Until very recently, fans of the losing side in Virginia looking to advertise that fact could pay a little extra to get official, state-issued Robert E. Lee or Sons of Confederate Veterans license plates for their cars. As a bonus, part of the money they spent buying those plates got funneled to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as having “strong neo-Confederate principles.” However, that arrangement ended this week, 13NewsNow reports, when Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed a bill into law that bans the plates’ renewal.
“Renewal” is the key word there, by the way. The law didn’t immediately invalidate the plates, so the Confederacy enthusiasts who have them will still be legally allowed to drive with them until they expire. After that, they’ll still be able to choose on of Virginia’s 342 other specialty plate options or resign themselves to getting a regular plate. See? The state’s even being nice about it. You can’t have your Lost Cause propaganda plate anymore, but you don’t have to get rid of it immediately. Just do it before your next birthday.
State Delegate Dan Helmer, a representative for Fairfax County, wrote the original bill. He responded to Spanberger signing it into law with a video posted on Facebook. “The Confederacy was a four year period in which traitors hellbent on preserving slavery tried – and then failed – to divide the Union,” Helmer wrote with remarkable candor in the video’s caption. “The Confederacy and its leaders do not deserve our commemoration, and its adherents certainly do not deserve taxpayer dollars.”
Wait, that was a thing?
If you live outside the U.S. and aren’t familiar with our history, you may have a hard time understanding why a state government would issue plates that celebrate a traitorous general who led a rebellion against his own country and lost. I wish I had a good answer for you, but the propaganda campaign that became known as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy is a complicated issue. Instead, I’d recommend reading “The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History” by Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, then following it up with “Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture” by Karen L. Cox.
But those books really only explain the Lost Cause, not how the state ended up selling Lost Cause merchandise that directly enriched a neo-Confederate organization. That’s because Virginia allows colleges and universities, fraternities and sororities, municipalities, and special interest groups to sponsor new specialty plate designs. The state requires organizations that want their own plates jump through several hoops, including obtaining at least 450 prepaid applications for the design, and the Department of Motor Vehicles says to expect the process to take two years, but pretty much anyone can do it.
So-called “revenue sharing” license plates in Virginia have a $25 annual plate fee; “After 1,000 qualifying plate sales,” the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles says, “DMV will return $15 of every $25 collected annually to the designated entity.” That’s assuming the revenue sharing organization holds one of a number of different statuses in the state, such as being an institute of higher education or — as in the case of the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Virginia division – a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
While an application could always be rejected, you won’t find official bans on certain types of organizations going through the process, and the state has a history of approving plate designs submitted by controversial groups. Back in 2015, Virginia did ban an SCV plate, but that was only because the design included a Confederate flag. When they resubmitted a design that lacked their favorite flag, that one was approved.
