Anti-racists in a Virginia
city 100 miles from the nation's capital showed they won't be intimidated by
the far right. Danny Katch draws out the lessons of their struggle.
July 18, 2017
THE SMALL city of
Charlottesville, Virginia, has become a prime target for a range of far-right
racists--from the "alt-right" forces of Richard Spencer to the more
"traditional" fascists of the Ku Klux Klan, along with more
mainstream forces of reaction inside the Republican Party and the local police department.
But when a few dozen Klan
members tried to march through town on July 8, they
were dwarfed over 1,000 protesters, who defied both the far right and the
pleas from Charlottesville's liberal establishment to let the KKK go unopposed.
The successful counterprotest
is a hopeful sign of the growing awareness on the left that we need to confront
the far right with our much larger numbers.
Charlottesville, a city of
under 50,000 people that is home to the University of Virginia (UVA), entered
the crosshairs of organized racists earlier this year when its city council
voted to stop honoring pro-slavery Southern leaders of the Confederacy.
Council members voted to take
down the statues of Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall"
Jackson, and to change the names of Lee Park and Jackson Park to Emancipation
Park and Justice Park, respectively. The parks' names were changed, but a legal
challenge has halted the removal of the statues until November.
Like
other cities that have recently decided to take down Confederate statues,
Charlottesville quickly attracted a range of right-wingers who absurdly claimed
that renouncing slavery was a violation of freedom.
Corey Stewart, a hard-right
candidate for the Republican Party nomination for Virginia governor, made the
statues a centerpiece of his nearly successful primary campaign. Stewart
gave speeches in front of the Lee statue and called the city council
decision "political correctness gone mad" and "historical
vandalism."
In May, the white supremacist
and self-proclaimed "alt-right" leader Richard Spencer invaded
Justice Park with a held a nighttime rally of torch-wielding racists, who
cheered as he proclaimed, "We [whites] are a people! We will not be
replaced!"
Stewart and Spencer gave the
North Carolina-based Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan the confidence to
call a Charlottesville hate march of its own for Justice Park on July 8.
"The liberals are taking
away our heritage," declared KKK member James Moore declared. "By
taking these monuments away, that's what they're working on. They're trying to
erase the white culture right out of the history books."
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HERE'S AN obvious point that
would be unnecessary to make if the corporate media did their job when covering
protests over such symbols: The Confederacy is and always has been a symbol of
anti-Black racism, period.
If you don't trust the opinion
of socialists on this question, take it from Alexander Stephens, the vice
president of the Confederacy, who declared in his famous "Corner
Stone" speech:
Our new government is founded
upon exactly the opposite idea [from the "equality of races"]; its
foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the
negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior
race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the
first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical,
philosophical, and moral truth.
Here's another obvious point
about people who organize protests in defense of the Confederacy: they are
hate-fueled racists whose actions quickly reveal that the only freedoms they're
interested in protecting is their own freedom to oppress and intimidate others.
"In 2012," the
Washington Post reported, "when a city council member first proposed
removing the statue, she received death threats, and her car was covered in
Confederate stickers.
And when Charlottesville's
Democratic Mayor Mike Signer, who is Jewish, denounced Spencer's nighttime
rally, he was hit with a wave of anti-Semitic attacks on Twitter.
"You're seeing
anti-Semitism in these crazy tweets I'm getting, and you're seeing a display of
torches at night, which is reminiscent of the KKK," Signer
told Reuters. "They're sort of a last gasp of the bigotry that this
country has systematically overcome."
Unfortunately, Signer is wrong
about his last point: Bigotry was never at its last breath in a country whose
intense racism only a few years ago inspired a movement organized around the
poignant call "Black Lives Matter." And now, there is bright orange
bat signal coming up from the White House to encourage bigots of every
stripe--Islamophobes and anti-Semites unite!--to emerge from their secret lairs
and online sewers.
To halt this growing menace
will require people coming together in large numbers to directly confront the
hate-mongers before they can grow into a truly threatening force.
Which is why it's a good thing
that so many people in Charlottesville didn't listen to the mayor. After
denouncing Spencer by comparing him to the KKK, Signer responded to the call
for a protest by the actual Klan by urging residents not to protest them.
Instead, the city worked with
businesses, churches and UVA to organize a range of activities in other parts
of the city to encourage anti-racists to go anywhere other than Justice Park on
July 8.
