US vigils address racial rift after fascist killing
RICHMOND: In sight of one of the most notorious slave markets of the pre-Civil War south, the Rev Sylvester Turner asked hundreds of people on Sunday night to pray for US President Donald Trump to have a change of heart and heal the nation’s racial divide.
Several hundred people had gathered with clergy and politicians for a vigil around the Slavery Reconciliation Statue, a towering stone figure that represents atonement for Richmond’s role in the slave trade.
“Look over our president,” Turner thundered in prayer. “He may not be all, Lord God, that he can be at this time, but I believe that you are a heart-changing God. I believe that when prayer and praises go up, lessons come down.”
Activists throughout the country, including in Virginia and the Washington region, held vigils on Sunday in response to the white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville on Saturday that erupted into violence and resulted in the death of one counter-protester and the injury of more than a dozen.
Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, who spent Sunday morning visiting churches in Charlottesville, attended the Richmond vigil looking unusually sombre.
He had been angry on Saturday, he told the crowd, but now he was sad.
“It’s been a rough couple of days for our beautiful commonwealth,” McAuliffe said, adding he had been visiting families of the two state troopers who were killed when their helicopter crashed while patrolling the Charlottesville rally. “To go in the homes and talk to the children whose father… neither one are coming home tonight,” he said, then paused as he grew emotional.
McAuliffe then spoke of Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman who was killed when a driver rear-ended another car and pushed vehicles into a crowd of peaceful protesters.
“She was doing what she loved, she was fighting for democracy, free speech, and to stop hatred and bigotry,” he said, as someone in the crowd issued a soft “Amen”.
Many of the multiracial crowd attending the vigil were from church groups.
Several from local Unitarian Universalist churches wore yellow shirts that read “Standing on the side of love”.
Others held signs, including “Stop pretending your racism is patriotism” and “No one is free when others are repressed”, and one person waved a large American flag.
Parents held up small children in the hot sun, straining to hear as cars whizzed by on a highway overpass.
“We thought it was important for us to come together at such a time as this,” Delores McQuinn, who helped put together the vigil, told the crowd. Like many of Richmond’s leaders, she is African-American.
“We stand at this reconciliation statue as a symbolic gesture to remind us that we still have work to do.
“The battle to fight hatred, racism, prejudice and faces of evil is not over.”
Hundreds of people gathered in Charlottesville on Sunday for a vigil at the spot where Heyer was killed.