On Aug. 11, the cities of Charlotte and Charlottesville were very different places, although that was unclear Saturday morning, when people from other parts of the country were using the hashtags #Charlotte and #Charlottesville interchangeably on social media. Those hashtags were, of course, in reference to the deadly white supremacist rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia, that has shaken our country to its core over the past several days.
We all now know what happened in Charlottesville: domestic terrorists marched through the small college town holding torches. The next day, one terrorist drove through a group of anti-racist counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. By all accounts, the events were not a reflection of the people of Charlottesville, whose city council had earlier voted to tear down a bronze sculpture of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The white supremacists who arrived to protest that decision came from other places.
What most people don’t know is that a very different scenario went down in Charlotte Aug. 11. While white supremacists held the city of Charlottesville hostage that Friday night, a diverse group of music and arts lovers gathered at two CLT clubs, the Rabbit Hole and Snug Harbor, for culturally inclusive events that brought together almost every important local musician CL has featured, in one way or another, over the past six months: rappers Deniro Farrar, Elevator Jay, Black Linen, Nige Hood, Tizzy of Th3 Higher; singers Kevin “Mercury” Carter, Autumn Rainwater, Dexter Jordan, Celeste Moonchild; rockers LeAnna Eden and Blu House; and surrealist performance artist Allamuto, to name just a few.
Plaza Midwood was all about celebrating diversity, not separation, that Friday. But it could have been another story. What happened in Charlottesville easily could have happened here. When racist terrorists invade cities, as they did Charlottesville, they could care less about the people who live in those cities. Their aim is to create chaos and violence, and they serve a president who has consistently given tacit support of their hatred, bigotry and violence. While that president was pressured into making a statement against hate groups two days after the violence, his words fell empty in light of his previous comments and tweets.
“Maybe he should have been roughed up,” the president said of a Black Lives Matter protester while on the campaign trail in 2016. “Knock the crap out of them,” he told his followers, instructing them to violently confront protesters. “Get ’em out,” he repeated at campaign stops across the country.
To be sure, this president is hardly the first American leader to endorse racial division and violence. The U.S. has a terrible track record with regard to race. The current commander in chief is just the latest in a long line of politicians who have gotten it terribly wrong in the centuries since European settlers slaughtered 80 percent of this land’s indigenous people to create the United States.
But as more Americans over the past few decades have begun to acknowledge the country’s racist legacy, white supremacist terrorism like the one seen in Charlottesville has become more prevalent.
And it must stop.
One solution is for cities hosting the remaining 1,000 Confederate monuments in 31 states to diligently and vigilantly follow in the footsteps of Charlottesville’s leaders in wiping away those stains. In Durham, on Aug. 14, protesters took matters into their own hands. Carrying signs reading “No Trump, no KKK, no racist USA” they wrapped a yellow rope around the statue of a Confederate soldier, which crumbled to the ground with hardly any effort. In my hometown of Asheboro, where the statue of a Confederate soldier has stood in front of the courthouse all my life, a former Randolph County NAACP president has asked that it be removed and replaced with one honoring the area’s pacifist Quakers, who valiantly resisted the Civil War.
But what about Charlotte? It’s time for two prominent Confederate monuments here to go, too. One, on North Kings Drive outside Memorial Stadium, includes the words, “preserving the Anglo-Saxon civilization of the South.” Tear it down. Another, now standing in Elmwood Cemetary, reads, “Mecklenburg County remembers with honor her gallant sons who fought in the armies of the Confederate states. With the other brave soldiers of the South, they struggled nobly for the cause of independence and constitutional self-government.” Tear it down.
Unfortunately, it won’t so be easy to officially remove those stains. That’s because when former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory was governor in 2015, he signed a law forbidding such removals. And so … the monuments will have to be removed in other ways.
Maybe the diverse group of artists who gathered in Plaza Midwood on Aug. 12 could form a task force to help our city and county leaders come up with creative solutions.
This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2017.
When are we going to tear down the holocaust museums, monuments for WW1, WW2, Vietnam War?? Where does it stop? Should we eradicate all references,written words, photos relating to the Civil War like it never happened or just the parts that the few aren’t happy with. Unfortunately for all the war did happen and it is part of our history no matter how ugly it is, to remind us that these things should never be allowed to happen again. We need to get on with our collective lives and end the teaching and practice of hatred that exist on all sides of our races.
