A civil war among neighbors over Confederate-themed streets

"'You either agree with me or we don’t talk.'”Could renaming streets in Northern Virginia promote racial healing?Grace Gillespie realized the group she co-founded in 2020 — “Neighbors for Change” — had touched a nerve when she returned home after passing out fliers about renaming the streets and read an email accusing the volunteer organization of being funded by liberal philanthropist George Soros.“I actually had to look up who George Soros was,” Gillespie recalled.More emails followed, some from outside the community.“If those who forget history are bound to repeat it, I would HATE to see what happens to those who try to rewrite it,” one read, calling the effort “virtue signaling” and signing off by suggesting that Gillespie and her neighbor Laura Bowles, the group’s co-founder, “kill yourselves.”They informed the police, who took a report but no charges resulted from the case, a Fairfax police spokeswoman said.Gillespie’s family has been in Mosby Woods since it was built, a common boast in a neighborhood of brick ramblers and two-story colonial-style houses 45 minutes from D.C. that features its own community swimming pool.In the early 1960s, Gillespie’s grandparents bought into developer Stephen Yeonas’s vision of a self-contained community surrounded by parks, restaurants and shopping plazas in what was then a rapidly growing section of Northern Virginia.The name “Mosby Woods” and its Civil War theme was a marketing scheme born during local centennial commemorations of the start of the Civil War, Yeonas told the local community association president for a 2012 book commemorating the development’s 50th anniversary.Mosby was known for his “Midnight Raid” of 1863, when the Confederate colonel and his Rangers captured a Union Army brigadier general while he was sleeping in nearby Fairfax Courthouse — a southern victory commemorated by a local historic state marker that inspired the developer’s son to suggest the name, according to Bob Reinsel, the book’s author. Then, they passed away and Gillespie and her husband moved into the home on Plantation Parkway.Their son, Micah, brought up the street names one day in 2017 after a fourth-grade lesson in Virginia history, Gillespie said.“He started asking: 'Is it racist to have streets like Plantation and Confederate?’ ” she recalled.How `Dragbook Story Hour' led to culture wars at a Virginia community centerOthers in the community had similar questions after the white supremacist rally over a Confederate statue in Charlottesville that year led to the death of a 32-year-old woman.But it was the Floyd killing that moved Gillespie and Bowles into action.They invited neighbors to join and petitioned the city, which was already discussing changing other Confederate markers around town — including the city seal that features an image of John Quincy Marr, the first Confederate soldier killed by a Union soldier in combat.Neighbors for Change also researched the history of Confederate monuments and street names in the South, noting on its website how such memorials to “The Lost Cause” multiplied during the start of the civil rights movement, about when Mosby Woods was being built.Amy Chase said that awareness made her think differently about her cheerful home on Ranger Road, named after Mosby’s troops.“Within these walls were people sending their White kids to White-only schools,” she said.