Down Along with That Devil's Bones

by Connor Towne O'Neill

  Litigation then moved to the second charge against Long, misdemeanor assault, which stemmed from an incident that took place soon after. Having avoided Preston’s bullet, Long and several friends had set off down Market Street, heckling members of the League of the South who were retreating to the parking garage. This was a brief window of time that afternoon, less than two hours all told, when counterprotesters felt they had won the day. Armed, violent white supremacists from all over the country had come to Charlottesville and, without aid from police, these counterprotesters had stood them down. And all before Michael Hill could even deliver his speech. Chants of “Whose streets? Our streets!” carried over the cobblestone. Quickly, though, that joy turned to grief and anger when James Allen Fields, Jr. drove his car into a mass of counterprotesters, injuring dozens and killing a thirty-two-year-old named Heather Heyer.

  But it was in that earlier brief window of celebration that Corey Long allegedly attempted to snatch the Confederate flag carried by Harold Crews, a member of the League of the South. A game of tug of war ensued. That was when DeAndre Harris, a friend of Long’s who believed that Crews was trying to spear Long with the pole, swung a flashlight toward Crews. He’d later claim that he was attempting to break the flagpole but from footage of the encounter, it appears that he instead caught Crews with a glancing blow to his head. But the swing provoked a bystander to deploy his pepper spray, causing everyone to fall back. Seeing Harris reeling, six more rally-goers pounced on him, stomping him and beating him with metal poles, signposts, and the arm of the parking garage gate. It was a vicious attack. Harris—with a fractured wrist, a concussion, and a sizeable gash on his head—got to his feet, woozy and bleeding, and managed to escape into the parking structure, where he reunited with Long. Long told me that the two hid out in one of the stairwells of the garage until the crowd dispersed.

  In the span of about twenty minutes, Corey Long had stood down an Imperial Wizard of the Klan with a flamethrower and had wrestled with a member of the League of the South—back-to-back battles with latter-day Forrests come ’round again. For it, Long was embraced by the Black Panther Party and heralded by progressives online. Even The New Yorker commented on how the image of him with the flamethrower evoked the fire of Black liberation.

  But now, ten months later, Long had to stand trial for those actions. Several members of the group who attacked Harris in the parking garage had been charged and convicted for their actions. But in an effort to revise the narrative of the day by casting themselves as the victims, members of the League of the South pressured Albemarle County officials to charge both Harris and Long. And their early efforts proved successful—both men were indeed charged. Later footage revealed that the injuries Crews alleged were caused by Harris’s flashlight had more likely come from another fight that day. (Harris would later be cleared of charges.) And though Crews had at first seemed willing to pursue charges, he had not shown up for court that day. In fact, the prosecutor told the judge that he had not been able to reach Crews at all in the lead-up to the trial and so would no longer be pursuing the assault charge against Long.

  That left the disorderly conduct charge to settle. Judge Downer admitted that the statute was problematic for a judge, as it requires proof of a specific intent to create disorder. In his seventeen years on the bench, Downer said, there had been only a few cases that had warranted a guilty verdict. But this was one of those times. Judge Downer sentenced Long to 360 days, suspending 340 of them. When he did, a hiss broke out from the crowd. Actions such as Long’s, Judge Downer said, had “cost Charlottesville its reputation as an All-American city.”

  Downer’s comments echoed a trend I’d noticed in the way some people commented on the Unite the Right rally in the months since, both online and here in Charlottesville. On social media, it can often take the form of an aggrieved comment on an article or a retweet to footage from the rally, asserting that “this isn’t us.” Bumper stickers I saw in Charlottesville proclaim that “This is OUR town: Openness, Unity, Respect,” reflecting a feeling that, because so many who attended Unite the Right were from out of town, this university town was being held responsible for attitudes cultivated in other places. It’s become a modern-day Selma. And this self-righteousness makes sense. People did come from all over: Neo-Nazis from Indiana and Neo-Confederates from Arkansas, Proud Boys from New York and white nationalists from Ohio. But broadening the blame can’t lessen any one city’s share. It just implicates everyone. In that way, I think, Charlottesville has become an All-American city. Corey Long seemed to think so, too. Reflecting on his experience at the rally, Long told me that the rally “reminded me of stories my grandfather used to tell out in rural Virginia. Finally, it really made sense.”

