Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality

The Autumn 2018 edition of The Virginia Defender newspaper is now on the streets and online: Click "The Virginia Defender" above. INSIDE THIS ISSUE: This issue features four pages of antiwar and international news. Most people know us for our work around Shockoe Bottom, fighting to reclaim and properly memorialize the Richmond district that was once the epicenter of the U.S. domestic slave trade. Or our work against Confederate monuments, in support of labor unions, opposing police abuse or any of the other domestic issues we struggle around. But the Defenders also play a leading role in the antiwar movement, participating in the leadership of the United National Antiwar Coalition. This summer we represented UNAC at protests at the U.S. Ramstein Air Base on Germany, which plays a key role in the drone warfare that has killed so many innocent people in the Middle East and North Africa; and at the march and conferences held to oppose the North Atlantic Treaty Organiza...

RICHMOND, VA, Nov. 4 -- More than 50 antiracists from Charlottesville, Durham and Richmond gathered today outside the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy on the Boulevard in Richmond to demand that the organization stop defending monuments that glorify the slavery-defending Confederate States of America. More than any other organization, the UDC has been responsible for promoting the myth that the Confederacy represented a noble cause, that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War and that slavery itself was a benign institution in which enslaved Black people happily toiled for benevolent white masters. While best known for its work in promoting the building of Confederate monuments throughout the South - and in most states in the country - it was the work of the UDC in policing history textbooks that had the greatest effect in promoting the organization’s distorted views. Generations of white Southerners grew up believing in the nobility of the Confederate...