I am a Virginian and I am always surprised when, every few years, people announce that Virginia has moved from a red state to a purple state. It is litterally true, since red and blue just refer to electing pugs and Dems and we have elected a lot of Dems over the years but sometimes I wonder whether that's partially because some older white folks here might be so traditional they still won't vote for the party of Lincoln. Yes, Northern Virginia (and Richmond and Tidewater area) sometimes provides a sufficient margin to elect moderate Democrats state-wide and we had a good run for a while but once you get outside the DC suburbs Virginia is a deep-south state.
Our capital was the capital of the confederacy and remains damn proud of it. Richmond is 50-50 white and black but the Richmond public school system is about 90% black. Integration never really took. (Those were the #s when I lived there... I don't know if it has changed any.)(On edit: My numbers are old. White flight continued, it seems. Richmond is about two-thirds black now. Eric Cantor's Henrico County is where most Richmond whites fled to and is something like 87% white today.)
The docents at a publicly funded museum in Richmond refer to the civil war as "The War of Northern Aggression."
Monument Avenue is an endless series of statues of confederate heroes, all erected well after the civil war, obviously. For balance, at some point the city erected a statue of famed tap-dancer William "Bojangles" Robinson in a black neighborhood. That was not meant as an insult. Robinson was born in Richmond and was a pretty cool guy. But still... And there is also a statue of Arthur Ashe.
And that is how Virginia does things... when you complain about a statue of a maniac like Jefferson Davis the state responds with balance, erecting a statue of Robinson.
And when the Martin Luther King holiday became law Virginia responded with its usual balance, making the day a dual holiday to honor MLK and Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Fair and balanced!
When Timothy McVeigh was arrested he was wearing a tee shirt bearing the Virginia State Motto: Sic Semper Tyrannis. That was, of course, what John Wilkes Booth shouted from the stage after shooting Lincoln. (Probably hoarsely since he had broken his ankle jumping onto the stage.)
It was a venerable phrase when adopted but it isn't fun reading your state motto every time you see McVeigh's mug-shot.
(On the plus side, we have the only state flag with nudity. Probably also the only state flag with a corpse... sex and violence always sells!)
Virginia adopted this as their state song in 1940. (Yes, that's a nine, not an eight.)
Carry Me back to Old Virginny
Written by James Bland
Carry me back to old Virginny,
There's where the cotton and the corn and tatoes grow,
There's where the birds warble sweet in the springtime,
There's where the old darke'ys heart am long'd to go,
There's where I labored so hard for old massa,
Day after day in the field of yellow corn,
No place on earth do I love more sincerely
Than old Virginny, the state where I was born.
Note that our state song 1) never spells the state correctly and 2) might get a schoolteacher in Northern Virginia fired if he taught it to the kids.... except it's the state song. (Onenote notes in a reply that the commonwealth fixed the spelling when adopting the song, so ignore that comment of mine.)
The song was written by a black man, if that helps any. (Nah, didn't think so.)
Yes, this will be a more enlightened state someday but even today our inner-Alabama is never that far beneath the surface. The political struggle for Virginia will ultimately be generational and demographic and has a ways yet to go.
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