  This is us. Always has been.

  To wit: In 1898, Alfred Moore Waddell, a Confederate monument booster, led a mob to burn a Black newspaper office in Wilmington, North Carolina, sparking a coup to overthrow a biracial government and reinstate white supremacist rule. In 1956, Jack Kershaw, a Confederate monument booster, led a series of protests in opposition to integrated schools that sparked two days of riots and the deployment of the National Guard. And in 2017, Michael Hill, a Confederate monument booster, broke loose the biggest part of hell in Charlottesville, Virginia, when he marched a column of white nationalists down Market Street and into a melee.

  The oft-quoted definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Perhaps our American insanity is creating and institutionalizing a false sense of racial superiority, while expecting to foster an open, democratic society. The rally, then, was a very American expression of our madness about race. From across the country, white people came to Charlottesville to assert their racial prerogative. They came to demand what, for so long, had been simply given as the palliatives of their race. But now, as the country awkwardly lurches forward, they have to ask for it. We are in a moment where some of us are finding ways to see, talk about, and begin to reckon with the inequities wrought by white supremacy, to identify the ways our notions of race have hobbled us. But it’s a push and pull. These clunky steps toward another way of being makes others anxious, makes them want to pull rank, to exert their racial prerogative, maintain that hierarchy, and resist these shifts by any means necessary. To spit in the bucket, as the Agrarian Andrew Lytle would have us do.

  Ironically, by violently defending the traitors who made up the Confederacy, Unite the Right expressed something essential about American whiteness—as if their Plexiglas shields were meant for us to catch our reflection in. I set out on this journey trying to better understand my country and myself through the stories of Confederate monuments. Charlottesville offered an answer, but it was an answer that our long-held insistence on white American innocence has trained us to look away from. If we white people want to move away from the America embodied in this rally, the America that would have looked so familiar to Corey Long’s grandfather, we are going to have to redefine our sense of what “All-American” means, let a fuller sense of how race operates in this country temper that definition.

  When i got up from the courthouse gallery and blinked my way out into the high-noon sun, I was reminded that there were plenty in Charlottesville who did not subscribe to Judge Downer’s amnesia. Representatives from several other churches, Black Lives Matter, Standing Up For Social Justice, and Congregate C’Ville were there to remind Corey Long that they saw his actions as a welcome rejection of a noxious ideology. They had packed the courtroom to support him, and now, as they waited for him on the sidewalk, they chanted the refrain that had become all too common recently, “Corey Long did nothing wrong!”

  When he emerged from the courthouse, he was flanked by members of the New Black Panther Party, who were offering legal support. Long looked a little stunned by the verdict, but he briefly addressed the crowd.

  “It is what it is,” he said, shrugging. Then he paused. He wasn’t taking questions, but one seemed to be occurring to h
im. “Would I do it again? Hey, you never know.”

  Would he again confront armed Klansmen and Neo-Confederates, these latter-day Forrests come ’round again? You never know. But it seems assured that if we continue to look away, believing this isn’t us, someone will have to.

  Part Four

  Down Along with That Devil’s Bones

  Memphis

  Eighteen

  A Symbol of Everything We Are Fighting Every Day

  Not three hours after James Fields drove his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, Tami Sawyer set out for Health Sciences Park in Memphis’s Medical District to mourn at the foot of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Sawyer, a Memphis native in her midthirties, is a grassroots organizer and the founder of #TakeEmDown901. She spent the morning at home, staring at CNN in horror, as she followed the unfolding news from Charlottesville. She was in tears when she called her friend and fellow organizer, the Reverend Earle Fisher. They had to do something, she told him, and not just a Facebook post or a news conference. “I think we go to the space of this statue and stand in solidarity.” So they put the word out and headed for the statue. Within an hour, hundreds of people had come out to join them. The impromptu rally set off a week of protests and initiated the endgame in #TakeEmDown901’s campaign against Forrest.

