EDITOR:

In the Aug. 25, 2017, issue of the Daily Press a letter to the editor from Tom Grant entitled “We need a conversation,” rhetorically asked why “Confederate statues” that haven’t been a problem for years “(a)ll of a sudden, the statutes offend?.” Mr. Grant wrote that Charlottesville started as “a simple protest” to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee and that a woman was dead “because of a statue.”

Confederate statutes would not have directly offended most citizens of the U.P. Their purpose was to intimidate African Americans. They were erected when Jim Crow laws were enacted and the Ku Klux Klan was resurgent, as signal to black Americans that they were not equal to whites. Statue building escalated again during Civil Rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Two years ago a white supremacist killed nine African Americas in prayer in Charleston. On social media he was pictured with a pistol and Confederate battle flag. The Charleston killings highlighted the use of symbols, including statues and battle flags, used by supremacists, neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

Charlottesville was not a simple protest. Organizers called it the Unite the Right. They were a collection of white supremacists, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, and neo-Nazis. The “protesters” carried symbols adopted by Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s; chanted anti-semitic slogans like “you will not replace us,” “Jews will not replace us,” and “blood and soil,” a slogan popular with mid-century Nazis. They armed themselves with automatic weapons and bats and performed Nazi salutes. The “protesters” marched with torch light the night before Unite the Right in a manner reminiscent Europe’s Nazis.

Heather Heyer was not killed because of a statue. The man charged killing Ms. Heyer drove the car into pedestrians several blocks from any confrontations between Unite the Right and its counter-protesters. He was from Maumee, Ohio, more than 500 miles from Charlottesville. The act was a terrorist act.

Richard Clark

Escanaba