What Else Is Sacred Here
In recent years, reckonings over memory, race, and history in the United States have taken center stage. What Else is Sacred Here explores, complicates, and challenges this contemporary debate in a small southern city that is an important—though often overlooked or misrepresented—bellwether of change. Lexington, Virginia, a bucolic college town of 7,200 in Rockbridge County, has long been known to many as “The Shrine of the South.” The town, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains an hour west of Charlottesville, is home to the graves of both Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and the names, images, and belongings of the two Confederate generals mark many of the town’s flagship institutions and tourist sites. In January 2017, three days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, local organizers held the town’s first Martin Luther King Day parade, a counter-statement to the Lee-Jackson Day parade that for decades was held on the same weekend. (In 2020, the Commonwealth of Virginia abolished Lee-Jackson Day’s 121-year run as an official state holiday.)
We initiated a long-term oral history and photography project in January 2018 documenting the second MLK parade, as well as the town’s efforts to face its past and generate a new understanding of itself. Over the course of several visits, we conducted more than 20 long-form interviews with residents, including organizers of the MLK parade, the mayor, the first Black woman elected to city council, faith leaders, educators, a local independent journalist, student-activists at Washington & Lee University, and a Virginia Military Institute colonel and museum director. Words and images shape collective memory and have often led to erasure in Lexington and Rockbridge County. Monikers like “Shrine of the South” and oft-repeated visuals of Confederate reenactors, flags, and monuments compound the violence of the past by enabling one historical narrative to mute others. This project instead asks community members: What else is sacred here?
Cameron Vanderscoff, Oral Historian
Jessica Bal, Photographer
“There is an incredible wealth of culture here, some of it very old, that is just obliterated by that stupid term: [Shrine of the South]. It is cruel even to the white people who are from here. There is more. They did more. They could own more. They could speak of more. Journalists never get past that. To the extent we keep centering on that conflict, it is not a neutral place. It is not an objective beginning. It is not a fair beginning. It prioritizes one minority’s rather unsubstantiated notion of what constitutes history and obliterates so many other possibilities. That is already taking something from the people who live here. It is taking something from the possibilities. If we ask the people on the street today: what do they love here, what do they see here? What would we learn?”
— Robin LeBlanc
