Forty people showed up for a Black Lives Matter march in Kingwood over the weekend. Sixty people showed up in opposition. Both sides brought guns. One guy came wearing a Nazi ‘SS’ shirt.
And while that sounds like every cliché and stereotype about Preston County — and West Virginia as a whole — that’s exactly what happened.
To recap, for the people who are still confused, to say “Black lives matter” — separate from the BLM organization and the hashtag — is not to say that all other lives don’t matter. To say “Black lives matter” is a reminder that Black lives matter, too — despite a long history that shows Black lives have often been viewed as less valuable and Black people as inferior — and a plea to help our country, our world, get to a place where society treats Black people with the same dignity, respect and compassion that white people already receive.
We’re extremely glad the march remained nonviolent (sans insults) but also a little surprised given all the guns and the outside provocateurs. There was literally a guy from Pennsylvania, calling himself “John Patriot,” who showed up to the Kingwood rally because he thinks “Black Lives Matter … are a terrorist organization.” (Which BLM is not, FYI. We checked PolitiFact.) His other reason for attending? “To keep our rights where they’re supposed to be” (DP-09-13-20).
Another man came to oppose the rally while wearing a shirt emblazoned with two stylized ‘S’s (looking almost like lightning bolts). This is the symbol of the “Schutzstaffel,” which, according to History.com, “initially served as Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler’s (1889-1945) personal bodyguards, and later became one of the most powerful and feared organizations in all of Nazi Germany.”
If you and neo-Nazis share the same opinion about a social justice/human rights movement, you may want to reevaluate some things. Because, historically, Nazis have not been the “good guys.”
If you show up to oppose a peaceful BLM march because you’re “standing up for what’s right” as one Morgantown man — who insisted on remaining anonymous — claimed, we would really like to know your definition of “right.”
If your response to chants of “Black Lives Matter” is to shout back “four more years” in reference to Trump’s presidency, it’s not his economic policies you support — it’s his bigotry and the way he has normalized hateful speech.
If you hear Delegate Danielle Walker say, “I stand with all people, and I love all people, but in this time we know that there is disparity amongst us,” and your response is to bellow “U.S.A.,” then it is not the promise of America — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” — you support; it is the reality of America, which has fallen unquestionably short of that promise.
Because Black Lives Matter isn’t an anti-America movement. It’s an active effort to make America live up to its stated ideals, to insist that the structures built on the oppression of some can be fixed to the benefit of all.
