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| Counter protesters confronted White Racists in Charlottesville last year. |
Sunday
was the first anniversary of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina that erupted into confrontations with thousands of outraged local residents and activists
which resulted in multiple arrests, scores
of injuries, and the murder by auto of anti-fascist activist Heather
Heyer. I covered Charlottesville, the background
to the action, players on both sides,
and the implications of the events
in a three part series on this blog that you can read here,
here,
and here.
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| Anti-fascist martyr Heather Heyer commemorated in a Charlottesville mural. |
Blocked from
returning to the scene of the crime,
neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and Alt-Right strutters opted to march this
year in Washington, D.C. to rally in
Lafayette Park across from the White House. The man that they recognize as wink-and-nod
supporter and inspiration was conveniently playing golf and Twitter raging—but not at them—at his New Jersey resort.
They managed to turn
out a pathetic corporal’s guard—maybe
a couple of dozen—instead of the hundreds touted to the media in advance. They were protected by a sizable army of
Metropolitan Police and personnel from other Federal law enforcement agencies. They needed the protraction—thousands turned out to oppose them and
there were multiple rallies and
vigils in other parts of the Capital. Although the protests were raucous, no violence beyond some minor push-back against police lines was
reported and there were no arrests.
In Charlottesville, where the Confederate monuments that were at the heart of last year’s confrontations
still stand despite the city’s efforts to remove them because
they are now protected under a hastily passed state law, thousands more
turned out against fascism and racism in
marches and rallies. Things got more
heated there and there was more serious scuffling
with police. Four were arrested.
Just a day earlier my wife Kathy Brady-Murfin and I took in a rare Saturday matinee to see Spike
Lee’s new joint, BlacKkKlansman. The movie was based on a real undercover
investigation of the Ku Klux Klan
by Colorado Springs detective Ron
Stallworth, the first Black Officer on
the force. The film stars John David Washington
as Stallworth, Adam Driver as his White
partner Flip Zimmerman, Laura Harrier as Black student activist Patrice Dumas, Topher Grace as Imperial Wizard David Duke, and Finnish actor Jasper Pääkkönen as the nearly psychotic Klansman Felix
Kendrickson.
Lee’s strongest
effort in years typically plays
homage to diverse cinema genres. It is by turns a buddy cop flick,
meet-cute romcom, police procedural, suspenseful thriller,
and a send-up of ‘80’s Blaxploitation films. It follows
the actual details of the real investigation pretty closely until it adopts a cinematic race-against-time bomb plot standard to action movies. Yet it all hung together resulting in near
unanimous audience approval, critical acclaim, and international film festival laurels.
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| Ku Klux Klan terrorism was celebrated and romanticized powerfully in D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. |
But it is how Lee framed his film that raised it to a whole other level. It begins with footage from D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, an epic homage to the origins of the original Ku Klux Klan and then cuts to Dr. Kennebrew Beaureguard—a cameo by Alex Baldwin—making a film of a pseudo-scientific argument for White Supremacy. The film is punctuated with a lengthy verbatim speech by Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael and the casual racist rants of the Klansmen. As tension builds Lees cuts between a Klan initiation where Birth of a Nation is shown as the bomb plot unfolds and Harry Bellefonte as an elderly witness to a horrific real-life lynching by burning conducted by the revived Klan which was energized by the Griffith's picture. At the end of the narrative to meant-to-be happy reunion of star crossed lovers Ron Stallworth and Patrice Dumas is interrupted by a burning cross on a near-by hillside.
But it is the epilogue
that frankly exposes the poisonous connections between deeply
engrained American White racism, the power
of the media and propaganda, and the rise
of demagoguery and Donald Trump. In less than five minutes a montage
of clips covered the last 30 years climaxing with footage of the Charlottesville events and then ends in a close-up portrait of Heather Heyer with the simple inscription “Rest in Power.”
No one leaves
the theater unmoved.
A year ago the Social
Justice Team of Tree of Life
Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry
took part in a national response to Charlottesville by organizing a rally and candlelight vigil on its grounds and
along Bull Valley Road. Well over 100 people turned out for a moving event organized in just two days
by the power of social media. Our gathering was reverent and reflective. But I was struggling with the violence in
Charlottesville, and the sometimes
clashing themes of assertive and
active anti-fascism and the traditional values of non-violence. I read the following poem composed the day after the deadly struggle.
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| The Old Man in the gloaming at the Tree of Life candle light vigil for Charlottesville last year. Photo by Gregory Shaver from the Northwest Herald. |
Munich and Charlottesville
August 13, 2017
So is this how it felt on the streets of Munich
when the strutting
Brown Shirts
in their polished
jackboots,
Sam Browne belts, and
scarlet arm bands
faced the scruffy
Commies
in their cloth caps
and shirtsleeves
rolled up
and battled in the
beerhalls,
parks and streets.
All of the good people, the nice people
cowered behind closed
doors
and wished it would
go away—
all of
the liberals, the Catholics,
the
new-bred pacifists of the Great War,
the
professors and doctors,
editors
and intellectuals,
the
Social Democrats,
even—my
God!—the Jews
who had
not gone Red—
a pox on both your
houses they solemnly intoned.
Hey, buddy, in retrospect those damn Bolshi’s
look pretty good,
like heroes even.
Things look a little different in Charlottesville,
in brilliant color
not grainy black and white
and the Fascists
can’t agree on a
Boy Scout uniform and
array themselves
golf shirts and
khakis, rainbow Klan hoods,
biker black and studs
and strutting camo.
But the smell, you know, that stench,
is just the same.
The question is—do you dare be a Red today
or will you close
your doors
and go back to your
game consoles
and cat videos.
Which will it be, buddy?
—Patrick Murfin
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