Will They Listen…This Time

Four years ago, at the urging of my good friend Richard Prince, I joined more than a dozen other speakers at an Alexandria public hearing to support the removal of Confederate memorials in the city. I pointed out that even Europe undertook a similar act of reconciliation by banishing Adolf Hitler’s name from the more than 80 streets in the continent that bore the name of the Nazi Party leader before 1950.

But despite a substantial number of voices in Alexandria supporting removal of confederate memorials in the city, the wheels of change were slow to turn. Alexandria’s Ad Hoc Advisory Group on Confederate Memorials recommended that the Appomattox statute of a lone Confederate soldier facing south with his arms crossed, remain in place on South Washington Street. Their only caveat was to recommend that the city make efforts to add context to the story of the statue, which has stood in Alexandria for 131 years.

The statute, according to the Washington Post newspaper, commemorates the mustering at the start of the Civil War of Alexandria citizens who marched south to join the Confederate forces. However, the city’s black residents have long viewed the towering memorial as an affront and a painful reminder that Alexandria sided with those who supported slavery. Defenders, several of whom spoke at the city’s public hearing in 2016, countered that the statute was an important reminder of the city’s southern heritage.

Six months after that hearing, the Alexandria City Council voted unanimously to change the name of Jefferson Davis Highway to Richmond Highway and seek permission from the Virginia General Assembly to move the Appomattox statute. But the Virginia legislature was unable to pass a measure supporting removal of confederate statues in the state until this year. Thus, the memorial stood in the city’s downtown until June 2, when the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which owns the statue, opted to allow the city to remove the memorial a month ahead of schedule.

What changed?

The United Daughters of the Confederacy have not said publicly why they accelerated, by a month, the statue’s removal from the city’s main thoroughfare. But I would venture that the sight of thousands of demonstrators around the nation, protesting police brutality against African Americans, weighed heavily on their minds.

I have written previously in this blog about the importance of voting to bring about change. But when it comes to matters of race, the nationwide protests over police brutality this spring have underscored how politics and elections have failed to substantially diminish the twin scourges of racism and white supremacy in this country. In fact, many commentators have remarked that—in terms of police violence and economic inequities engulfing the nation’s black communities—progress has been painful and incremental since the civil rights protests of the 1960s.

Indeed, 53 years ago, former Alexandria City Councilman Nelson E. Greene Sr., my father and more than 100 other demonstrators dragged two caskets onto Route 1 in Hybla Valley near Spring Garden Apartments to protest the state’s refusal to install a traffic signal on a part of the busy highway corridor that ran through the historically black Gum Springs community. At least five people were killed in traffic accidents in the late 1950s and early 1960s on that highway, including Fred Wilkins, a 57-year-old janitor at Ft. Belvoir who was killed after a southbound Route 1 automobile struck him in Gum Springs at 6:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day in 1957.

The protest was not widely covered by the media. But news of it soon percolated its way up to Virginia transportation officials, who had drawn up engineering plans as early as  July 1965 for a stop light in Gum Springs but never got around to installing it. But soon after news of the highway protest spread, a traffic signal was installed just above the pavement that the caskets and protesters had occupied just a few months earlier that spring.

A half century later, our society is still blind to the carnage taking place among black Americans in our communities. Too many streets, in city after divided city, look eerily similar to the way they looked during the riots of the 1960s.

“A riot is the language of the unheard,” Martin Luther King Jr said in a 1967 speech that is currently echoing through newscasts and social media as if the words had just emerged from Dr. King’s lips yesterday. But more than a half century later, it seems America still won’t receive and act on that message.