When the Nazis march where you went to school
American Nazis and white supremacists jabbed their hatred into the heart of America on the weekend. The images of fighting, the torches at night, the horrible photo of bodies flying through the air — they all peeled back history, leaving a country raw and wounded.
Personally, I was sickened by the sights, but not entirely surprised.
I was a graduate student of the University of Virginia in the 1960s, working for a doctorate in U.S. history.
It didn’t last. The atmosphere of this campus — perhaps the most beautiful in North America — was too fraught with repressed anger, both at the university and between many liberally minded students and residents of Charlottesville.
Founded by Thomas Jefferson, UVa has a soothing veneer of gentility and 18th-century enlightenment. The Lawn where those torchbearers marched is a famous place of peaceful gathering.
But the Lawn (they capitalize it) and the Rotunda that overlooks it were once tended by slaves. Personal slaves saw to the needs of wealthy young southern students. Some faculty members had slaves.
Jefferson himself “owned” hundreds of human beings, although he later favoured emancipation and an end to the slave trade.
That’s the deep past of the famous university. It explains why the arrival of white supremacists on the Lawn, and in the city, exploded with such force in America’s national consciousness. The racists dug up and celebrated the ugly story that UVa has alternately tried to suppress and overcome.
There have always been southerners, black and white, who have fought for justice and reconciliation at the university. Having some sense of the hostility they face, I admire them enormously.
In the better part of a year, I saw only one black student on that campus, a fierce young man named Jim Gay.
Although UVa had been formally desegregated in 1955, the predicted flood of black students remained a trickle for decades. Black people knew what they’d be getting into.
But Jim Gay would not be cowed.
He entered the law school in 1965. Later he fought for civil rights, even winning a Supreme Court ruling against segregationist voting rules in Norfolk, Va.
He died in 2008 at 65, only months before Barack Obama won the presidency.
Back then I wrote, with no foresight whatever, “and that’s the promise of America, a country whose dream can actually overpower its history.”
What horror would Jim Gay feel today? The idealism that propelled Obama now seems entirely dead at the highest level of American politics.
President Donald Trump has unleashed the dogs of hatred with his equivocations about the white supremacists.
Even on Monday, when he finally disowned Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan by name, he blasted a black executive who had quit one of his panels in protest. The racists can always find something in Trump’s utterances to cheer about.
People with far less power often show more moral courage. One of my professors was the great historian, Alabama-born Paul M. Gaston, who for decades participated in struggles for civil rights and equality, on and off the campus.
After he retired, Gaston said UVa made great progress after a courageous president resisted the will of a very conservative board.
Today, the university is ostensibly tolerant and inclusive. Many black students are taught by black professors. There’s an institute for African-American and African studies. One professor has shown how tax law was rigged to steal land from black owners.
But history lurks in the corners. One of the notoriously secretive fraternities staged “blackface” displays. A black woman running for student office was attacked and told “nobody wants a (racial slur) to be president.”
This university, at once so great and so flawed, shows why Americans were affected powerfully by the violence. If a place where the narrative of racism has been so carefully groomed and managed can explode, where can’t it happen?