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| Some of the crowd who attended the Plainfield Vigil on behalf of Charlottesville, VA victims. |
Last night, residents of Plainfield joined clergy, elected and appointed officials, and community leaders at a vigil we held on behalf of the murderous, racist violence that occurred in Charlottesville, VA last week. I want to thank my colleagues and administration officials who attended, along with Rev. Hodari Hamilton, Rev. Ann Marie Alderman, Pastor Antione Hart, and Rev. Damaris Ortega, who delivered words of comfort and strength to our community. After a rousing invocation and benediction "book-ended" by City Council Vice President Barry Goode, we closed out the evening as he led us in song. Here is a video (posted on YouTube by TapIntoPlainfield's editor Jenn Popper).
At the request of a
couple of friends who attended, I am posting below the words that I spoke last
night.
We are here this evening to come together as one as we mourn the
deaths and injuries that occurred in Charlottesville, VA last week, and in
hopes of renewing our commitment to fighting against racism and all the other
“isms” that would seek to further divide our nation. The events of the past
week have thrown into high relief the continuing moral failures of our country,
exemplified in the words of the disgraceful Donald Trump--who has decided that
it is "okay" to equate the counter-protests of the Black Lives Matter
activists and other anti-racist groups with the KKK, neo-Nazis, and the other
white supremacist individuals and groups who injured and murdered American
citizens in the name of white supremacy and anti-Semitism.
As we have
seen, many are ignorant of the history lessons of the past—when Donald Trump,
possibly the most ignorant person ever to occupy the White House, says that
there were “…many fine people…” marching with the KKK members, neo-Nazis, and
other white supremacist racist groups—we must call him out. Our country has had
a very painful history—the pain continues, despite the end of legal slavery
through the historic amendments to the Constitution, despite the advances
gained through the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and
despite much additional legislation designed to live up to the credo of equal
rights. A little over a month before the end of the Civil War in 1865,
President Lincoln delivered his 2nd Inaugural Address. In that speech, knowing
that the war’s end was near, he spoke of the need for the nation to come
together. He said:
“If we shall
suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence
of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed
time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this
terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern
therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a
living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that
this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it
continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty
years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn
with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three
thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are
true and righteous altogether.' With malice toward none, with charity for all,
with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on
to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him
who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all
which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with
all nations.”
So, Lincoln was
saying that whether it was Providence that allowed the offense of slavery to
come, Providence also brought the war, and Providence dictated that the blood
of the lash upon the enslaved would be paid by the sword—meaning, the Union
would fight the traitorous Confederacy until the war was done. The South did
not commemorate their treason until decades after Reconstruction, when the
vanquished and their descendants erected monuments to their treason and evil.
To those, like Donald Trump, the neo-Nazis, the KKK, and other white
supremacists, whether in groups or alone, who want to maintain shrines to these
traitors, we must say no. Pull the monuments DOWN.
I know that I
speak for the entire governing body when I say that is important that we, as a
city, stand together against those who want to normalize and fan the flames of racial
hatred. We will not accept a moral equivalency between those fighting racism
and those who revel in its violence. We must say ‘NO’ to such evil. Thank you.
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