Battle lines drawn in wake of Charlottesville incident
21st August 2017 · 0 Comments
The FBI and federal prosecutors announced Saturday night. Aug. 12, that a civil rights investigation will be opened into the vehicular death of a 32-year-old woman and injuries to 20 others during a white nationalist rally earlier that day.
The woman was killed after police say 20-year-old James Alex Fields drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counter-protesters as they walked in the opposite direction on the street. Fields, of Maumee, Ohio, is being held without bail on murder and other charges related to the hit-and-run, officials said. Police reported that three people were arrested in relation to the rally. Fields and another suspect arrested are not from the state of Virginia.
Hours after the crash, two law enforcement officers were killed in a helicopter crash seven miles southwest of the city. Police said the helicopter was assisting law enforcement officers monitor the rally in Charlottesville.
Lt. H. Jay Cullen of Midlothian and Trooper-Pilot Burke M.M. Bates of Quinton were killed in the crash, Virginia State Police reported.
CNN reported that in an emotional news conference, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe sent a message to the white nationalists who held the rally.
“Go home. You came here today to hurt people,” McAuliffe said. “We are stronger than you…There is no place for you in America.”
Upon learning of the incident, National Urban League President & CEO Marc H, Morial released the following statement: Horrifying expressions of white supremacy and Nazi sympathies sadly are nothing novel in the United States, even in the 21st century. What is shocking is that these demonstrations — with apparent deliberate fatal assaults against counter-protesters — should take place without a clear condemnation from the highest levels of government. What we are witnessing is a failure of our national institutions. We in the Urban League Movement call upon everyone with a voice on our national stage to condemn these demonstrations and these racist sentiments in the strongest possible terms. This is not who we are as a society and as a nation.”
Speaking at his golf club in Bedminster, NJ, President Donald Trump spoke about the violence at a previously scheduled press conference about veterans’ healthcare and said we have to “heal the wounds of our country.”
He drew bipartisan criticism for not denouncing white nationalists and neo- Nazis by name. A startling criticism came from conservative Set. Orin Hatch, R-Utah, who invoked the memory of his brother who was killed in World War II.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” Trump said. “No citizen should ever fear for their safety and security in our society. No child should ever be afraid to go outside and play.”
Despite mentioning several things he said were going in the right direction, like unemployment and job creation, Trump said it’s important to find out why violence continues.
“No matter our color, creed, religion or political party, we are all American first. We love our country, we love our God, we love our flag, we’re proud of our country, we’re proud of who we are,” Trump said. “So we want to the get this situation straightened out and we want to study it and we want to see what we’re doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen.”
Trump did not take questions following his remarks.
During an Aug. 14 teleconference, civil rights advocates and elected officials weighed in on the president’s remarks and the violent protest.
“The president was two days late and a dollar short,” Kristen Clark, a member of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told reporters.
“The president has pursued policies that have emboldened white supremacists,” Clark added. “The alt-right now know they have a friend in the White House.”
“We are not going to allow white supremacists to come into our city and define our story,” Charlottesville Vice Mayor Dr. Wes Bellamy said. “We will become stronger from this.
“We are a resilient place, a strong place and we are going to be alright,” Bellamy added.
“Charlottesville was first, Boston is next,” Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, said referring to a white nationalist rally scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 19, in Boston.
“The hate is metastasizing,” he added.
Thousands of people, some waving Confederate flags and displaying swastikas, took part in the protest against the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
The image of swastikas being boldly displayed in Charlottesville sent shockwaves across the nation and prompted some of Congress’ most prominent GOP members to distance themselves from the Trump administration, which has repeatedly been accused by the media and civil rights groups of creating a political and social climate that encourages racial hatred and acts of violence and terrorism.
Trump left the press conference without answering any questions from reporters.
The Southern Poverty Law Center described the rally as “the largest hate-gathering of its kind in decades.”
Charlottesville, Va. has become Ground Zero for white nationalist and other protesters, who faced larger counter-rallies in the past. About 1,000 law enforcement officers and first responders flooded the event.
Emboldened and proclaiming victory after a bloody weekend in Virginia, white nationalists said last week that they are planning more demonstrations across the nation to promote their agenda.
“We’re going to be more active than ever before,” Matthew Heimbach, a white nationalist leader, said Monday.
