"The South, of course, carries the legacy of slavery, the Ku Klux Man and resistance to the Civil Rights Movement. Whether it's deserved, the South maintains a reputation for racism, intolerance and political conservatism.

Again, the degree to which this stereotype holds true depends on which rung you occupy on the socio-economic ladder On one hand, [City Council member Maurice] Cox calls Charlottesville 'a bastion of liberal progressive thinking' characterized by strong bi-racial political allegiances dating to the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation ruling. Charlottesville has elected a black representative to City Council consistently for the past 30 years, and, in another break from Virginia politics-as-usual, the Council has spoken out against the death penalty. It also promotes a living wage initiative.

The City's voting record tells a similar story says Larry J. Sabato, director of the UVA Center for Governmental Studies: 'I can only judge Charlottesville by its votes and, by that measure, Charlottesville is a little piece of Massachusetts dropped into Virginia.'

The City, Sabato continues, 'is even more liberal than most other Virginia university towns. Within Virginia, Charlottesville may most resemble Alexandria, where liberal whites, many of them non-native-Virginians, demonstrate voting patterns not much different from minority voters.'

That difference in politics and lifestyle attracts residents to Charlottesville who would otherwise not choose to live in Virginia. On a personal note he does not often publicly discuss, Cox talks about moving his own interracial family-stateside after 10 years in Italy. 'I wanted to assure them a wonderful life where they would be accepted and could be engaged in the community, he says. 'I felt that I could do that in Charlottesville, whereas I do not feel that about many other cities in the South.'

But the come-heres who add to Charlottesville's cosmopolitan aura and benefit from its progressive, tolerant atmosphere tend to be educated and middle class. The town may not seem so progressive if you're poor or uneducated.

Long-time political activist and Charlottesville native Alicia Lugo believes things are not much different for the poor here than they were 150 years ago The City, she asserts, ignores its disenfranchised class in keeping with an 'unbroken tradition of plantation life that dates back to Thomas Jefferson.

'We're still on the plantation, and we're anxious to let it go,' she says.

Currently Director of Focus TeenSite program, Lugo likens the City's deaf ear to the Southern plantation owners attitude toward the sharecroppers and slaves they exploited 200 years ago. 'Part of the plantation ethos is the lack of voice,' she says. 'The field hands can't be heard, because they may have minds of their own.'

Like earlier generations Charlottesville's working poor are expected to provide their services and then go away 'We give them no skills and we open no doors to upward mobility,' Lugo charges. 'For them life is a struggle each day.'

Lugo maintains that affluent neighborhoods bask in the afterglow of antebellum favor. 'If drug dealers set up shop on the corner of Greenbrier and Rio Road, they wouldn't be there 10 minutes,' she says, but when they thrive in poor neighborhoods, the City says it lacks the resources to get rid of them. 'The same thing if kids decided to hang out on the sidewalk outside Greenbrier Elementary and shoot guns,' Lugo says. 'And if the Jefferson School were anywhere else, weld have slapped some paint on that building a long time ago.'

In his capacity as director Of the Legal Aid Justice Center, Alex Gulotta agrees that Charlottesville's economically strapped citizens remain more vulnerable to the sting of Southern conservatism, specifically the widely held belief that people should solve their own problems The Virginia Usury Statute for instance, which limits the amount of interest that lenders can charge, does not actually apply if the financing agreement is signed by both parties. As a result, some poor folks drive around Charlottesville in cars for which they pay an annual interest rate of 39.9 percent. Gulotta calls it outrageous.

'There are unscrupulous businesses in this town that routinely victimize poor people,' he says. 'We've got a usury statute that's meaningless, so people get ripped off.'

In another area of consumer protection, Virginia narrowly construes one statute to make only deceptive (but not unfair) practices actionable. That means plaintiffs must prove intentional acts tantamount to fraud in order to succeed in court. And in the area of workers' rights, Virginia has a comparatively low claims rate for unemployment insurance because, by requiring employees to prove they were fired through no fault of their own, the state statute is designed to deny claims.

'The fact that what the other person did is patently unfair is of little or no legal consequence in the Virginia Court,' Gulotta says. 'Many of the tools that a less Southern state may have offered to protect the victim are not here.'" (Phoebe Frosch, C-Ville Weekly, May 21, 2002)