Where do we go after Charlottesville?

Here in Colorado, although geographically removed from the racist and antiSemitic sentiments shaking our nation, we shouldn’t be surprised they’re out there. While we might readily relegate them to America’s backwoods, they also are part of our own history.

Just 33 years ago, white supremacists in Denver assassinated a provocative liberal host on KOA Radio, Alan Berg. I am mindful, because I ended up working there in his time slot.

Almost a hundred years ago, Benjamin Stapleton — after whom Denver’s onetime airport was named — was elected as the city’s mayor. Only subtly shrouded from voters’ eyes: Stapleton was a member of Colorado’s Ku Klux Klan.

Far removed? Hardly.

The bigger picture of progress in civil rights in America is positive. By 50 years ago we already had the Civil Rights Act forbidding discrimination in the workplace and in public accommodations based on “race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” Also both the Voting Rights Act and the 24th Amendment, which together prohibited discriminatory decrees that blocked black Americans and other minorities from taking part in elections.

These laws opened the door to diversity in politics. In the past 50 years there have been countless mayors and police chiefs of color; Denver is among the estimable examples. Forty-nine black citizens today serve in Congress. Both major political parties have had credible black candidates for president. Nine years ago, one of them even won.

We’ve come a long way, but then last week was Charlottesville.

It reaffirmed what I learned covering civil rights as a reporter: the mere making of transformational laws won’t soften the spirit of Americans stuck in the bigotry and bias of the past.

I reported from two cities, for example, on the beginning of busing for the purpose of integration. There was anger for sure in the southern city of Louisville, but the resistance and bile and hostility were far worse at “Southie,” the nickname for a high school in south Boston.

I did stories in Idaho, where the Hitler-adoring Aryan Nations had its headquarters. I had to listen to leaders like Richard Butler tell me that Jews were a plague on our nation. In Skokie, Illinois, a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago, American Nazis used their constitutional rights of assembly and speech to march across the city and spread their message of malevolence.

This week though, I saw a photo from Charlottesville: a black policeman at a barrier, protecting white nationalists behind him who just as eagerly might hang him from a bridge as honor his badge. So we’ve come a long way, baby. But the story from that troubled Virginia city is that some Americans still pledge their ugly allegiance to the past. We’ve still got a ways to go.

There are those today who maintain that from the moment Barack Obama moved into the White House in 2009, the strong animus against him was not because of his history or his politics, but simply because he was black. Maybe. But we really can’t say for sure.

There also are those who now maintain that because Donald Trump has moved into the White House, there has been a vile and visible rise of white nationalism, with Charlottesville its most recent display. Maybe it’s because of Trump. But again, we really can’t say for sure.

What we can say is this: Trump’s oratory emboldens the likes of former KKK Imperial Wizard David Duke. His alliances empower white nationalist enabler Steve Bannon. And now he equates George Washington, who fought to create our country, with Robert E. Lee, who fought to destroy it. The president hasn’t diminished the perception that he’s aiding and abetting America’s foulest factions.

Leaving us to ask, if he’s not, what else can explain it?

And leaving us to wonder, now that it’s out in the open elsewhere, what’s to stop it from rising again in Colorado?