Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Victory claims emerge from diverged sides
White supremacist, anti-racist groups see Charlottesville as triumph for their views
In the aftermath of a white supremacist rally that turned deadly in Charlottesville, Va., everyone claimed victory.
To white supremacists, the pure havoc in the city after they marched to oppose the removal of a Confederate monument marked a win. To anti-racist groups, growing acknowledgment across the country of the threat of racist violence was proof they made a difference.
But while the tragedy in Charlottesville could be seen as the climax of tensions in the city that had feared the worst for weeks before thousands came out on Saturday, it may only be just the beginning in central Virginia and beyond.
In the days since, white nationalists and pro-Confederate groups have quickly announced rallies and speaking events from Virginia to Texas, gaining throngs of online supporters and loud condemnations from locals. In Kentucky and Maryland, city officials have vowed to swiftly tear down Confederate monuments after years of debates, drawing cheers along with criticism.
“These conflicts are growing, not diminishing,” said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. “A wedge has been turned into a battering ram by emboldened white nationalists.”
Hours after the Charlottesville chaos Saturday, when a woman died and 19 were injured as a man plowed a car into a crowd on a downtown street, Texas resident Preston Wiginton announced a “White Lives Matter” rally in College Station, Tex., in September. He said he was carrying the torch for those in Virginia.
“TODAY CHARLOTTESVILLE TOMORROW TEXAS A&M,” Wiginton, who has ties to white supremacist groups, wrote to news stations. He vowed to fight “the liberal agenda of white guilt and white genocide.”
On Monday, the university reportedly cited safety concerns in canceling the rally, which was advertised as featuring Richard Spencer, a prominent white nationalist who promoted the Charlottesville rally nationally.
But at the same time that white nationalists fought for speaking engagements, monuments came down.
Residents of Gainesville, Fla., wiped away tears of joy on Monday as workers used jackhammers to remove a Confederate statue nicknamed “Old Joe” that stood in front of a county building.
Meanwhile, demonstrators in Durham, N.C., cheered as they used a lasso to topple a 15-foot statue of a Confederate soldier and started kicking its head. The statue stood since 1924 with a dedication to “the boys who wore the gray.”
Protesters vandalized a statue in Atlanta overnight, while dozens of demonstrators gathered in Nashville and hundreds in San Antonio to protest local monuments.
The gatherings followed formal announcements in cities across the U.S. On Monday, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh lent her support to pulling four Confederate monuments in the city, including those of generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas. J. “Stonewall” Jackson.
Her decision came after a viral tweet from a city councilman calling for the “immediate destruction” of all Confederate monuments in the city after the Virginia attacks.
“Everywhere in this country, we have to remove these monuments and melt them down so nobody can ever idolize them again and wreck this havoc,” said the city council member, Brandon Scott, who is black.
In Lexington, Ky., the mayor shared a similar view.
“These moral moments require everyone to take a stand,” Jim Grey, a Democrat, who said Saturday that he would move to tear down two Confederate statues from the grounds of a 19th-century courthouse after city officials first broached the idea two years ago.
But opposition groups were ready to save monuments. “If the American people don’t speak up, the majority of these monuments will be gone,” said Kirk Lyons, an attorney at Southern Legal Resource Center, a pro-Confederate group. Lyons said his group is ready to file suits against monument removals.
“Confederate monuments are just a speed bump for these people. They will go after Confederates first … it’s about Thomas Jefferson, George Washington next,” said Lyons, who said he was a “a Christian attorney of Southern ancestry” and rejected the label “white supremacist.”