How Church Leaders in Charlottesville Prepared for White Supremacists – The New Yorker

Just down the road from Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia,where a thousand white supremacists congregated around a statue ofRobert E. Lee this weekend, is another historical landmark. Its alarge, two-story brick building called the Jefferson School, which firstunderwent construction in 1924the same year that the Confederatemonument went upat the insistence of the local black community, whosechildren were barred from the citys high schools because ofsegregation. Now the school is on the National Register of HistoricPlaces.

On Monday night, a few hundred Charlottesville residents gathered at theJefferson School, in an auditorium on the second floor, for a communitymeeting. Two days before, three people died and nineteen were injuredwhen violent demonstrators from across the country came toCharlottesville with guns, shields, weapons, and flaming tikitorches for a Unite the Right rally. Well fucking kill these people if wehave to, one of themtold ViceNews. A twenty-year-old neo-Nazi from Ohio ran over counter-protestersin his car, in an act that Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, latercalled domestic terrorism. (The President initially condemned violenceon many sides, then followed up on Tuesday afternoon by saying thatthere were very fine people on both sides.) But, almost as soon asthey had arrived, the agitators were gone, and community members wereleft to try to make sense of what had just happened.

One of the local leaders at the school was instantly recognizable toeverybody: a sixty-five-year-old reverend named Alvin Edwards. WhenTerry McAuliffe, the governor of Virginia, came to town on Sunday, hewent directly to a service at the Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church,which is Edwardss congregation. Hes been there for the past thirty-sixyears, and during that time hes also served as the citys mayor and asa member of its school board. His years in politics have only seemed tostrengthen his ties to his parishioners, and he likes to joke, withfolksy charm, about his B.C. daysbefore Christwhen he lived inIllinois, where he grew up with plans to make money and to be anindustrial engineer. Edwards marched with the counter-protesters overthe weekend, but these days hes best known for founding a broadcoalition of local faith leaders called the Charlottesville ClergyCollective.

For the past month, the Collective has met weekly to prepare for theincursion that took place this weekend. The violence outstripped evenEdwardss expectations, and he and others in the Collective are tryingto balance spiritual and pragmatic imperatives in the aftermath of thetragedy. The local debate over what to do with the citys Confederatemonuments, which was fractious but never violent, will flare again atthe end of the month, with another public hearing on the issue. Youcant let others have the last word, but we have to move to the highground, Edwards said. If they come back, we have to shout louder andmore often.

In 2015, after a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina,murdered eight church members and their pastor, Edwards wondered what would havehappened if a similar attack had taken place at his own congregation.Would he have called any of his fellow-clergy in Charlottesville fortheir support? The answer was no, he told me, when we met in hisoffice Monday afternoon. We didnt have the kind of relationship thatwould warrant a call like that. Why would I call you when I barely knowyou? The clergy community herethe faith communityhas been dividedsince desegregation. It was almost like they were nonexistent. They wereover there; we were over here. Youd almost think they didnt want tocome over, because they were afraid of the projects! It was adisturbing realization that Edwards vowed to correct immediately, sothat summer he started calling other pastors to float the idea of acollective.

The initial proposition was simple: once a month, a small group of whiteand black pastors, from different denominations, would meet forbreakfast and discuss activities that they could do together, such as takinga day trip to Monticello. We talked about how we didnt know eachother, he said. We had a bunch of ideas. But we werent prepared forwhat happened with the K.K.K. coming here. We didnt know that was goingto happen when we formed this. In May, two permit applications camebefore the City Councilthe first was for a Ku Klux Klan rally, to beheld in July, and the second was for Unite the Right. Attendance atthe Collective went from about five or six regulars per session to closeto fifty.

We talked about the safety of those demonstrating close to the front,and about whether or not we wanted to march down there, or go pray,Edwards said, of the meetings. He has the slightly more conservativeoutlook of an elder statesman, and hed sooner lead a prayer vigil thanrush into the fray. My thought was that we should completely ignore theKlansmen, he told me. Their numbers were smallthis wasnt the Klan ofold, he arguedand theyd clearly come from out of town. The worstthing you can do to a person is to not listen to him. I hate whensomeone does that to me, he said. But in the Collective you had theones who wanted to confront them, and I respect that, he told me.