"Our approach all the way
through, from our police chief on down, has been to urge people not to take
this totally discredited fringe organization's putrid bait at all," the
mayor told the Washington Post.
"The only thing they seem
to want is division and confrontation and a twisted kind of celebrity. The most
successful defiance will be to refuse to take their bait and continue to tell
our story. Then their memory of Charlottesville will be of a community that repudiated
them by not getting drawn into their pathetic drama."
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BUT MANY residents understood
that challenging the leading white terrorist organization in American history
is a far more serious matter than Signer seemed to think.
"They say to ignore them,
and that they're just a small group," said
Grace Aheron, a member of Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ), to the Washington
Post, "but we've watched the rise of many people, including our
current president, who hold many similar views. It's enraging that the city
would give a permit to a known terrorist organization."
SURJ, along with
Charlottesville Black Lives Matter, Cville Solidarity and a number of other
groups, organized a counterprotest that drew over 1,000 people. The
anti-racists mobilized to Justice Park hours ahead of the Klan's 3 p.m.
scheduled start time.
The KKK didn't show up until
around 3:45 and only stayed for 45 minutes. The
racists were quickly escorted into and out of the park by police, a sight
that enraged many counter-protesters.
As the Klan tried to leave,
counterprotesters attempted to block their path, which triggered an immediate
and disproportionate police reaction. Fifteen minutes after escorting the Klan
away, cops declared the counterprotest an "unlawful assembly" and
moved in on the crowd with riot gear and tear gas, arresting 22 people--four on
felony charges. (Click
here to donate to their legal defense fund.)
"It's truly sad,"
Don Gathers, former chair of the city's Blue Ribbon Commission on Race,
Memorials and Public Spaces, said
to the Daily Progress in Charlottesville. "The police, I was so proud
of them up until this point, and now this. They treated the Klan members one
way: with respect. But then, the folks who came out to stand up to oppression,
this is what you do to them?"
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THERE ARE a number of lessons
to learn from the way Charlottesville residents defended themselves and one
another from the far right. These lessons will be important to apply in
preparation for the next racist invasion on August 12, when a number of groups
are gathering in Charlottesville for a Unite
the Right rally.
The first lesson is that while
new hate groups have been fueled by more recent hatreds like Islamophobia and
anti-Mexican xenophobia, the fight over the contested legacy of the Civil War
and the Confederacy is still one of their potent rallying points.
Republican politicians like
Corey Stewart can try to ignore Richard Spencer, and Spencer in turn can
distance himself from the Klan, but they're all drawing from the same deep well
of anti-Black racism that's in the DNA of every American reactionary.
The second lesson is that
directly confronting hate groups with large numbers works. Far fewer Klan
supporters showed up than their announced expectation of 80 to 100 marchers. As
activist Laura Goldblatt told Sarah Jaffe of Truthout:
We delayed the Klan. They
showed up. Their permit was from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., and they didn't even get
into the park until like 3:55 p.m....We could not completely prevent them from
entering....It would have been a bigger victory, but yes, we delayed them.
There were like eight of them and thousands of us. We are stronger than them; there
[were] more of us than them, and the state and the threat of racist terrorism
can't keep us away.
On the flip side, there's no
evidence and never has been that the strategy of ignoring hate groups or
holding pro-diversity events in another part of town is effective in slowing
the growth of hate groups that use these events to recruit new followers.
Finally, Mayor Signer and his
administration demonstrated that government officials may personally dislike
far-right racists, but that they are instinctively hostile to the type of
grassroots protest and confrontation that we need to protect our communities
from them.
The liberal city of
Charlottesville protected racists and attacked anti-racists, and defended the
Klan's right to protest but argued that people against the Klan shouldn't
exercise their right to counterprotest.
As activists are preparing to
mobilize against the August 12 "Unite the Right" rally, they are
trying to get the city to revoke the bigots' permit for the event. But the
racists are growing, whether they have a permit or not, because they feed on
the racism that permeates U.S. society, from the anti-Muslim "War on
Terror" to the daily anti-Black racist practices of police departments
across the country--including
in Charlottesville.
To confront the far right,
activists will have to build on and expand the successful organizing that
chased the Klan out of Justice Park on July 8. And everyone across the country
with an interest in fighting racism should look for ways we can show our
support for those in Charlottesville fighting on the front line.
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