The Fire This Time - Part 1

This morning in Nashville we are angry at last night’s destruction in our downtown. We are also deeply curious.

We wonder who these vandals are, where their controllers live, and who instilled in them the provocative purpose of their senseless rampage at City Hall, the State Capitol, and along the storefronts of Lower Broadway. To provoke whom, to what end?

The bad actors were not the people who spoke out and demonstrated civilly against police violence, in the sunshine of the afternoon on our Memorial Plaza. The citizens there were loud, but not lawbreakers. No, what happened after the sun went down, and that turned our streets mean, seems the work of wanton vandals, of low and lawless minds.

It is good to ask, therefore, whether these actions were just senseless or purposeful? On the senseless agenda:

·      If you want to attack symbols that represent the work of the devil, you don’t set flames to Nashville’s City Hall, of all places. For sixty years, that front door has been an important symbol of reconciliation, which is the opposite of racism, and of our city’s progressivism. In April 1960, this was the spot where Nashville began to change for the better. On the day after Councilman Z. Alexander Looby’s home was bombed, Diane Nash and her fellow activists marched peacefully from campuses on the north and west sides, and they spoke civilly with Mayor Ben West on these steps. Here, the mayor famously agreed with Nash that segregated lunch counters were wrong.

·      And you don’t smash the engraved plaque, installed 35 years later by Mayor Phil Bredesen, who hoped to mark the spot forever. (To this day I never enter our City Hall without stopping to re-read its solemn message: “May we continue to live together as one God-fearing community forever.”) This morning those words of a city’s hope lay in shards. No, the fire-setters and spray-painters and rock-throwers of last night were not of soul of our town.

·      If you don’t care for Tennessee’s record of glorifying murders of black folk, and of celebrating the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest inside the Capitol, fine. But you don’t redress that by toppling the statue of E.W. Carmack outside.

Carmack’s story – how the editor championed temperance back in the day, how he was murdered by his political enemies on a street nearby - is an obscure one now. He is all but lost to history. The destruction of his statue was nothing more than street vandalism of convenience, not of principle. The miscreants sent us no understandable message with that act. (UPDATE: After this was posted, early Sunday, an alert reader pointed out that Carmack used his editor’s position to attack the journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett for her writing and speaking out against lynching across the South. Possibly that was the motive behind tearing down his likeness on the capitol grounds. Just last month, she was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her courageous advocacy journalism. I stand corrected.)

But also on the “purposeful” side (which is my own view this morning) consider…

·      It’s the essence of terrorism (which is often guided remotely) to intentionally jar the senses, upset norms and civil order, in order to sow confusion and fear and political instability.

·      Too many events like this were happening in too many U.S. cities this weekend to think bad actors in Nashville were not put up to this. How far does this reach?

·      And plenty of folks watching what unfolded downtown on screens at home were immediately curious – and well we should be – about where these bad actors came from, and who was manipulating them. How far does this reach, in either its sources or its outcomes? Sorting that out should be high on the FBI’s to-do list today. But will it be?

Disruptive uncivil acts like these can be fodder for demagogues, in any age. The timing of Nashville’s disorder is also curious, coming on the last weekend of May, so close to national elections in such an angry and divided summer. These are the kind of events, that can sway elections. (Have a look at Twitter this morning. See how quickly Rudy Giuliani put the blame on certain cities having Democratic mayors. “This is the future,” he tweeted, “if you elect Democrats.”)

One also wonders this morning why there were not more arrests the vandals in downtown Nashville last night on charges of destruction of property, not just for violating a new curfew. Plenty of the acts of vandalism – smashing windows, tossing firebombs, damage to commercial businesses – were caught on countless cellphones and news cameras.

On that point, I for one am eager to hear more today and tomorrow about why MNPD’s policy of restraint may not have done justice to anything or anyone on this weekend of flame and shattered glass.

© Keel Hunt, 2020