Starting this July, Virginia drivers will no longer have the option to purchase special license plates commemorating the Confederacy.
Gov. Abigail Spanberger approved House Bill 1344 from Fairfax Del. Dan Helmer (D-10) on Monday (April 6) ending the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles’ authorization to issue or renew license plates honoring Confederate General Robert E. Lee and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
“The Confederacy was a four year period in which traitors hellbent on preserving slavery tried — and then failed — to divide the Union,” Helmer said in a statement released yesterday. “The Confederacy and its leaders do not deserve our commemoration, and its adherents certainly do not deserve taxpayer dollars.”
According to Helmer, a portion of the revenue from sales of both commemorative plates goes to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which he described as “a neo-Confederate organization that promotes hate speech, white supremacy, and the debunked ‘Lost Cause’ ideology.”
Originally established in Richmond in 1896, the Sons of Confederate Veterans is a membership organization for male descendants of soldiers who fought for the Confederacy.
On its website, the group argues that the “preservation of liberty and freedom” motivated Southern states to fight the Civil War, with no mention of their explicit opposition to the abolition of slavery. At the same time, the Virginia chapter claims to “reject racism in all its forms and denounce the use of Confederate images as symbols of white supremacy or hatred.”
FFXnow reached out to the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Virginia division for comment.
With only four delegates and eight senators dissenting for the final vote, the General Assembly adopted legislation in 1999 allowing special license plates to be issued to members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. A bill to establish commemorative license plates honoring Robert E. Lee passed in 2007 with even less opposition, flying through the state Senate unanimously and getting a single abstention in the House of Delegates.
Since then, however, local and state lawmakers, particularly Democrats, have increasingly challenged the whitewashing of Lee and the Confederacy. Under then-governor Ralph Northam, Virginia scrapped Lee-Jackson Day as a holiday in 2020, recognizing Election Day instead, and removed a statue of Lee that had stood in Richmond for 130 years in 2021.
In Fairfax County, a yearlong review of landmarks with Confederate names resulted in Lee’s name and that of fellow Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson getting dropped from Routes 29 and 50 in 2022. Robert E. Lee High School in Springfield was renamed after the late congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis in 2020.
The DMV redesigned the Sons of the Confederate Veterans license plate in 2015 to remove an image of the Confederate flag after the U.S. Supreme Court found that specialty license plates constitute government speech, ruling against the organization’s challenge of Texas denying its plate design with a Confederate flag.
Before Helmer took up the cause this year, Prince William Del. Candi Mundon King, who’s now Spanberger’s secretary of the commonwealth, tried multiple times to eliminate Virginia’s Confederate-affiliated license plates. A 2023 bill that would’ve banned references to the Confederacy “or persons who committed treason” never received a vote, while a 2024 bill with the same language as Helmer’s passed the General Assembly only to be vetoed by then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Under HB 1344, which will take effect on July 1, drivers with valid Robert E. Lee and Sons of Confederate Veterans license plates can retain them until their current expiration date, but they won’t be renewed.
The Virginia DMV charges a $10 annual fee for personalized plates. The department didn’t respond to a request for updated information by press time, but as of Feb. 27, 2024, it had issued approximately 2,300 Robert E. Lee and Sons of Confederate Veterans plates, Virginia Mercury reported at the time.
