Charlottesville

“When you dance with the devil, the devil doesn't change. The devil changes you,” Charlottesville mayor Michael Signer, quoting an old saying in the wake of Heather Heyer’s death at the hands of a racist in a reference to Trump’s political flirtation with the alt-right

Beginning in the fall of 1964, I spent four months in Charlottesville, Virginia, as a student at Virginia Law School before deciding to attend graduate school in History at the University of Hawaii.  My impression then was that Charlottesville was a genteel college town whose civic leaders played lip service to the Cavalier Ideal of honor and chivalry, but I seldom left campus except to walk to a nearby commercial block to visit book stores that sold outlines of law professors’ lectures and past exams and a smoke shop that specialized in pipe tobacco and smelled terrific.  On football weekends, Southern gentlemen would come onto campus, immaculately dressed and often drunk by game’s end. In a Virginia Cavaliers game against Navy, I recall, the Virginia QB threw an incomplete backward pass and a Midshipmen picked it up and waltzed in for a TD.  The only African American I recall seeing was a maid who cleaned a suite of rooms I shared with three others.  Other law school memories: playing bridge on Saturday nights while drinking beer and eating Fritos, having to wear a coat and tie to the cafeteria; being shocked when a dorm mate committed suicide. On a trip to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate, a few miles from campus, there was no trace of the former slave quarters.  A guide claimed that, using a telescope, the nation’s third president could keep an eye on how construction was progressing at the university he founded.

Tragedy came to Charlottesville over the weekend, culminating in the death of Heather Heyer, 32, when a 20-year-old white racist drove his car into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators.  They were protesting the appearance of white nationalist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, in their city for what was billed as a “Unite the Right Rally.”  The racists’ avowed purpose was to protest the possible removal from Emancipation Park (formerly named for Robert E. Lee) of a Robert E. Lee statue commissioned exactly one hundred years ago. The previous night, white nationalists with lit tiki torches invaded the University of Virginia campus shouting slogans such as “White Lives Matter” and “Jews Will Not Replace Us.”  They surrounded a group that had gathered near a statue of Thomas Jefferson, and a brawl ensued.  On the scene, former Klan member David Duke claimed that the event was fulfilling the promises of President Trump. 

Trump condemned “hatred, bigotry, and violence” but then added without explanation “on many sides.” He refused to condemn the hate groups who had assembled in Charlottesville.  In contrast, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch tweeted: “We should call evil by its name. My brother didn't give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home.” Finally, on Monday, bowing to pressure, Trump issued this statement: “Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”

 

On Vogue’s website Lynn Yaeger described assassination victim Heather Heyer:

She was 32 years old: A former bartender, and a waitress, she was now working as paralegal and taking classes at night. According to those who knew her best, she was often moved to tears by the injustices in the world. On Saturday morning, she got up, left her Chihuahua, Violet, at home, met up with friends, and went out to protest the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Klan members who were congregating in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she lived.

How do we not give in to despair in times like these, when the simplest, most innocent acts of resistance can be extinguished by a deed of almost unimaginable evil?

The last Facebook post Heyer wrote was, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

Charlottesville is home to novelist John Grisham, actress Sissy Spacek, members of the Dave Mathews Band and others of good will no doubt horrified by the weekend invasion of alt-right Neanderthals.  Valid arguments can be made, however, for, as well as against, Lee’s statue remaining in Emancipation Park, which some want to name in Heather Heyer’s honor.  Although a slaveholder, Lee was a reluctant secessionist who felt a stronger loyalty to Virginia than the Union.  If the survival of ancient statues depended on contemporary political correctness (and I hate that pejorative phrase), few would remain, certainly not that of my distant uncle James Buchanan in New York City.  But this should be a matter for the good people of Charlottesville, not the vandals who used the statue as a pretense for savagery.

In his latest egregious statement equating white supremacists with what he called alt-left protestors, Trump made an issue of vandals destroying a statue of a Confederate soldier in Durham, North Carolina.  What’s next, he jeered, statues of slaveholders George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?  The difference, of course, is Washington and Jefferson were Founding Fathers while Robert E. Lee and Confederate soldiers warred against the Union they had helped create.  Ray Smock wrote:

Phyllis and Ray Smock at Promontory Summit, Utah, where the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads joined to complete the transcontinental rail system in 1869.  Photo by Matt Simek

    We have all heard the excuse from those who display and honor the Confederate flag and march under its banner at rallies that it is not hate it is heritage. That is a hollow slogan and a complete misreading of history. The Civil War still grips us. The armies stopped fighting in 1865 because Robert E. Lee could no longer field an army. So, he surrendered. Most American people and government officials did not push hard for the Confederate leaders to be tried for treason even though those who lead the Confederacy were clearly traitors. They took up arms against the United States. This is treason. Despite the treasonous acts, the sentiment that prevailed after the war was that of the martyred President Lincoln who urged the nation to end of the war “with malice toward none, with charity for all…” He called for healing the wounds of war. 

