Virginia Democrats passed a new law revoking the state property tax exemptions previously enjoyed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and related organizations. It’s a welcome shift in Virginia politics, but the fight against white supremacist revisionism requires more than imposing a $57,000 tax bill.
For over a century, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) has operated behind a veil of Southern gentility, hosting teas and genealogical meetings in their Richmond headquarters. But their life’s work has been far more insidious than polite social gatherings.
The UDC was founded and serves as the primary engine of the “Lost Cause” myth, a deliberate, organized campaign of historical revisionism designed to sanitize the Confederacy, spread the lie that the U.S. Civil War was fought in the name of “states’ rights,” rather than for the preservation of chattel slavery, and re-entrench white supremacy in the American classroom and public square.
This month, the Virginia state legislature and Gov. Abigail Spanberger took a tangible step toward dismantling that legacy by making HB167 law. The bill revokes state and local property tax exemptions for the UDC and five other neo-Confederate organizations, including the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Stonewall Jackson Memorial.
For proponents of truth, this legislation represents a dual victory: It deals a material blow to a reactionary institution while potentially signaling a long-overdue shift in how Virginia Democrats wield power against right-wing historical malice.
Poisonous pedagogy
To understand why HB167 matters, we must reject the framing offered by the bill’s opponents, which boil down to the usual claims that the work of UDC and similar outfits is concerned with “preserving history” or honoring the dead. This is about power.
Following the military defeat of the slavocracy, the UDC understood that the battle for the future would be fought in the minds of the next generation. They waged what scholars and the Southern Poverty Law Center describe as a “war of ideas.” Their weapons were not bayonets but textbooks, monuments, and youth indoctrination.
The UDC’s “Historical Committees” functioned as de facto censors, blacklisting any textbook that dared to suggest the Civil War was fought over slavery or that the Ku Klux Klan’s terror was anything but noble. They created the “Children of the Confederacy” to ensure that the ideology of racial hierarchy was passed down like a family heirloom. And they littered the landscape, from Richmond to rural courthouse lawns, with over 2,000 monuments designed not as memorials to the dead but as granite sentinels of Jim Crow intimidation.
This is the organization whose tax-exempt status was just revoked. The very group that taught generations of Southerners that slavery was a “benign institution” and that the Civil War was a noble “Lost Cause.”
From appeasement to confrontation
For years, the Democratic establishment in Virginia tread lightly around these “heritage” groups, fearing backlash from a vocal conservative base eager to cry “cancel culture.” The public testimony against HB167, filled with bad-faith invocations of the 14th Amendment and ahistorical ramblings about Lincoln’s “invasion” of the South, shows that the right remains deeply invested in protecting these outposts of white supremacy mythos.
But, surprisingly, Spanberger and the Democratic legislature did not blink. The bill passed the House 62-35 and the Senate 21-17, largely on party lines. This action aligns with a broader, more combative posture from authorities in Richmond. While right-wing outlets like Fox News and the Washington Times are currently hyperventilating about Spanberger being a “radical leftist” over tax policy and redistricting fights, this specific bill shows Democrats applying progressive pressure where it counts: against the institutional infrastructure of white supremacy.
This is the kind of governance that eschews the failed “Virginia Way” of bipartisan deference to racists. It recognizes that working with community organizations to overcome ignorance and malice requires first stripping the purveyors of that malice of their state-sanctioned privileges.
The limits of a $57,000 fine
We should be clear-eyed about the tangible impact. The UDC’s Richmond headquarters is valued at roughly $4.7 million; their new annual property tax bill is estimated at just over $57,000. This is not a sum that will bankrupt an organization with a national endowment and deep-pocketed donors.
Let’s be blunt: That $57,000 will likely be made whole within days by right-wing donors eager to martyr the UDC as victims of “woke” persecution. In fact, opponents of the bill explicitly promised to finance the legal costs and fill the funding gap during the public comment period.
Yet, this does not make the law meaningless. Symbolism carries material weight in the class struggle. Revoking the tax exemption removes the state’s official endorsement from the UDC. Virginia is no longer a silent partner in subsidizing Lost Cause mythology. It is a formal acknowledgment that these organizations are not public charities or historical societies; they are ideological relics dedicated to a poisonous and evil cause.
HB167 is a necessary step, but it is not the destination. As long as the UDC’s version of history is still taught in pockets of our schools, and as long as the Republican Party at the national level continues to openly embrace neo-Confederate ideology, restoring the names of traitors to military bases and passing laws that erase the brutal reality of chattel slavery, the fight continues.
Virginia Democrats have shown they are willing to stop appeasing the right. Now, the left must ensure this momentum extends beyond tax codes and into a full-throated, materialist reclamation of our history. The UDC and their ilk should pay more than property taxes; they should pay with their cultural irrelevance.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views expressed here are those of the author.
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