161 Years Later: Virginia Ends Public Funding for Confederate Groups—Why This Matters Now

Let me be direct with y’all: This story is about conservative contradictions, the trick of time and the hypocrisy of democracy.On April 1, 2025, Virginia passed HB 167. This bill did one thing—it reversed a segregation-era carve-out in the state’s tax code that had been benefiting the United Daughters of the Confederacy and other pro-Confederate groups since 1950. That’s 75 years. Three-quarters of a century. The Confederacy itself lasted four years. Let that marinate.But the real story isn’t just about Virginia finally ending tax breaks for white supremacist terrorist organizations. The real story is what this reveals about America’s relationship with history, memory, and whose pain gets funded by the state.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Legal Architecture of Historical RevisionismHere’s what happened: Virginia’s tax code contained a specific exemption—a carve-out—that allowed organizations devoted to preserving, romanticizing, and glorifying the Confederacy to operate tax-free. These weren’t small grassroots groups. The United Daughters of the Confederacy is a massive network with chapters across the country, dedicated explicitly to erecting monuments, publishing pro-Confederate literature, and rewriting the historical narrative around slavery and Jim Crow.Think about the infrastructure that built. For seventy-five years, Virginia taxpayers—including Black Virginians—subsidized the operational costs of organizations working to preserve the memory of a government that existed to enslave them. This wasn’t accidental. This was written into law during the segregation era, which means it was deliberately designed to protect white supremacist organizing.The new law ends that. HB 167 reverses this carve-out and eliminates “more than 75 years of state support for efforts to romanticize slavery, glorify the Confederacy, and enforce Jim Crow segregation.” That’s the official language. Read it again. State-sponsored romanticization of slavery. Let that sit.The Hypocrisy is Structural, Not IndividualNow, let’s talk about the synchronicity here because it matters. While Virginia finally removes tax breaks for Confederate preservation societies, the Trump administration is simultaneously attacking curriculum that teaches slavery—but only when that curriculum is honest. When it’s taught from a Confederate standpoint, presented as “both sides,” or framed through the Lost Cause mythology? Silent. Welcome.This isn’t random. This is a coherent ideological project. The allegiance is consistent. The people attacking “divisive racial teachings” aren’t actually opposed to teaching slavery. They’re opposed to teaching slavery accurately. They’re fine with the version that preserves white innocence and Southern nostalgia. The version that centers plantation owners’ “economic challenges” or frames slavery as an unfortunate institution everyone shared blame for. They just won’t tolerate the version where we say: enslaved people built this nation’s wealth, the South fought a war to preserve that system, and the North was complicit in rebuilding it through sharecropping, redlining, and segregation law.The Reparations ContradictionAnd here’s where the hypocrisy becomes prosecutorial: The same voices that chastised Black people for being “stuck in the past” and told us to “move forward”—those same voices were getting state-funded tax breaks for organizations preserving the Confederacy. The same administration attacking “critical race theory” in schools is defending monuments to Confederate generals. The same politicians rejecting reparations for slavery as “unrealistic, unfair, and unwarranted” after 161 years were, until recently, literally writing off the operational costs of Confederate monument societies.This is the receipt right here. This is the proof that the objection to reparations was never about practicality or fairness. It was about white supremacy preserving itself through the apparatus of the state.Think about it structurally: A Black person proposes reparations—direct payment to repair the material harms of slavery and Jim Crow—and we hear: “That was a long time ago. We need to move forward. How would we even identify who deserves it? It’s too complicated.”Meanwhile, Virginia’s tax code was literally structured to preserve the Confederacy. The state had already figured out how to identify groups benefiting from slavery’s legacy (the United Daughters of the Confederacy—easy to find, they have a literal organization chart). The state had already determined the mechanism (tax exemption). The infrastructure was in place. And for seventy-five years, Virginia said yes to that. No problem. No complications. No hand-wringing.But reparations? Too hard. Too unfair. Can’t do it.What HB 167 Actually RevealsThis is why HB 167 is important beyond the immediate policy change. It’s a window into how state power actually works in America. It shows us that:First, the government knows how to identify and fund the preservation of white supremacist ideology when it wants to. It doesn’t lack the technical capacity to do so. It has mechanisms, precedents, and legal language already built out.Second, when a state decides to fund something, it can do so across centuries and through legal carve-outs that survive generations of legislators. These aren’t accidents. These are deliberate structures that persist because they reflect something deeper: an unstated national consensus that white supremacist memory deserves public protection.Third, the sudden urgency with which the Trump administration attacks slavery curriculum—specifically honest slavery curriculum—in this exact moment shows what was really at stake with Virginia’s tax breaks. It was never just about museum tax exemptions. It was about a broader project: ensuring that when America remembers slavery, it remembers it on terms that don’t threaten the present order. That don’t demand reparations. That don’t trace modern inequality back to state-sponsored theft. That keep the past safely past.This Country Has a Natural Allegiance Toward LosersHere’s a fact that should make y’all angry: The Confederacy lost in 1865. It lasted four years. And yet, 161 years after its defeat, America was still funding its legacy through tax policy.We’ve spent more time subsidizing Confederate memory than the Confederacy itself existed.Meanwhile, we’re told reparations are impossible. We’re told we need to move on. We’re told the past is past. But the same country telling us this was, just last year, writing off the operational costs of organizations whose singular mission is to ensure that the Confederate vision of history—a sanitized, “heritage not hate” version—survives in American consciousness.The Educational Void and What It CostsThis all