Ultimately, the group decided to stage a counter-protest against theKlansmen, who in July flocked to another Confederate monument in town, astatue of Stonewall Jackson, in Justice Park. Elaine Thomas, a priest atSt. Pauls Memorial Church, a mostly white Episcopalian congregationacross the street from the University of Virginia, had joined theCollective at its inception and marched with the other members at theK.K.K. counter-protest. Were not activists, but we are people whowanted to make our presence known, Thomas told me. Young racial-justiceactivists whod shown up to stand in opposition to the Klansmen ralliedaround the pastors when they arrived. As we rounded the corner toJustice Park, they rushed toward us, she said. They kept saying, Theclergy are here! The clergy are here!

There are a number of historically influential churches inCharlottesville, but Mt. Zion and St. Pauls are especially emblematic.One is mostly black, the other mostly white. Mt. Zion sits at the bottomof a hill, in a quiet neighborhood called Fifeville, on the outskirts ofdowntown. St. Pauls is on University Avenue, within feet of theschools iconic statue of Thomas Jefferson; its classical portico andbrick building are an extension of the campuss architectural style. OnFriday night, close to a thousand people were packed into St. Pauls fora prayer service when a throng of torch-wielding demonstrators startedmassing across the street. Several police cars sped to the church justbefore the service let out, after reports that one of the demonstratorshad brandished a rifle.

I visited St. Pauls earlier this week to talk with its rector, theReverend William Peyton, a native Virginian whose great-great-grandfather lost his arm at the First Battle of Manassas. He has onlyrecently returned to the state, after serving as the associate rector atSt. James Church, in New York City, for the past seven years; he andEdwards are still only loose acquaintances. Peyton marched with a largegroup on Saturday that started at the Jefferson School and continued tothe First United Methodist Church, which is directly across the streetfrom Emancipation Park. As armed demonstrators moved along the fringesof the park beating counter-protesters, Peyton and others stood in thechurch parking lot to make sure that the property wasnt overrun.

There are all kinds of deep and intertwining historical ironies here,Peyton told me, as we walked through St. Pauls on Monday. We had sevenhundred people in the church the other night. There were Nazi torchesoutside. Some of the pews in the chapel bear the names of Confederatesoldiers. This church also had a proud history of leadership during thecivil-rights era. Thomas Jefferson was a white supremacist, he said,adding to the litany. How far was Robert E. Lee from Jefferson in termsof world view? But we deify Jefferson in this town.

Even the liberal politics of Charlottesville were complex and tangled,he told me. On one side was what Peyton called Old Virginia, acontingent of residents with a more conservative, nostalgist bent, whonever quite defended the Confederate monuments but still saw the CityCouncils vote to remove them, in February, as a needless provocation.On the other was a progressive group anchored by students and faculty atthe university, some of whom would leave town when their time at schoolwas up. Its a big university and a small city, he said. People whocome here from elsewhere dont always appreciate the depth of thehistoric ties to the Confederacy.

Peyton, like Edwards, wants his church to be a source of moral clarityand purpose, without overt activism becoming its sole function duringtrying times. Im trying to lead a church whose Christian identityleads my members to their politics, and not to have their politics leadthem to the church, he said. On Saturday morning, while protestersgathered downtown, Edwards invited congregants to Mt. Zion to pray fromsix until noon. To hear him describe it, the worshippers were a criticalpart of the resistance, too. We were trying to be prayerful, and Imgrateful for that, because I believe it would have been worse if peoplehadnt prayed, he told me.

The Collective is now at a crossroads. Some of its participants,especially younger pastors, grew restless in the weeks before thisweekends confrontation. They wanted the group to prepare for nonviolentdirect action and to hold the line against the white supremacists whowere coming to town by the van-load. You cant wish this away, SethWispelwey, a recently ordained minister, told me at the JeffersonSchool, on Monday. He helped a colleague, Brittany Caine-Conley, put outa nationalcall for pastors to come to Charlottesville to join the counter-protesters onthe front lines. The move wasnt exactly a consensus position amongmembers of the Collective, but its defenders saw it as necessary giventhe circumstances.

On Monday night, one sentiment seemed to elicit broad and unqualifiedagreement. There is a specific and demonstrable connection betweensymbols of racism and acts of racism, Lisa Woolfork, a University ofVirginia professor and member of Black Lives Matter, said. They keepcoming because we keep inviting them, she said, of the whitesupremacists from out of town. To rescind the invitation, you have toremove the Confederate monuments. Her statement drew the biggestapplause of the night.

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How Church Leaders in Charlottesville Prepared for White Supremacists - The New Yorker