I hear you, Brian. But most of the more offensive monuments paying tribute to and honoring civil war “heroes” were erected decades after — and, in the case of one Charlotte monument, more than a century after — the end of the civil war. These were erected by those who wanted to skew the reality that this war was about slavery and exploitation of blacks in this country. They were erected as slaps in the face of citizens of the United States whose ancestors were ripped from their native Africa. Period.
Also, I think you may be confusing hatred with anger when you refer to “hatred that exist on all sides.” The hatred comes from the historic racist oppressors; anger is a result of that hatred. I believe equating white supremacist hatred with black anger (and that of non-black allies) is simplistic, at best.
My clarion call in this column is not about erasing history. There are many ways to remember this great country’s shameful past (and my juxtaposition of “great” with “shameful” here is not a contradiction; nations and individuals alike can harbor both “greatness” and “shame”). Bestowing honor on those who have consistently and purposefully made life miserable for black citizens of the United States is not the way to remember that past. It is deliberately hurtful.
Garrett Epps wrote a terrific piece on this in the Atlantic in June, an excerpt of which is in italics below:
Would reducing the bronzed omnipresence of the Confederate General Staff really eliminate ‘history’?
Lets look at real history. Americans tend to assume that Southern segregation was a ‘natural’ legacy of antebellum slavery. The truth is far more complicated. After the Civil War, the South went through a period of transition — not simply during ‘Reconstruction’ (which ended in about 1877) but for the two decades that followed. There was no overall system of separation; gross racism and discrimination existed alongside tentative inter-racial cooperation and political coalition-building. Until the first decade of the twentieth century, black Southerners continued to vote, to serve on juries, and to hold state and local office. The last first-generation black member of the U.S. House left office in 1901.
Only with the rise of the U.S. as an imperial power — forcibly dominating people of color from San Juan to Manila — did the idea of legal white supremacy become acceptable to a majority of whites in North or South. Thus began the era of segregation — a system that subordinated black Southerners economically, disfranchised them politically, and isolated them in public and private space. Whats called the ‘nadir’ of race relations was the early 20th Century, not the 1870s and 80s.
The year 1890 saw the first segregation-era Southern state constitution, in South Carolina, strip blacks of the right to vote. That same year, the giant Lee statue went up in Richmond. Virginia itself disfranchised black voters in 1902. The monuments to Jefferson Davis and Jeb Stuart went up in 1907; the horseback statue of Jackson was unveiled in 1919. All across the South during these years, these statues went up to mark the triumph of the once-outlandish idea of segregation.
Segregation had an official myth: “The white South would have freed its slaves voluntarily if not for Northern meddling. The North destroyed the South because it coveted its natural resources and its cheap labor. After the War, corrupt ‘carpetbaggers’ and vile Southern white ‘scalawags’ seized power with Northern bayonets, upheld by ignorant, illiterate blacks. Heroic white conservatives finally did away with the ‘corrupt Negro vote,’ restored to power the Souths natural leaders, and returned black Southerners to their proper subordinate place.”
Blacks played no part in any of Southern history. They had no past, and no future, in white America.
As New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in his recent speech, ‘These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.’
To Brian (and anyone else who’s gotten this far): If you’re interested in these issues, I highly recommend reading Epps’ entire piece at the Atlantic, as his argument is eloquent and well-thought-out.
Yours sincerely,
Mark Kemp
Editor
Creative Loafing
I agree with the gentleman who said where does it stop. What if the statue of Andrew Jackson offended a Cherokee person because he signed the order for The removal of the Cherokee. If you keep removing statues you are doing it in Fear. Don’t give in to fear.
Wanda, ABSOLUTELY the Cherokee are offended by Andrew Jackson in any form. Take any statues of him down! Remove any reference to him from all public or God forbid any Government buildings. No streets named after him,,, etc. And the same for Civil war references or statues, or monuments. The history that surrounds them is painful for not just the victims but also for many of the perpetrators. America has avoided ever REALLY making the Native American genocide right, as well as the Slave trade and ownership right. If the Government is to ‘busy’ to actually make right these wrongs, then at least remove the reminders. That’s a start, and then we go forward from there.