The U.S. Justice Department said it will review the violence, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions told ABC that the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer, 32, met the definition of domestic terrorism.
White nationalists said they were undaunted.
Heimbach, who said he was pepper-sprayed during the melee in Charlottesville, called the Aug. 12 event “an absolute stunning victory” for the far right because of the large number of supporters who descended on the city to decry plans to remove a statue of Lee.
A neo-Nazi website that helped promote the gathering said there will be more events soon.
“We are going to start doing this nonstop. Across the country,” said the site, which Internet domain host GoDaddy said it was shutting down after it mocked the woman killed in Charlottesville.
“It’s an assault on American freedoms. Today it’s Confederate monuments. Tomorrow it may be the Constitution or the American flag,” a National Socialist Party leader told The Associated Press..
Kevin Boyle, an American history professor at Northwestern University, watched the violence in Charlottesville unfold, the feeling in his gut both horror and a sense that the racial tension bubbling for years had finally, almost inevitably, begun boiling over.
“Given our political moment, I’m not surprised that we’ve come to this point,” he told The Associated Press. “I’m terribly depressed we’ve come to this point but I’m not surprised. It didn’t come out of nowhere.”
“Donald Trump gave (white supremacists) permission to come out into the real world,” Boyle said. “As long as they were existing in this kind of sad little shadow world where they were just talking to each other, it was disturbing, but it’s not as profoundly dangerous as when they feel they can take the public square.”
Whether they might be successful in spreading their message depends a lot on how American leaders respond, Boyle told The Associated Press.
Trump quickly came under fire for his response. He said “we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.”
The “on many sides” emphasized at the ending drew the ire of his critics, who pushed back on his statement as failing to specifically denounce racism and equating the white supremacists with those who came to protest their hate.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, for example, 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.”
U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio said that Trump should not allow white supremacists “to share only part of the blame.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan tweeted that “white supremacy is repulsive” and that there should be “no moral ambiguity.”
U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, of Hawaii, disowned the president, tweeting “As a Jew, as an American, as a human, words cannot express my disgust and disappointment. This is not my president.”
“I was clear about this bigotry & violence over the weekend and I’ll repeat it today: We must defeat white supremacy and all forms of hatred,” Rep. Steve Scalise, R-Metairie, tweeted as he continues to recover from a gunshot wound suffered during practice this summer for a congressional baseball game.
Trump “welcomes the support of white supremacists, which is why he has at least two of them working for him in the White House, and sees them as morally equivalent to anti-racist protesters,” U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said late Tuesday evening. “I never thought I would see the day when the president of the United States would openly defend white supremacy.”
Richmond was referring to White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and senior policy advisor Stephen Miller.
On Tuesday, Richmond and leaders of three other minority Congressional caucuses called for the termination of Bannon, Miller and Deputy Assistant to the President Sebastian Gorka, calling all three “white supremacists.”
After Trump backed away from remarks Tuesday during which he referred to neo-Nazis, KKK members and white supremacists who commit acts of violence as “criminals and thugs,” former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke tweeted “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth.”
The Charlottesville, Va. incident appears to have lit a fire under some elected officials to hasten the removal of Confederate statues.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said last week that he would ask the Legislature to reverse a 2015 law signed by his Republican predecessor that blocks the removal or relocation of monuments and to defeat a measure that gives immunity to motorists who strike protesters.
“Our Civil War history is important, but it belongs in textbooks and museums — not a place of allegiance on Capital grounds,” Cooper said in a statement.
Last Monday, Tennessee GOP Gov. Bill Haslam asked state officials to remove a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest. A Confederate general and an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, from the Tennessee Capitol.
In Maryland, GOP Gov. Larry Hogan said Tuesday that he would push for the removal from state land of the statue of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, author of the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision which said that Black people had no rights that whites were “bound by law to respect.”
“While we cannot hide from our history, nor should we, the time has come to make clear the difference between properly acknowledging our past and glorifying the darkest chapters of our history,” Hogan, who had previously resisted calls for the removal of the Taney statue, said.
In Durham, NC, protesters used a rope to pull down a Confederate statue that had been erected in 1924 and in Gainsville, FL two Confederate statues were taken down last week.
Similar efforts are under way in Dallas, Jacksonville, FL, Memphis, TN, Baltimore, MD, San Antonio, TX and Lexington, KY.
This article originally published in the August 21, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
