Look! Away and down, south in Dixie
by Tom Sullivan
Image via Twitter.
It happened with the Confederate battle flag at South Carolina’s state capitol after the Charleston mass shooting. Now the deaths and injuries in Charlottesville, VA on Saturday have accelerated attempts to remove other Confederate commemorations to “The Lost Cause” erected across the South at the onset of Jim Crow.
White nationalists, neo-Nazis, members of the alt-right, and gun-toting militia members arrived in Charlottesville to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a city park.
Protesters in Nashville on Monday called for the removal of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest that resides between the Statehouse and Senate chambers. The Confederate general and KKK leader directed the massacre of black troops after the Union surrender at Fort Pillow in April 1864.
Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam released a statement saying, “I do not believe Nathan Bedford Forrest should be one of the individuals we honor at the Capitol. The General Assembly has established a process for addressing these matters and I strongly encourage the Capitol Commission and the Historical Commission to act.”
Rep. Brenda Gilmore and other Democratic lawmakers spoke to reporters after meeting with Haslam:
“I think it has been painful to me as a black caucus member, and also other members of the General Assembly, when we pass by this symbol of a very dark period in our history that represented hate and slavery,” she said.
In other states, moves already underway to remove Confederate iconography accelerated. The New York Times reports:
In Maryland, a statue of the former Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, which sits in front of the Statehouse, has drawn ire. Michael E. Busch the House speaker, told The Baltimore Sun on Monday that “it’s the appropriate time to remove it.” Taney is best known for ruling against Dred Scott in 1857, decreeing that blacks couldn’t claim United States citizenship, and therefore couldn’t sue in federal court.
The mayor of Lexington, Jim Gray, said he would speed up a proposal to remove two Confederate monuments from the city’s former courthouse.
Mayor Jim Gray of Lexington, Ky., said in a statement on Saturday that plans to move two statues of Confederate figures from the grounds of the former courthouse there were in place before the violence in Charlottesville, in which a 32-year-old woman was killed and at least 34 others were injured. He said what happened there “accelerated the announcement I intended to make next week.”
In Durham, North Carolina, protesters took matters into their own hands:
DURHAM, N.C. (WNCN) – A crowd of protesters gathered outside the old Durham County courthouse on Main Street Monday evening in opposition to a Confederate monument in front of the government building.
Around 7:10 p.m. a woman using a ladder climbed the statue of a soldier and attached a rope around the statue.
Moments later, the crowd pulled on the rope and the statue fell. One man quickly ran up and spat on the statue and several others began kicking it.
The clashes are sure to continue. But the black-masked antifa counterprotesters get it wrong and simply play into the alt-right strategy. The better way to confront neo-nazi clowns is with real clowns, Dave Neiwert
of the Southern Poverty Law Center told me Saturday. That happened in Charlotte in 2012 when counterprotesters in red noses outnumbered Nazi marchers 5 to 1:
“The message from us is, you look silly,” Lacey Williams, the youth coordinator for Charlotte’s Latin American Coalición, told WCNC. “We’re dressed like clowns and you’re the ones that look funny.”
The real clowns met white power with noisemakers, signs reading “Wife Power,” and sacks of white flour. Everyone but the Nazis and klansmen went home with smiles on their faces.
The racist cause is still lost. The country is still growing browner. But the alt-right wants its Horst Wessel and will provoke violent clashes until it gets its martyr to white pride.
White pride: It’s what you’re left with when the only thing to be proud of in your sorry life is the skin you were born in.
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