Alexandria: War of Passive Aggression
South rises again in Alexandria to fight renaming streets and moving memorial.
By Vernon Miles
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
... by the end of the meeting, several of the black citizens decided they couldn’t sit idly by.
“I came here just to listen, but what I heard was one perspective,” said Joe Sampson. “<You’re> not thinking of both sides of the coin. It’s easy to look back with rose-colored glasses, but the experience for African Americans in Virginia was not the same … We cannot continue to make decisions that stand on the shoulders of one side. We can try to smudge history as much as we want. We can say that it wasn’t something, but we all know what the reality is, and the reality is that it was fought over slavery, over the commodity of African people, over human beings.”
The fact that all of the white speakers had supported keeping the confederate names had not escaped Sampson’s notice ...
Sampson was joined by Chaka Lindsey, both of them veterans who took exception to another speaker claiming to represent the offended veteran population. Lindsey, a native of New York, said he couldn’t understand why the other citizens were hurling words like “Yankee” around as an insult ...
http://www.connectionnewspapers.com/news/2016/feb/10/alexandria-war-passive-aggression/