  Sawyer and Fisher have been “attached at the hip,” as Rev. Fisher put it, ever since Memphis police officer Connor Schilling shot and killed nineteen-year-old Darrius Stewart during a traffic stop in 2015. “That was Memphis’s Mike Brown,” Fisher explained, referring to the young man shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, whose death catalyzed the Black Lives Matter movement. Since then Sawyer and Fisher have teamed up to tackle issues of police violence, income inequality, voting access, and at the forefront of their minds that day in August, Memphis’s Confederate statues.

  On the south end of Health Sciences Park, the August heat at its late-afternoon worst, Sawyer climbed the marble base of the statue. Above her, on horseback in bronze, sat Forrest: the goatee long; the square jaw set; his gaze impassive, alert to the middle distance, and at 21 feet above the base, impossible to meet. The puffed chests of horse and rider are shielded from direct light and so have tarnished darker, spared the weathered verdigris of the rider’s sleeves and horse’s haunches. To see the statue from Sawyer’s vantage—a gaze goes upward from the stirrups to the double-breasted general’s coat, to the stare into the nowhere of the horizon—is to see a flex of intimidation. It is striking. Unnerving. Intentional. But Sawyer was unbowed.

  “What these statues do is give power to a white supremacist movement that is reemerging and growing as we speak every day,” she told the crowd, and that the Charlottesville rally offered clear evidence of how they intended to use that power.

  The hundreds of people who came out that afternoon to stand with Sawyer and to stand down the Forrest statue made it the biggest rally to date of #TakeEmDown901’s campaign. For Sawyer, it was also the biggest protest she’d led in over a year—since she organized protests in response to the police killings of two Black men, Philando Castile in Minneapolis and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, the previous summer. Now, standing under the Forrest statue, Sawyer experienced a flashback to those protests, to the vehicles halted by those marches, their engines revving. Then the footage from the Unite the Right rally flooded her mind, the muscle car accelerating into a crowd of people, bodies flying up and off the car like stalks of grain from a threshing machine.

  Not that Sawyer was naïve about the life-and-death nature of the campaign she had undertaken—she joked, early into our conversation, about how, if I don’t hear from her in a while, my next assignment would be to find out what happened to her—but still, the Unite the Right rally was a visceral reminder of the stakes. “It could have been us,” Sawyer told me.

  Back in 2015, the Memphis City Council had voted unanimously to remove the Forrest statue. But a week after the council vote, hundreds of people went to the park and celebrated Forrest’s 193rd birthday. Lee Millar, the spokesman for the local Sons of Confederate Veterans troop, addressed the crowd. He listed the logistical difficulties the city still had to face in order to remove the statue and hoped the gathered group would be one of them. The Confederate caucus obliged two weeks later at the city council’s next meeting, speaking against the motion to finalize the city’s application to the state historical commission. Responding to the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ insistence that the council cannot change history, then-Mayor A. C. Walton said, “We can’t unring a bell. But how long do we have to pay fealty to it? That’s what monuments represent. I’m resolved we’re going to remove it.” That resolve, however, was not enough to persuade the Tennessee Historical Commission, who heard and denied the appeal in late October 2016.

  But something was amiss. The Heritage Protection Act, remember, was first passed in 2013, then updated in 2016 to require a supermajority of the Historical Commission to permit the removal of statues. Yes, but as Memphis city council attorney Allen Wade pointed out, while the Commission ruled on the city’s request after the Act was updated, the city had applied for a waiver before the legislation passed. The point being that the commission had adopted the newer set of rules to evaluate an application that had been filed while the previous rules were still in place. Reavis Mitchell, the chairman of the Historical Commission, disagreed with that point of process, but still, it was a toehold toward an appeal: if the commission had adopted the wrong set of rules, their ruling could be invalidated.

