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In Charlottesville, there is before 12 August and there is after. So decisive is this date that it often appears in Virginia newspapers without a year attached. It is the local 9/11.
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For Cameron Webb, that Saturday in 2017 began with a phone call. Webb, a doctor with a law degree, was completing a White House fellowship. His wife, Leigh-Ann, was in Charlottesville, where the couple planned to move in a week’s time. Calling from her car, Leigh-Ann told her husband that men carrying Confederate flags had swarmed the public garage where she was now parked.
“I’m scared,” she said. “Something’s happening here.”
The evening prior, white nationalists had paraded around the University of Virginia, where the Webbs, who are both Black, had met 16 years earlier. The next day, 12 August, promised to be even more intense; a “Unite the Right” rally was scheduled to unfold under a statue of Robert E Lee at the center of town.
Alarmed by his wife’s tone, Webb hopped in a car and picked up a friend. Heading south, the two men reached out to local community members. They wrote a letter to incoming students, explaining their experiences as Black alumni. When they learned that a counter-protester had been killed in the escalating violence, they pulled over to reflect.
“Like so many people, we were mortified that this could happen in a town that we know and love,” Webb recalled. “We just wanted to do our part.”
When the weekend was over, Webb returned to DC; within several days, his fellowship had ended. He, his wife and their two young children moved into their new house in Charlottesville. He began working at UVA, practicing medicine, teaching and serving as the director of health policy and equity. Leigh-Ann worked as an ER doctor while also attending business school.
Then, in August 2019, almost exactly two years after the Unite the Right rally, Cameron Webb announced his candidacy for Congress. He was 36 years old.
A Democrat running in a deeply conservative district, Webb would go on to lose by a five-point margin in November. But just weeks later, he returns to Washington with a decidedly elevated stature. As the senior policy adviser for Covid-19 equity, Webb will counsel Joe Biden on matters related to the coronavirus, and its effects on minority communities.
A role Webb couldn’t have anticipated even a year ago, it’s one he is nonetheless well prepared to execute – in no small part thanks to the divided district where he is coming from.
Shaped like a seated ostrich – plump at the bottom, skinny through the neck – Virginia’s fifth congressional district is a 10,000-sq-mile constituency that extends from the DC exurbs all the way to the North Carolina border. This largely rural district has just two sizable cities: Charlottesville, midway down the ostrich gullet, and Danville, at the base of the state.
The fifth district is America in microcosm, boasting both urban elites and a rural working class struggling with a declining economy. The charitable reading of this diversity is that it’s an example of how people of different backgrounds manage to live alongside each other. A more cynical interpretation is that the fault lines of American life run straight through this district, dividing, enraging and mystifying residents.
What unites the district, then, is history. The fifth, where Black residents make up 19% of the population, is home to a huge number of civil rights landmarks. There is the Appomattox court house, where Robert E Lee surrendered to Ulysses S Grant, and Danville, the last capital of the Confederacy and site of Bloody Monday, a violent attack on civil rights protests. There is Prince Edward county, where white leaders shut down the public-school system for five years rather than allowing its integration.
When he announced his candidacy, Webb said he was entering this fraught historical context, not just for Virginia, but for America.
•••
On a humid morning last October, I drove to a socially distanced rally in South Hill, Virginia; Donald Trump shilled for Bob Good, Webb’s far-right opponent and an athletics fundraiser at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, on the radio.
The race had become surprisingly competitive. Despite the district’s historic conservatism – in 2016, Donald Trump won the fifth by 11 points – Good’s disastrous fundraising and extreme rhetoric had proved damaging. Good had gone so far as to compare the Democratic party to an Islamic jihadist terror network, and was running a flurry of obviously racist ads against Webb. Tightening polls indicated that Webb’s moderate positioning and positive message had won him the support of not a few Republicans.
Webb was getting up to speak when I arrived at an outdoor amphitheater in Centennial Park. Wearing blackish blue jeans and a crisp white shirt, he cut a handsome figure; the applause from the 70 people in attendance was accordingly enthusiastic.
“As a physician who treats coronavirus patients, I can tell you there is nothing made up or exaggerated about this virus,” said Webb. “There is nothing exaggerated about its economic impact. We have to reconcile those two crises – as well as the crisis of racial injustice facing our communities.”
After the rally, a Black attendee named Sebastian Midder explained his own personal stake in politics. “I’m presently fighting cancer,” he said. “I have chronic heart failure as a pre-existing condition. I wanted them both to know that they have to win.”
At the core of Webb’s research is a concept called “allostatic load” – the physical “wear and tear” that results from social factors like income inequality and discrimination. For 55-year-old Midder, this is real life. “I feel like I worked long and hard enough to not have that be my final years,” he said. “I feel robbed. This was supposed to be my retirement. I gave all I got. I’m sitting here packing a .38 special, because I don’t know what’s going to happen.” He motioned to a raincoat covering a gun he’d bought in the days following George Floyd’s murder.
The next morning, I asked Webb about the district’s history, and how he sees himself within that context. “It’s not lost on folks that every single representative from the fifth district has been a white man,” he said.
Most prominent among their number is James Madison, not just the district’s first representative and the father of the US constitution, but also a facilitator of the three-fifths compromise, which labeled Black men as less than fully human. Webb, however, said sins like this don’t exist at the exclusion of America’s better angels. “Look at James Madison, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson,” he said. “These were slaveholders. So that’s one part of the history. But if you look at the civil rights movement, if you’re in Prince Edward county – that was a huge staging place for the conversation about education rights.”
•••
Election day came in crisp and clear. The candidates made good use of the weather, traveling to Palmyra, Ruckersville and Rustburg in a final push for votes. The last respectable poll had Webb three points ahead.
Vote totals started coming in a few hours after sunset. Rural districts arrived first, giving Good a sizable lead. But even as deeply blue areas like Charlottesville began reporting, Good’s lead held strong.
At 12.31am the Webb campaign released a statement of concession. By a margin of five points, 52.6% to 47.4%, Bob Good had won. The district’s basic partisanship had proved, for Webb, too high a hurdle.
The fallout from this and other Democratic House losses became public in the days following. Abigail Spanberger, a moderate who had narrowly won re-election in a district that hugged the fifth, implored colleagues to avoid terms like “socialism” and “defund the police”, which she said had hurt the party.
Having spent much of the fall in the fifth district, talking to voters and following the candidates, I knew it was possible. Progressive policies might have had a receptive audience, but progressive rhetoric was repellent here. Webb seemed to have understood this: even as he had pursued liberal positions, he had stayed away from lightning-rod lingo, and if this strategy hadn’t gotten him to a win, it had earned him a number of Trump voters: Webb ran 2.3 points ahead of Biden in a district the new president lost by 8.5 points.
Three weeks after the election, Webb was back in the hospital, consulting a woman who had just undergone surgery. On recognizing Webb, the woman revealed she was a Republican, a fact she said she hoped the doctor wouldn’t hold against her. She even asked for an autograph, adding, “You’ve been so kind and people are never going to believe me that you were my doctor tonight.”
Webb obliged, handing over a note that read, in part, “I guess we’re proof that Republicans and Democrats can get along just fine!” Webb wrote the names of the parties in their respective colors: red for Republicans, blue for Democrats.
It’s almost too pat, this anecdote: if only we could talk to each other, like Webb and his patient did! And yet, it’s something – a microscopic movement in the tectonic plates of our politics. The means by which Webb’s new work in the Biden White House could make a real-world impact.
A doctor met a woman in pain, and he helped her feel better. The journey begins there.
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