Virginia governor allows Confederate groups to keep tax exemptions

A statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee being removed from a park in Charlottesville, Virginia, on 10 July 2021. Photograph: Ryan M Kelly/AFP/Getty Images

Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin has vetoed two bills that would have stripped tax exemptions for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that has opposed the removal of statues of southern state generals during the US civil war and other markers of the southern states’ attempt to secede from the Union in defense of slavery.

The Republican governor vetoed several measures, including those related to maintaining access to contraception, saying in a statement they were “not ready to become law”.

The rejected Confederacy-related bill would have removed tax exemptions for real estate and personal property owned by several Confederacy heritage groups, including United Daughters organisations the Confederate Memorial Literary Society and Stonewall Jackson Memorial.

“Narrowly targeting specific organizations to gain or lose such tax exemptions sets an inappropriate precedent,” Youngkin wrote in his veto statement, but added that property tax exemptions were “ripe for reform, delineated by inconsistencies and discrepancies”.

That statement provoked a reaction from local Democratic party leaders, who have almost unanimously supported the measures. Senator Angelia Williams Graves of Norfolk, one of the sponsors of the bill, wrote on X that the governor “wants to keep giving our tax breaks to hate organizations like the Daughters of the Confederacy”.

Don Scott Jr, a Democrat and the first Black speaker of the Virginia house of delegates, told the New York Times that the purpose of the bill was not to interfere with the United Daughters’ charity work, but to make sure the state code better reflects the commonwealth’s modern values.

But Jinny Widowski, the president of the group, which was founded in 1894 for women who are descendants of Confederate soldiers, said the legislative efforts against the group were unfair and discriminatory.

“The continued harassment of our ladies and our mission will not deter us from the charitable work that we do,” she said.

The organization acknowledges that “memorial statues and markers are viewed as divisive and thus unworthy of being allowed to remain in public places”, but also says “they simply represent a memorial to our forefathers who fought bravely during four years of war” and “have been a part of the Southern landscape for decades”.

“Our Confederate ancestors were and are Americans,” the Daughters group adds on its website. “We as an Organization do not sit in judgment of them nor do we impose the standards of the 19th century on Americans of the 21st century.”

Youngkin’s veto came a week after an all-white school board in Virginia’s Shenandoah county voted to restore the names of Confederate leaders Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Turner Ashby to two public schools.

Their names had been removed during the racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd while in police custody in 2020.

As a result of the vote, Mountain View high school will return to its pre-2020 name, Stonewall Jackson high school, and Honey Run elementary school will once again be named Ashby-Lee elementary school.

The school board vote is one of the sharpest examples of a nationwide pushback by conservative groups against the changes that were made after the summer of protests following Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. At least 160 Confederate symbols have been taken down.

A coalition claimed to have conducted a survey of Shenandoah citizens that found that more than 90% wanted to revert to the original school names.

The school board’s current chair, Dennis Barlow, said during a contentious debate preceding the vote to restores the names that he saw Jackson as a “gallant commander”, while those who had led the post-Floyd move to reform the school names were in his view “creepy”, “elitist” and “from the dark side”.