  When, or even if, that appeal might take place, however, remained unclear. With the city’s bureaucratic efforts stalled, Tami Sawyer hit the pavement. For months, like a bad song, the image of the Forrest statue had been stuck in her head. In January 2017, when an Ohio grand jury did not return an indictment on Timothy Loehmann, the officer who killed twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, Sawyer’s mind went to Forrest: “A young boy could be killed for playing with a BB gun in his local park and here in our park stands this statue of the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.” In response, she organized a “healing circle” at the foot of the statue. A healing circle, Sawyer explained, creates a place for people to talk, pray, sing, hold space—if there is anything that people need to do after one more painful reminder of whose lives matter, they can do it around others. “I just believe in the power of not sitting at home on Facebook with your anger,” she said.

  Sawyer is animated and outgoing, has a personality suited to organizing. When we met for espressos (double espressos, she’s also very busy) at a place just up from Health Sciences Park, Sawyer was fresh off her win in the Democratic primary for county commissioner. She’s bright, prone to laughter—a product of both a scathing wit and a stubborn joy. She’s expressive, talks with her hands (her fingernails that day were painted a bright blue—vivid, visual punctuation marks to the story of her campaign against the city’s Confederate monuments). And she’s steeped in legacy of civil rights protest and is committed to carrying on that work. Sawyer’s father used to be the CFO of the National Civil Rights Museum, so as a teenager, after school, she’d walk in the back door of the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, and where the museum is now based.

  To her, the Forrest statue represented “A symbol of everything we are fighting every day,” and so she was constantly reminded of it. Whenever she wrote about Memphis, she found herself referencing the statue. A week after the healing circle, she introduced Angela Davis, the legendary civil rights activist, at a benefit dinner, welcoming Davis “to a city that is 67 percent Black and 26 percent poor . . . to a city that underserves its population with inadequate transportation and underfunded, segregated education . . . to a city that profits from being the town where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated and claims to live out his dream, but spends money and energy protecting the statue of a man who made his fortune off the abuse and destruction of the bodies of Black men and women, Nathan Bedford Forrest.”

  It’s maybe n
o surprise, then, that when she was asked at a work retreat to set an achievable goal, the answer came off the top of her head: “Remove these damn statues,” she said, Historical Commission be damned.

  While city officials continued to voice support for the removal of the Forrest statue (along with the city’s two other Confederate statues—one of Jefferson Davis, the other of Capt. J. Harvey Mathes), there was no discernable movement on the issue. Would the city appeal the commission’s ruling? Could they just go ahead and remove them anyway? When the City of New Orleans removed its Confederate statues in May 2017, Memphis city attorney Bruce McMullen was asked about the status of Memphis’s own statues. “The way it’s set up, it’s going to be very onerous to get their approval to remove the statue,” he said. To Sawyer, it seemed like the politicians were hedging, being overly deferential to the commission. A follow-up statement from the city only furthered that sense: “Our situation differs from New Orleans in that Louisiana does not have a law similar to Tennessee’s.” The city would proceed as the law required, but, to the outside observer, the Heritage Protection Act and the Historical Commission were constructed specifically to foreclose, or, at the very least, slow-walk any efforts toward removal.

  So Sawyer forced the issue.

  After the work retreat, Sawyer floated the idea on social media of a grassroots movement to remove the city’s Confederate statues. Several hundred replies later, Sawyer saw that things had gotten real. Quickly. Three hundred and fifty people showed up to the first meeting that June, including city councilmen, county commissioners, a state senator, a member of hiphop group Three 6 Mafia, and William Webb, a descendant of Nathan Bedford Forrest, who told the crowd, “I want to stand here and publically state that I am for the removal of all Confederate monuments, not only here in Memphis but across the state of Tennessee.”