By Dr. Jerry Carr Jr.
This letter is in response to the article titled “Black Lives Matter march in Kingwood meets with opposition but goes on peacefully” (DP-09-12-20). You gave the white supremacists a platform. You let them control the message. You normalized them. They got to speak in whatever coded language they desired and spread their message to the rest of the world.
My name is Jerry Carr, and I was invited to speak at this nonviolent rally to denounce racist violence and advocate for racial equity in front of the courthouse by the rally’s chief organizer, Frank Goines Jr. However, I wasn’t able to speak at that location because the situation was deemed unsafe. I was one of four Black people present, and I was also quoted by the paper on that same day speaking to the demonstrators after the rally was completed. I noticed some disturbing aspects in the article that I wanted to comment on:
The group labelled “the opposition,” many of them unwilling to provide their real names, were white supremacists. White supremacists wore Confederate and Nazi flags, while carrying guns to promote fear. Not stating this explicitly in the article completely misleads the readers on how inherently non-peaceful the situation was that Saturday.
What they yelled at the BLM demonstrators were not slogans. They were the same kind of threats the Klan delivered to my grandfather decades ago and forced him to flee Alabama for Detroit. Besides referring to the BLM demonstrators as “socialist terrorists,” they were also called “n—-r lovers.” They made sure to call me a “n—-r” directly in addition to threatening to kill all of us. Shouts of “white power” were abundant.
I dispute the numbers reported on the rally. The opposition had enough people present to surround the demonstrators and many were armed.
I am not sure how these details did not make it into the article. A headline with the word “peacefully” was striking given how unsafe everyone felt. I am also troubled by people who embraced treasonous ideologies such as the Confederacy and Nazism get to call themselves patriots while they also get to label BLM demonstrators as terrorists.
On its face, what was reported doesn’t make sense, and I’ve been fielding phone calls all week from folks asking me for the real story, since what was printed didn’t seem remotely plausible. I fear all of these details of the event on Saturday were ignored in a sense to preserve a false sense of “neutrality.”
This false sense of neutrality while reporting on white supremacy allowed the permeation of two possible messages, both which were communicated to me directly by white supremacists at the rally: First, racism doesn’t matter or exist; this statement implies history doesn’t exist and we should destroy all knowledge. Second, white supremacy is good and a valid position to take; I submit that promoting lies such as this are dangerous on more levels than I have the capacity to explain in this critique.
To The Dominion Post: I am begging you to learn from this lesson and get this right, because our entire community is at risk if you do not. Racist incidents are increasing across the state and within our local communities. Thanks to the lack of moral leadership from key figures in positions of power, they will continue to increase unchecked for the foreseeable future. The NAACP will continue its century-long mission to fight these issues, but our community needs to have a firm understanding on what it can expect from this publication in the future.
Dr. Jerry Carr Jr. is president of the Morgantown/Kingwood branch of the NAACP.
