I went to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, between 1969 and graduation in 1971.
East Tennessee was a very conservative and reliably Republican bastion that supported the War in Vietnam.
During those years much happened.
Numerous marches and protests against the war were held in downtown Knoxville as well as in Washington, D.C.
In May 1970, following the shooting that took place at Kent State University, U-T, like many other colleges and universities, went on strike.
Picket lines protesting the shooting and the war were everywhere on campus.
Large meetings and assemblies were held on campus at which speakers railed against the war and the persons responsible for sending the National Guard onto the Kent state campus.
During this period police in Mississippi shot into a dormitory at the African-American college Jackson State University in Jackson, killing two students and wounding twelve more.
While this raised the temperature on and off campuses across the nation, events, for the most part, continued peacefully.
In the Nation’s Capital, a protest march drew 100,000.
I was one of them.
No violence occurred.
Shortly after the shooting at Kent State, President Richard Nixon appeared on our campus to address a Billy Graham gathering.
While several hundred protesters turned out, the protest was peaceful and respectable.
The following year I traveled from Knoxville to Washington, again. This march drew 200,000.
In San Francisco another 156,000 protested.
Both protests were peaceful.
I offer all of this background as a way of explaining my confusion and understanding about how we have arrived where we find ourselves in the wake of Charlottesville.
The events in Charlottesville and Trump’s reaction to them are nothing short of spine chilling.
On Friday night, a large group of racists drawn from the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other white “nationalist” groups marched through the University of Virginia Campus in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In true KKK fashion, they carried burning torches.
In true Nazi fashion, they chanted “blood and soil,” a phrase chanted in Nazi Germany to signify ethnic purity and the virtue of German agrarian life.
On Saturday, as the world watched, they engaged in violent confrontations with counter demonstrators that ultimately led to the death of three people and left scores of others injured.
In the immediate aftermath, one would have expected that the President of the United States would have condemned the KKK members, Neo-Nazi’s and other racist extremists who precipitated the violence.
Instead, he condemned “many sides” lumping the counter demonstrators in with racists and Nazis, one of whom drove his car into a crowd of people, killing a young woman.
Former KKK Grand Dragon, David Duke applauded Trump’s stance, observing that it was white people, like himself, that were responsible for Trump being in the White House.
This moral equivalence by Trump, led to an outcry across the political spectrum causing him to backtrack and condemn racism and anti-Semitism.
By Tuesday, Trump had doubled down on his earlier comments during a raucous press conference in which he said there were “many fine people” among the racists, neo-Nazis and other extremists who participated in the “Unite the Right’ rally.
Once again, David Duke took to the air to thank Trump for “your honesty and courage to tell the truth about Charlottesville…..”
It is, to say the least, puzzling that Trump would characterize the alt-right followers that chanted “Jews will not replace us” and castigated Trump for allowing his daughter to marry a Jew as “many fine people.”
By the end of the week, Trump’s “chief strategist” Steve Bannon resigned and returned to Breitbart News, which he characterized as the “platform for the alt-right.”
Commentators have mused about whether Bannon’s departure will result in more moderation coming to the White House.
It’s time to face the sad truth.
Bannon is not responsible for Trump’s racism and bigotry.
Trump is responsible for that.
It is who he is.
He demonstrated it long before he began his racist “birther” campaign to challenge the legitimacy of the first African-American President’s right to hold that office.
It is manifest in his continued claim that the “Central Park Five,” young African-American men that were wrongfully accused, convicted and imprisoned for a the rape of a jogger remain guilty of that crime, despite being exonerated by DNA testing and the confession of the real perpetrator.
Only the most naïve or myopic can expect for a change in the man’s character.
It’s also time to stop sanitizing the characterization of Ku Klux Klan members, Neo- Nazis and other bigoted defectives by referring to them as “White Nationalists” and the “alt-Right” as though there was some moral or philosophical legitimacy for the hate they spew.
After watching the news reporting of the events in Charlottesville, I can’t see the “many fine people” that Trump saw among them.
Maybe, he saw them in the light from the torches that they carried.