Charlottesville mayor’s poem about city, racism ‘hits nerve’

America’s Black politicians have a long history of calling out the nation’s racism. But few have taken to poetry and written that their city is “void of a moral compass” and “rapes you of your breaths.”

Nikuyah Walker, the first Black woman to be mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, has posted poetry on Twitter and Facebook that has drawn national attention for descriptions of a picturesque college town that is indelibly linked to a slave-owning U.S. president and a deadly white nationalist rally.

“Charlottesville: The beautiful-ugly it is,” Walker wrote on Wednesday. “It rapes you, comforts you in its (expletive) stained sheet and tells you to keep its secrets.”

The mayor of the majority- white city in the Blue Ridge Mountain foothills followed up with a longer and cleaner version. Charlottesville, she wrote, “lynched you, hung the noose at city hall and pressed the souvenir that was once your finger against its lips.”

It ends by stating that the city of 47,000 “is anchored in white supremacy and rooted in racism. Charlottesville rapes you and covers you in sullied sheets.”

Walker’s words have resonated with some who said she captured the Black experience while communicating in the same way many people do these days: through artful expression on social media.

“This is a new era of Black electeds,” said Wes Bellamy, a friend of Walker’s, a former Charlottesville vice mayor and interim chair of Virginia State University’s political science department.

“We don’t follow the same playbook that individuals used before,” said Bellamy, who has come under fire for his own tweets in years past. “We emote in different ways. We utilize technology in different ways to get our points across.”

But others, including two of Walker’s fellow council members, said her rape metaphor was “hurtful to victims of sexual assault and rape, and deeply unfair in how it presents Charlottesville to the world.”

“We should not gloss over our difficult history of race relations,” City Council members Heather Hill and Lloyd Snook said in a joint statement. “But as elected officials, we must choose our words carefully.”

Hill and Snook, who are both white, said they were “appalled” at the threats Walker has received from the post. And they said they can “only dimly understand the present-day impact of America’s history of slavery, lynching and sexualized violence toward Black people in general, and toward Black women in particular.”

Charlottesville is home to the University of Virginia. It’s where Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president, lived and owned Black Americans who were enslaved. They included Sally Hemings, who is widely believed by historians to have given birth to several of Jefferson’s children.

Walker did not respond to an email from The Associated Press requesting comment. But on Thursday night, she offered no apologies during a Facebook live interview with Bellamy.