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| About 500 people attended today's Town Hall in Charlottesville / Photo: Marguerite Gallorini |
Charlottesville residents came to the Martin Luther King Performing Arts Center to get answers to the issues of August 12’s alt-right rally. After close to 4 hours of "Community Recovery" discussions – instead of 2 hours as planned – people may not have answers yet, but at least they voiced their concerns. They’ll have to come back in two weeks to learn about the City’s proposal of an action plan to address these concerns.
Introduced by Office of Human Rights Manager Charlene Green, the session was moderated by Suzanne Buchanan, from the Community Relations Services of the Department of Justice – dubbed the Department’s “peacemaker” for community conflicts and tensions relating to race, gender, religion, or disability. They both emphasized the need for dialogue and respect of one another during the meeting. Mayor Mike Signer, Chief of Police Al Thomas, City Manager Maurice Jones and other councilors sat in the crowd, listening.
One by one, people formed lines behind two microphones placed in front of the stage to speak their minds, pour their hearts out – and express their anger and disappointment. Several people called for the resignation of Signer, Thomas, and Jones. Dave was one of them; he is a Charlottesville resident who was "held hostage" with his wife and other citizens in at St Paul's church on Friday night, August 11. “The finger-pointing and the leaked memos show that you all reek of desperation to save what's little left of your careers. Mr. Signer, you just live in a bubble – you are the mayor of the 1 percent.”
He also pointed out a concern shared by many others who spoke: “We do not trust an internal review of the police - we cannot rely on an outsider to conduct that review either. Citizens' review of the police is the only thing that we can count on.” Many people shared their stories of August 11 and 12 where the police were nowhere to be found, and they had to protect themselves on their own – like outside of the synagogue, even though they had previously asked for police protection.
A non-exhaustive list of the recurrent demands made during the Town Hall includes: stopping racial profiling of African-Americans and stop-and-frisk police practices; naming the attack for what it was, that is, a terrorist attack; finding a way to prevent any such rally from happening here again, because “hate speech is not free speech”; improving children’s education on the racial past of Charlottesville, to make it more relatable to children of color, and truthful; and providing more affordable housing in the city as well.
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| Lively exchange between Lee statue defender (right) and criticizer (left) |
About 3 hours into the Community Recovery Town Hall, one person – the only one – came up to the microphone to defend the statues, and was faced by Dan H., a disabled African-American veteran on the other microphone. That was the first instance of an instant back-and-forth – even if brief – between two opposite views.
"I saw people going to Lee's monument and spitting on it. Why isn't it bigotry?" said the first man, who criticized Vice-Mayor Bellamy for his “bigotry.” He also argued that people, both Black and White, fought dirty wars – against Native Americans for instance – under the same American flag. Yet, “there are people on both sides of this with a hate ideology, "I hate that flag", "I hate this or that"... It's hate! You just want to choose hate."
"Robert E. Lee's monument was not erected because of Jim Crow laws. It was not, that is a myth.” The public starts to shout back. He continues, “I'm going to stand up and defend that man who freed two to three hundred slaves, and did offer them the opportunity to support themselves. And I agree, they should not have been slaves."
Dan H. then replies, “The Civil War was fought because the South was becoming too powerful. It had nothing to do with slavery.” “Another thing about the History of this country,” he adds: “anyone can check their own DNA ancestry, and you will have African ancestry. So this whole White Supremacy is a fallacy.
To which the other person replies, “We're all mixed blood. You want peace? The peace is within you, to stop bigotry. It starts with us as individuals, and understanding, educating ourselves about certain things. Not a single person here is without hate.” A brief face-to-face argument erupted between the two men in the public, and the room quieted down again.
Towards the end of the session, Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy assured that a group is currently actively working on all these issues, and comes from of a diversity of backgrounds – respected community members, activists, people from both sides of the fence. City Manager Maurice Jones jumped in to confirm they’ve had their first meeting on Wednesday; “We are going to continue to bring more people into that discussion. They will be eminently involved with deciding how we move forward with community engagement activities like tonight.”
He continued, “At the next meeting, we'll talk about if we can we come back in two weeks and have some meaningful discussion with this community. We'll come out – they’ll come out with a plan that says “Here is how we are going to engage over the course of the next two, three weeks, two months” - because this is not going to happen overnight, it's going to take some time for this community group to move these solutions forward.”
This article was written for this blog only.
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