, declared Charlottesville the “capital of the resistance” to Trump.
What Americans got was a whitewashing of history and the Unite the Right rally, where police were allegedly told to let paid protesters exact violence on each other. Trump has been smeared with the widely debunked “very fine people” hoax ever since.
But the statues that came down were not just those dedicated to Lee and Jackson (those have been destroyed in humiliating ways). The city had jurisdiction over those two, along with a third depicting the Meriwether Lewis and William Clark expedition with Sacagawea called “Their First View Of The Pacific,” which they also removed.
UVA had jurisdiction over a monument to George Rogers Clark, a Revolutionary War hero and brother of William Clark, who was nicknamed the “Conqueror of the Old Northwest” because he was instrumental in the British ceding the Northwest Territory to the United States in the Treaty of Paris.
That means he is responsible for Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and much of Minnesota being part of the Union.
The university removed that statue in 2021 as “part of a larger conversation about race, equity and injustice.” All four statues are listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places, but have been allowed to be removed, desecrated, and destroyed.
The Virginia Department of Historic Resources describes the “masterful and complex work of art” as a “heroic-size bronze group that portrays a mounted Clark with members of his expedition confronting an Indian chief and members of his party.”
Robert Ingersoll Aitken, the sculptor who created it, was the same man who created the iconic West Pediment of the U.S. Supreme Court building that states “equal justice under law.”
In an effort to find out the status of the Clark statue and the plans for the park where it once stood, The Federalist inquired with the university. While the statue itself is, for now, in storage with an unknown fate (though it is safe to assume those holding it hostage would like to destroy it in a similarly humiliating way as Lee and Jackson), The Federalist obtained the plans for the park.
UVA spokeswomen Bethanie Glover told The Federalist that the park’s new design “has been developed to interpret the deep history of the Commonwealth, its people, and landscape,” but it seems nothing could be further from the truth.
Keeping in line with our modern society’s penchant for pagan humiliation rituals on the altar of cultural Marxism, the plans for the park will have nothing to do with the Founders, Jefferson, Clark, or anyone else.
The plan for the park is to make it one massive land acknowledgement to the Monacan Indian tribe.
“Rather than teaching students full historical truth, the plans to glorify paganism represents both a back-sliding and ingratitude for advances in western civilization which benefits all citizens of the United States of America,” McLean said.
According to Glover, the new plan has already been reviewed by the Virginia Art and Architecture Review Board and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, as well as reviewed by the school’s Board of Visitors.
Moves like this have become more common at the university, where they are forcing ugly, culturally revolting monuments into a space renowned for its design and architecture.
One such example is the “Memorial to Enslaved Laborers” placed right in the shadow of the Rotunda, the school’s most iconic symbol designed by Jefferson himself.
Perhaps there is an argument to be made for having a memorial for that purpose, but the concrete, Soviet-style design is so extreme in its contrast to the surrounding beauty that it would not be hard to believe that it was meant to offend everything Jefferson built and loved.
As McLean has written in these pages, it is an ongoing assault. University admissions tours trashed Jefferson so much that they actually had to suspend the program because of complaints.
UVA just recently, supposedly, ended its era of capitulation to the thugs in the “Black Lives Matter” tyranny, and it seems the least the school could do is restore the Clark statue to its rightful place.
Breccan F. Thies is the White House correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
