Standing Up to Hate: The Charlottesville Clergy Collective and the Lessons from August 12, 2017

Edited by Michael Cheuk. Nurturing Faith, 2023. 138 pages. $20/paperback; $9.99/eBook.

Standing Up to Hate is raw in two senses of the word: its visceral firsthand accounts are gripping, both of the events staged by the KKK and other White nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., during 2017’s “summer of hate” and of the counterprotests. But the anthology’s “lessons”—as promised in the subtitle—are largely left to the reader to simmer and digest.

Editor Michael Cheuk of the Charlottesville Clergy Collective (CCC) groups 21 essays (including two by Friends) into three sections: what happened, what changed personally for people, and what changed for faith communities. While the numerous blow-by-blow descriptions became repetitive and fail to address the section themes, each essay powerfully evokes the intensity, confusion, and on-the-ground reality of being in the midst of rapidly cascading events: descriptions useful for anyone considering direct action. Standing Up to Hate offers many lessons for Friends—particularly White Friends such as myself—about faithful nonviolent work in fast-moving, high-conflict situations and their aftermath.

In the first lesson I took away, many writers expressed their shift from what I term “White astonishment” (White people’s shock when White people behave horribly) to accountability for their race privilege. One minister reviews the racist history of Charlottesville’s White clergy; another, his direct descent from enslaving plantation owners. Several White authors described their assumption that White young men were allies, until they saw their neo-Nazi T-shirts. A “white yoga-pants-wearing mother,” trying to support a Black Baptist deacon, hears: “I am a Black man in Charlottesville, Virginia. I can never take a Sabbath from . . . that.”

“[N]othing made me more angry and frustrated than hearing from stunned, ignorant, possibly well-meaning whites that ‘this is not who we are!’” writes Black minister Brenda Brown-Grooms. White pastor Will Brown responds, “[T]he truth is that this weekend revealed uncomfortable realities [for] many of us, particularly white Christians . . . ‘Yes, this is who we are.’”

A second lesson the book offers is that there’s a need for skill in coalition building, communication, and decision making during sudden organizational growth. Alvin Edwards, pastor of Charlottesville’s Mount Zion First African Baptist Church (see his terrific essay about Black churches), founded the CCC in 2015 after a White nationalist murdered nine members of Charleston, South Carolina’s historic Mother Emanuel AME Church. CCC participation tripled and diversified in early 2017, when dissension rose after city officials voted to remove two statues of Confederate generals from public spaces. Differences escalated within CCC, which both fissioned into other groups and created an internal environment that left key voices unheard and issues unresolved. For example, CCC clergy decided to wear clerical garb during counterprotests and rejected a Friend’s proposal that group T-shirts could identify CCC non-clergy as well. She, presciently, created T-shirts anyway.

Another lesson the book provides is that Friends and like-minded people must have an unflinching understanding of deadly conflict and our specific, effective skills and contributions. Standing Up to Hate’s essayists document numerous unheeded red flags of impending violence, one writer’s experience with the Idaho Aryan Nation decades earlier, and counter-protestors’ growing desire for a heroic battle between good and evil. After counter-protestors were assaulted with tear gas following the July 8 KKK rally, a minister wrote of the incident: “[I]t was abundantly clear . . . that we were in no way prepared for whatever was to come.” Several authors despaired that the “militant, nonviolent direct action” training provided was too little, too late and was outdated and misdirected at police rather than the alt-right or the weapons carried by all sides. A Sufi practitioner writes, “[M]y heart told me . . . [w]hile the police can be a symptom of white supremacy, they are not its cause.”

The book gave yet another lesson that conveyed the need to develop limits (and hacks!) when working with others who are not committed to Friends testimonies or even tactics: such as whether to negotiate with police. An issue left critically unresolved in 2017 was whether to heed the repeated requests and pleas of the police chief and city manager (both Black) when they met with counter-protestors: their pleas to stay home or away from the alt-right rally. The CCC rejected a Buddhist member’s proposal to fundraise for local antiracist organizations as a productive alternative. (She fundraised anyway.) Her proposal exemplifies up/bystander best practices: interventions—if safe for the threatened person and the bystander—should focus on the threatened, not the aggressor.

Finally, Friends have long understood that the peaceful prevention of deadly conflict requires skillful interventions before and after the intensity of peak confrontation. When rumors flew on August 12 of threats to his synagogue, a rabbi modeled this wisdom, stating firmly that they could not stop neo-Nazis from burning down their building, but they could protect people and their historic Torah and rebuild if needed. I wish the volume included more about the amazing rebuilding carried out by Beloved Community Cville, an organization established after August 12 by one of the Quaker essayists (Elizabeth Shillue) and editor Cheuk. Friends will find much in Standing Up to Hate to help us make love the first motion in all situations.

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Abigail E. Adams was a member of Charlottesville (Va.) Meeting for many years before moving in 1996 to Connecticut. She now worships with New Haven (Conn.) Meeting and serves Friends Committee on National Legislation as recording clerk. A recently retired anthropology professor, she and her children remain close with Friends in Charlottesville and Central America.