Draw a
line, starting at Gettysburg in the north, to Antietam, through Manassas,
Fredericksburg, and Richmond, then west through Appomattox and Lynchburg, and
it forms a rough, inverted question mark around the city of Charlottesville,
Virginia. According to one website
,
Charlottesville supplied uniforms, swords, and artificial limbs to the Southern
war effort. The Presidential home of
Thomas Jefferson is nearby and it is the home of the University of Virginia. This is where my prayers are today.
And
this city, located in the heart of Virginia’s Civil War, has made the bold decision
to embrace the honest history of its past, to remove the statue of Robert E.
Lee and to rename the park dedicated to the leaders of the Civil War "Emancipation Park". According to one news
report, this is the fourth round of protests since May by white supremacists and
neo-Nazis.
Can we, in
New Jersey, truly understand what it means for a city, in Virginia, to remove a
statue of Robert E. Lee? Can we understand
this is a legacy of having an African-American president in the White House for
eight years? In the frothing maelstrom of
the polluted waters that form the alt-right backlash, from President Trump on
down, Charlottesville, Virginia is removing the statue of Robert E. Lee. He is the man who would be “apotheosized” two years after his death. “Our beloved Chief stands, like some lofty
column which rears its head among the highest, in grandeur, simple, pure and
sublime.”
The honoring
of Robert E. Lee, of Jefferson Davis, of the pantheon of Confederate war
heroes, it commemorates the defenders of the “Golden Age” of the antebellum (I looked it up: ante-before; bellum: war; 'before the war') south. Somewhere along the way, the history of what
actually happened transformed into the mythology of what people selectively and
re-interpretively remember happening. This
mythology is at the heart over the conflicts about the “Rebel” flag and its
place in open society. It continues as
we begin to debate the place of the statues of the heroes. And consider that the tide is flowing toward
their removal, consigning these symbols of this evil chapter of American history
to the past. The mythology is
fading as reality catches up.
I think this mythology arose in
response to Reconstruction. The era of
Reconstruction was a time of vengeance against the South after the war. If I understand my history, it was from that
time that the call came ‘the south shall rise again’. That is where they sought out the Golden Age,
the mythological greatness of what had been. Economically, the South was great in that time. Virginia especially carried the legacy of the Revolution, giving us
four of our first five Presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison, and James Monroe. There was an
established ‘aristocratic’, 'gentlemanly' class in the south never so clearly defined in the north.
To this day, the plantations that
remain stand as sentinels of that class structure, that top class, that
aristocracy, temples of the mythology of Southern-White-greatness. It is that mythology, of the aristocracy,
that continues in the hearts and minds of those individuals bearing the 'Stars and
Bars' and the Nazi flags in Charlottesville throughout these protests. It is that mythology, that Golden Age, that continues in the cultural fiber of the American South to this day.
But there is a problem. Mythology is running into history. Yes, the era of Southern prosperity in the
antebellum south was as nothing as has been seen since. But what has been discounted is the
cost. The prosperity of the South was
built upon the horror of the Middle Passage. It was built on the foundation of the bodies of Africans and African-Americans. Two million people died in that passage, two to three times as many
before they even reached the ships.
Who can even number those who died here?
On a scale
between total, exploitative inequality amongst humans and total respect and
equality for every individual, the balance advanced powerfully to equality, in
the person of our first African-American President. His cultural legacy against racism will, I believe in time, overshadow his political accomplishments.
The prolonged, violent backlash that began while he was in office, that
continues now, is evidence of that.
History has shown that for every push, there is pushback. But, as before, we shall overcome. This is the historic context against which
we must measure what is happening in Charlottesville. Now, the stakes are at their highest.
In America, we celebrate our right of free
speech. We celebrate it so much that we
will permit the likes of the Ku Klux Klan to speak-though they are the worst that the ‘church’ has ever
produced in America, we will permit neo-Nazis to speak-though they carry the legacy of Adolf
Hitler, we will permit the alt-right to speak-though they seek to undercut every advance made against racism, we will permit anyone to speak, because
we can speak in response and in rebuttal. A protest
will lead to a counter-protest. Hate
speech will be met with the speech of love.
Until now. Now the speech of love is met with deadly violence.
It may be
that history remembers Heather Heyer as a martyr to the freedom of speech we enjoy as
Americans. We must remember her, her
family and friends, and those who continue to protest, in prayer. It must be that we pray for James Alex Fields
Jr., who decided to turn his car into a weapon to silence another’s right to
speak. It must be that we remember and pray for the families and the friends of Pilot Lt. H.
Jay Cullen and Trooper-Pilot Berke M.M. Bates, who died in the line of
duty while responding by helicopter to the events in the city. But more than that, let us not forget the context-the long game-which has gone on since the founding of this nation, through the
Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, the legacy of the Obama era, to whatever
comes next, for the advancement of equality and justice for every person,
regardless of what makes them who they are.
Epilogue
What is
happening in Charlottesville must not draw attention away from acts of
intentional terror and murder, as when Dylann Roof killed nine at the Emmanuel
AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
American history has too many examples of this premeditated evil. What makes Charlottesville different is that death
is no longer a targeted action of evil upon another, but an assumption that deathly violence is now, somehow, a ‘reasonable’ expression of
our disagreement with somebody else.
Rev. Peter Hofstra
www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=446
