A New Martin Luther King Jr. Parade Divides a Virginia Town
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Where Civil Rights Meet the Civil War
Lexington, Va., has a rich Confederate history. This year, residents marched in the city's first Martin Luther King Jr. parade. Down the road, others saluted the Confederacy.
By JULIA WALL and LOGAN JAFFE on January 16, 2017. Photo by Logan Jaffe for The New York Times. Technology by Samsung. . Watch in Times Video »
LEXINGTON, Va. — For years, the weekend leading up to the observance of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday has been overshadowed here by a celebration and a parade honoring two Confederate generals whose birthdays fall within days of the civil rights icon’s: Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
But this year, a group seeking to march in honor of King obtained the sole permit available on Saturday, the day that a Lee-Jackson parade is typically held.
After a presidential election that has left the country sharply divided and emotions raw, some people in the town feared the worst, with town officials warning of “unintended consequences” if the King parade went ahead. But on Saturday, both groups held peaceful observances.
“It did not feel like we were doing something that radical,” said one King parade organizer, Florentien Verhage, a professor of philosophy who teaches at Washington and Lee University.
Lee and Jackson are buried here in Lexington, a small city of 7,000 tucked among the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, near the border of West Virginia. For more than a decade, Confederacy enthusiasts have gathered on this January weekend to celebrate the generals’ birthdays and “flag” the city — a term they coined to describe standing along thoroughfares, some dressed in Civil War costume, waving Confederate battle flags.
The tradition is at odds with the beliefs of many residents of this predominantly liberal college town, home to Washington and Lee University as well as the Virginia Military Institute. Defenders of the battle flag regard it as a symbol of Southern pride and heritage. But critics view it as an emblem of bigotry, an especially sensitive topic after the conviction last month of Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who has been sentenced to death for a shooting in a Charleston, S.C., church that left nine black congregants dead.
This year, longstanding tensions in Lexington increased after Ku Klux Klan recruitment fliers appeared around town last spring, prompting a group of professors and faith leaders to form an advocacy group, the Community Anti-Racism Education Initiative.
In working to establish a King parade, they encountered resistance from both battle flag supporters, who called them antagonistic for their choice of date, and flag opponents, including some lifelong African-American residents, who said the parade threatened to upset the delicate, unspoken agreements that had allowed black and white residents to coexist in relative peace despite the town’s history.
A walk around downtown gives a sense of what they mean. Marysue Forrest, 69, a white bookstore owner, said she had never felt racial tension in Lexington. She declared with pride that she was related “by ex-marriage” to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general. She did not say that he was the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Ted DeLaney, a black professor of history at Washington and Lee, recalled having his tonsils removed inside Stonewall Jackson’s former home, which was for a time the city’s hospital. He said African-Americans in the town had long chosen to turn away from the painful parts of local history, rather than confront them head-on.
Part of that, he said, involved making peace with monuments and references to Lee and Jackson, which seem to exist on nearly every block. John Leland, a retired English professor who taught at Washington and Lee and the Virginia Military Institute, remembers walking into the Robert E. Lee Memorial Episcopal Church for the first time.
“Where you think there’s going to be an altar, there’s Lee, waiting to rise up — like the second coming of the Confederacy,” he said.
Tensions had erupted before. In 2011, Mimi Elrod, the mayor then, was driven in a police car to a City Council meeting to avoid hundreds of battle flag advocates protesting outside, according to local reports. Ms. Elrod had spearheaded an ordinance that would prevent them from obtaining a permit to hang their flag on municipal light posts, as they had quietly done the previous year.
After the ordinance passed, Ms. Elrod became a target. She received hundreds of letters, emails and phone calls, some of them threatening, she said. For years afterward, battle flag advocates gathered outside her house on Lee-Jackson Saturday and sang “Dixie.”
Ms. Elrod, who is white, said in an interview last week that her politics had been shaped more by her parents, staunch Democrats who fought to keep public schools open during integration, than by her ancestors, prominent Confederate generals whose portraits hang in her front room.
“They were men of their times,” she said. “They thought they were doing the right thing. They weren’t.”
It was time for the city to move on, she said. “We don’t want to bring people here who care about the Confederacy.”
But she did not speak for everyone. Just outside Lexington lies conservative Rockbridge County, where “Vote Trump” and “Lock Her Up,” a reference to Hillary Clinton, are written in white block letters on the side of an old barn. Behind it, a Confederate battle flag flies from an 80-foot pole on private property.
After the flag was planted, the property’s owner placed an ad in a local newspaper declaring, “No black people or Democrats are allowed on my property until further notice.”
Michael Chittum, 54, who traveled from Rockbridge to march in Lexington over the weekend, said, “I don’t believe in all that hate,” adding that he supported much of what Dr. King stood for, “but I don’t believe in shoving it down people’s throats all at once.”
Wielding a battle flag and standing with his 11-year-old daughter, Mr. Chittum explained that he felt that to deny his family’s Confederate roots would be unfair to his three children. He had no problem with the parade celebrating King, he said, but he was uncomfortable with some part of the paraders’ message, including marriage equality.
All this tension and disagreement was too much for Marylin Alexander, the only African-American member of Lexington’s City Council, who tried in an email that was obtained and published by a local journalist to warn parade organizers of potential “unintended consequences.” The police department and city manager’s office gave similar warnings, according to parade organizers.
Ms. Alexander knew that battle flag advocates had called the Community Anti-Racism Education Initiative “agitators,” and had published the personal information and photos of some online. In the past, some had driven through the historically black neighborhood in Lexington, rebel flags waving from their cars, shouting the n-word, she said.
“I don’t know what else they are capable of,” she said Friday evening.
But by 10 a.m. Saturday, more than 600 people had gathered for the King parade outside the Randolph Street United Methodist Church, nearly filling a city block. Fears seemed to have dissipated, at least for the morning. Parade marshals in bright pink T-shirts flanked the group, poised to keep hecklers at bay, but there were none to be seen.
The diverse but predominantly white crowd made their way across town, singing and chanting for peace and equality.
“I’m marching because racism is heavy in our area,” said Ken Davis, a white resident of Lexington.
His wife, Laura Davis, who is black, said, “It needs to end. I mean, we’re all the same.”
While the group marched, a substantial but smaller group of Confederacy enthusiasts gathered on the northwest edge of town outside a gun shop. Bagpipes played, and the crowd roared. They raised a giant battle flag, and announced it was the 25th they had hoisted on private property in response to the removal of battle flags from government buildings in recent years.
Afterward, they reconvened at the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery in Lexington. Susan Hathaway, the leader of a group called the Virginia Flaggers, had a message that sounded strikingly similar to one that King paraders had heard from their organizers less than an hour earlier — but one with a different goal.
“We are losing this war on a lot of fronts,” she said. “And folks, if we don’t learn to come alongside of people who might look a little different than us, who might have a different way of doing things, and find ways that we can work together like we did today, we’re not going to get very far.”
P.C: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/us/parades-lexington-virginia-martin-luther-king-jr-robert-e-lee.html
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