connects to something deeper: the systematic dismantling of public education media’s capacity to teach honest history. When Virginia’s tax code could fund Confederate preservation societies without debate, but a school district teaching the actual facts of slavery faces political warfare, we have a crisis. We have a gap. We have an absence.That absence is where misinformation lives. That’s where revisionism spreads. That’s where Lost Cause mythology thrives—not because it’s compelling history, but because the alternative (honest history funded and taught by institutions) retreated.I’m fighting to fill that void. Not with propaganda. Not with another perspective competing in the marketplace of ideas. But with receipts. With documented facts. With the legal codes and historical records that show exactly how American state power has worked to preserve white supremacy while denying redress to its victims.Virginia’s decision to end these tax breaks is a step. But it’s one step after seventy-five years of state-sponsored Confederate revisionism. The real reparations work—the real education work—hasn’t even started.Facts Over FeelingsLet me be clear about what this bill does and doesn’t do:It removes tax-exempt status from organizations built explicitly to preserve Confederate memory. That’s material. Organizations run on operational budgets. If the United Daughters of the Confederacy has to pay property taxes, file corporate taxes, account for revenue—that changes the economics of nostalgia.But it doesn’t create reparations. It doesn’t fund Black education or repair Black wealth. It doesn’t rewrite the curriculum. It simply stops subsidizing the other side’s version of memory.In a fair system, that would be the baseline. In America, it’s treated like a concession.EXPLICIT PAID SUBSCRIBER ASKHere’s what you just read: a legal receipt. A tax code. A 75-year paper trail showing exactly how state power subsidized white supremacy while calling it heritage preservation.This isn’t new information in the sense that historians have known this. But it’s information that’s missing from mainstream education. It’s missing from the curriculum. It’s missing from the public discourse because there’s no independent media infrastructure built to hold and distribute it.I’m fighting to fill that void.I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. I show the receipts. I cite the sources. I trace the money. I connect the past to the present through policy, not just sentiment. And I do it with no corporate backing and no wealthy sponsors.As a Black educator and researcher, my work depends entirely on a community of readers willing to pay for independence. Right now, that community is less than 1% of my followers.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* Tax Policy Is How the State Funds Ideology Without Naming It: Virginia’s 75-year tax carve-out for Confederate organizations was a subsidy disguised as neutral tax code. It shows that governments know exactly how to allocate resources toward specific projects. The argument that reparations are “administratively impossible” is refuted by the fact that Virginia successfully protected Confederate memory through tax policy for three-quarters of a century.* The Hypocrisy Reveals the Real Project: The same forces attacking “critical race theory” in schools were, until recently, receiving tax breaks for organizations dedicated to preserving slavery’s memory. This isn’t a contradiction. It’s a consistent project: ensuring that when America remembers slavery, it remembers it in a way that doesn’t demand reparations or threaten white wealth accumulation.* We’ve Spent More Time Subsidizing Confederate Memory Than the Confederacy Existed: The Confederacy lasted four years (1861-1865). Virginia funded its preservation for 75 years (1950-2025). This temporal inversion reveals America’s actual priorities: it would rather preserve a failed government’s ideology than repair the material harms of the slavery that government was built to protect.* Policy Reversals Are Possible, But They Require Political Will: HB 167 proves that states can identify organizations benefiting from historical injustice and reverse the legal structures protecting them. The fact that this took 161 years after slavery’s end shows that the barrier to reparations isn’t technical. It’s political. It’s a choice to protect white supremacy, not an inability to do otherwise.* The Work Is Incomplete Without Independent Education Infrastructure: Removing a tax break is necessary but insufficient. The Lost Cause mythology is already embedded in how Americans learned history. Undoing that requires an alternative education infrastructure—one funded by community, independent of corporate influence, and willing to tell the complete story. That’s the void that needs filling.ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY & CRITICAL READINGS* Smith, Susan-Mary and Richard B. Williams. Lost Cause: Confederacy, American Memory, and the Making of Modern Racism. Academic Press. On the systematic architecture of Lost Cause mythology and how it was institutionalized through monument-building and cultural organizations.* Gallagher, Gary W. and Alan T. Nolan (Eds.). The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. Indiana University Press. Foundational text deconstructing the Lost Cause narrative and its persistent influence on American historical consciousness.* McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press. Essential context on the Confederacy’s actual duration (1861-1865) and the material interests driving secession.* Douglas, Mary and David Hull. How Institutions Think. Syracuse University Press. Theoretical framework for understanding how organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy function as memory-preservation institutions.* Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press. Afropessimist analysis of how white supremacy operates through cultural revisionism and historical erasure.* Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. W.W. Norton. On how state institutions have systematized the erasure of Black historical presence and memory.* Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. UNC Press. Essential context on the racialized political economy that undergirds both slavery and its ongoing denial through policy.* Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press. Foundational theory on how the American state operates through an implicit contract that protects white supremacy as policy.* Virginia House Bill 167 (2025) - Official legislative text reversing tax exemptions for Confederate organizations.* United Daughters of the Confederacy v. State of Virginia - Relevant case law on the legal status of Confederate heritage organizations.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe