Page 8 - September 2017

the charlottesville aftermath: despite calls for removal and a clumsy president,
gOvernOr ducey says arizOna’s cOnfederate HistOry will still stand
“As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings [a nativist political party of the time] get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” ~ Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Letters, 1855
On August 12, Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old Charlottesville, VA paralegal, was killed when James Alex Fields Jr. of Ohio, a purported white supremacist and member of alt-right organizations that had gathered in the city, plowed his vehicle through a crowd of counter protesters near a park in downtown Charlottesville. Nineteen others were injured in what critics and media have called an incident of domestic terror.
Things began when Charlottesville’s city council voted to remove a statue of Confederate Civil War general Robert E. Lee from its downtown Emancipation Park. The announcement prompted the movement known as “Unite the Right” to plan a demonstration in the city. Over the last few years, several cities around the nation, particularly in the Southeast, have proposed removing statues and monuments to the Confederacy, disallowing the display of Confederate flags, and renaming things like parks and highways. In April, the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks hate groups and racist crimes, reported that at least 60 such symbols around the nation have been removed or renamed since 2015.
While discussions about the Civil War usually bring to mind images of the Deep South and states like Virginia and North Carolina, many people may be unaware Arizona played a role in that war as well. In fact, the Arizona Territory was claimed by the Confederate States in 1861 and included mostly the southern portion of present-day Arizona. The western-most battle of the Civil War, the Battle of Picacho Pass, was fought in 1862 on land between present- day Phoenix and Tucson. And, today, Arizona is host to six monuments to the Confederacy.
Alongside monuments to Arizona’s pioneer women and fallen peace officers, Wesley Bol- ing Memorial Park, which is part of the state capitol complex in Phoenix, includes a memo- rial to Arizona Confederate troops. It was presented to the state by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1961 in commemoration of the centennial anniversary of the begin- ning of the Civil War. That organization was established in Arizona in 1917.
There are Confederate veterans memorials at Greenwood Cemetery in Phoenix and at the Southern Arizona Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Sierra Vista. A portion of US 60 that runs through Apache Junction is called “Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway” and a monu- ment along the side of the road honors the president of the Confederate States.
Picacho Peak State Park contains several Civil War monuments to both Union and Confed- erate soldiers, including one commemorating the Picacho Pass battle fought there. In Dra- goon Springs outside of Tucson, there is a monument to the only Confederate soldiers killed in action in the Arizona Territory. They died in a skirmish with a band of Chiricahua Apaches, their graves noted by a historical marker placed by the United States Forest Service.
The oldest of these memorials was placed in 1943. The newest: in 2010. And, following the tragic events that took place in Charlottesville on August 12, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey says he has no plans to push for the removal of any of them.
In June 2015, after convicted murderer and white supremacist Dylann Roof entered a historically black church in South Carolina and opened fire with a legally purchased .45 caliber handgun, killing nine congregants, black leaders in Arizona called for the removal of the state’s Confederate monuments. Roof had written a lengthy manifesto filled with racist ideals, saying he wanted to start a “race war.” Pictures of him posing with the Confederate flag were found on social media.
Joined by a small group of activists, Arizona Representative Reginald Bolding, D-Laveen, spoke outside the State Capitol shortly after the South Carolina shooting asking that Ari- zona’s Confederate memorials be removed. “In light of everything that has happened, we
can’t go through our daily lives honoring symbols of hate, symbols of separation and sym- bols of segregation right now,” he said. Over the following two years, the issue seemingly faded back into the woodwork, at least in Arizona. Other states continued to debate and struggle over whether monuments should remain in place or be removed and whether state buildings should remove Confederate flags.
While many argue that removing Confederate monuments erases history that needs to be remembered, it may be worthwhile to know when and why many of the tributes were erected in the first place. As is evident in Arizona, where the oldest Confederate memorial was installed in 1943, these historical markers were generally not placed immediately fol- lowing the Civil War. According to the Washington Post, “the vast majority of monuments date between 1895 and World War I. They were part of a campaign to paint the Southern cause in the Civil War as just and slavery as a benevolent institution, and their installation came against a backdrop of Jim Crow violence and oppression of African Americans. The monuments were put up as explicit symbols of white supremacy.”
The 1920s was a time in America when the Ku Klux Klan, formed directly following the end of the Civil War, saw a resurgence, particularly in the South. After Jim Crow segregation laws were implemented, violence against black Americans was commonplace. In fact, a re- port released by the Equal Justice Institute in 2015 determined that over 4000 black people died in “racial terror lynchings” in 12 southern US states between 1877 and 1950 [eji.org/ reports/lynching-in-america]. These lynchings were usually public and included torture, burning, mutilation and dismemberment of the victims; all while local white folks watched with their children and collected body parts as souvenirs. Government officials were often in attendance as spectators.
Klan membership declined drastically during the Great Depression and the group tem- porarily disbanded. But, in the 1950s and 60s era of civil rights, KKK groups re-emerged and members perpetrated bombings, beatings and shootings of activists, both black and white. When civil rights legislation finally passed, Klan members became more disjointed and many aligned themselves with neo-Nazi and other extremist right-wing organizations. Recent events in places like South Carolina and Virginia have demonstrated that, while these racial hate groups may have gone quiet for a while, they are alive and well in the US and ready to, quite literally, take up the torches of their forebears.
Just to be sure there wasn’t a case of mistaken identity, alt-right protesters in Charlottes- ville enthusiastically mimicked KKK lynch mobs of days gone by. Beginning on the grounds of the University of Virginia (UVA) the night of Friday, August 11, well-dressed young white men, some wearing uniform white polo shirts, bore lit tiki torches and marched through the cam- pus shouting “You will not replace us,”“Kill the Jews,” and the Nazi homage “blood and soil.”
While most media reports focused on the events of Saturday, Friday night is where the violence began. The alt-right groups had gathered at a municipal park in Charlottesville and then marched to a rotunda on the UVA campus where a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the university, stands. There they met a small group of counter protesters that had linked arms and surrounded the statue. They chanted “No Nazis, no KKK, no fascist USA.”
The small group was surrounded by the hundreds of torch carrying white supremacists. The alt right demonstrators began shouting and taunting the small group of counter pro- testers. They chanted“white lives matter”and yelled at their challengers that they were“anti- white.” Finally the groups came to blows. [twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/896184638804119552]
The next day, “Unite the Right” showed up in downtown Charlottesville to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. They wore t-shirts that bore images of Hit- ler and swastikas and carried Confederate and Nazi flags. Some wore helmets and carried shields and clubs, similar to police riot gear. They used Nazi salutes and chants as they walked through the city’s streets. Is this the stuff peaceful protests are made of?
Not surprisingly, conflicts erupted as these defenders of Nazi ideals were met with resis- tance from counter protesters who were there to let them know there is no place for these symbols and this behavior in America. The demonstration was finally declared unlawful and police began to disperse the crowds. Skirmishes broke out and some turned into outright brawls. The conflicts culminated with Alex Field’s vehicular attack on counter protesters.
8 • SEPTEMBER 2017 | the NOISE arts & news | www.thenoise.us Above: Arizona Governor Doug Ducey; the protest in Charlottesville; President Donald Trump