    While the armies stopped fighting, the Confederate states never stopped the fight against racial equality. The Confederacy had to agree to the 13th and 14th Amendments which abolished slavery and gave black males the right to vote. This was the central Constitutional requirement of Reconstruction. Blacks participated in local, state, and federal politics for the first time during Reconstruction. This was a bitter pill for the white supremacists who hated blacks and could not accept them as political equals or equals as human beings. The “bottom rung of the ladder was on top” was a common expression in the South. Society was upside down. Blacks were elected sheriffs, they served in state legislatures, and a few made it to the U.S. Congress.

    The KKK and similar American terrorist groups with a variety of names such as the Knights of the White Camelia, rose to make America white again. Through decades of murder, lynching, and intimidation, the white supremacist groups sought to win through terrorism what they could not win on the battlefield. President Grant eventually sent troops to stop the terrorist groups and to outlaw the Klan. But the great tragedy of American history is that while the Confederate army lost the war, the leaders of that war and many of the Confederate troops and many who never fought in the war, managed to make white supremacy work in the politics and culture of the South. Blacks may have become citizens, but few could exercise the franchise. For a hundred years from the 1860s to the 1960s, blacks in the South, and often in the North, lived in a totalitarian system of oppression and racial hatred.

    And here we are in August of 2017, where the hate groups of white supremacy, the KKK and the neo-Nazis have made such an ugly, primordially brutal showing in Charlottesville. An innocent young woman who was protesting their hatred, their violence, and their blind bigotry, was murdered by a demented racist. He was only 20 years old. Where in God’s name did he learn so fast how to hate so deeply?

    To add additional woe to this unfolding tragedy of hate, we have a president who cannot make up his mind if he should condemn white supremacists or not.  who has no understanding of any of this history, and who has personally used racism to make money in real estate by discriminating against blacks, and who more recently rose to political prominence by smearing our first black President for being illegal and unfit to be president. The old Reconstruction fear of the bottom rung of the ladder being on top became a reality with Barack Obama in the White House. The Presidential election of 2016 was the most racially motivated in 100 years. Donald Trump did not invent this race hatred, but he used it to rise to the highest office in the land. It is almost as if the Civil Rights Movement never happened. The president has allowed and encouraged this hatred to come out of the shadows and back into the mainstream of American politics and American culture. Donald Trump is an evil and dangerous man, either on purpose, or because he truly is the most amoral, insensitive, and poorly educated person ever to hold this formerly distinguished office. 

    What can we do to turn this around? How do we stop the hate? We all need to work on this or we could face another civil war. This one, given all the other forces in the world today, could be the end of the Great American Experiment in Government that we call the United States. Even our name is becoming a joke, for we are not United, and we have a Grand Divider as president.

above, Rumba at Miller Market; below,  Doreen Carey

Miller Market had a Latin flavor Sunday as the group Rumba de la Region was playing Cuban drum music.  This will be the final week I will be able to order tacos from Bienvenides.  I recall my disappointment a year ago upon discovering my favorite vendor gone.  The stated reason: school is soon back in session.  I ran into Dorreen Carey, a Grand Calumet Task Force mainstay, and asked whether hubby Bill is still brewing beer.  This year he grew his own hops and is not certain how well they’ll do, she replied.  I volunteered to be a sampler.

above, Josh, Alissa, Anthony, Miranda; below, Becca and James

Alissa posted photos from Niagara Falls.  We took Alissa there when she was a little kid, and she fearlessly stood on the deck of the Maid of the Mist, singing “Sailing, Sailing” despite being sprayed with water. We also stopped at the Falls with grandkids on the way back from Jackie Okomski’s high school graduation party.

At Chesterton library, I found “Trajectory,” a collection of four stories by favorite writer Richard Russo.  “Horseman” is about English professor Janet Moore, whose marriage is unraveling and who can’t stop thinking about lines to Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “Windy Nights,” which husband Robbie recites every night to autistic son Marcus:

Whenever the moon and stars are set, 

Whenever the wind is high, 

All night long in the dark and wet, 

A man goes riding by. 

Marcus was named for a black professor both Janet and Robbie had known in grad school.  Once, after a night drinking, the professor recited “Windy Nights” and declared it to be a great poem.  When asked to explain why, he replied, “Because when I speak those words aloud, my father’s alive again.”  Faced with dealing with a plagiarized paper, Janet Moore ruminated on sexism on campus in ways that former IUN professors Anne Balay and Julie Peller could identify with:

  It angered her, and rightly so, that students were more likely to cheat in her classes than those of her male colleagues, or be tardier, to openly question her authority, to give out mediocre evaluations at the end of the term.  Worse still, that they held her to a higher standard was actually unwitting.  Had anyone asked if they were prejudiced against female professors, not one would answer yes.  Hook them up to a lie detector, and every last one would pass.

Historian and Hammond Gavit grad Anthony Zaragoza spent a day at the Calumet Regional Archives talking with me and using material relating to deindustrialization in Northwest Indiana.  He teaches at Evergreen State College in Tacoma, Washington, and was looking for ways to involve students in community research. He was particularly interested in the 20-year tenure of mayor Richard Hatcher.  Ove the weekend he met with VU Flight Paths” project directors Allison Schuette and Liz Wuerffel, and I’m sorry he’ll be leaving the area before I could put him in contact with Gary community organizer Samuel A. Love. His best friend from high school owns a juice bar in Valpo and filled him in on protests over polluters in East Chicago and the proposed immigrant detention center in Gary.