Silence
The administration’s recent directive to the National Park Service to “sanitize” the history of Medgar Evers’ assassination is a chilling act of historical revisionism. Reports that visitor materials at the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument are being edited to remove the word “racist” when describing his killer — a known Klansman — are an insult to the truth.
Under the guise of “restoring sanity” to history, the administration is instead erasing the brutal reality of the Jim Crow era. Removing details of Evers’ death and the white supremacist ideology that fueled it does not make our history “great;” it makes it dishonest. We cannot learn from a past we are forbidden to name.
Particularly deafening is the silence of Rep. Rob Wittman. As our representative and vice chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, Wittman has oversight over our National Parks. His failure to speak out against this whitewashing suggests a complicity in the erasure of a World War II veteran and Civil Rights icon’s legacy.
History is a mirror, not a marketing brochure. If we scrub away the scars, we lose the context of our progress. I urge Wittman to break his silence and demand that the NPS tell the unvarnished truth about Evers.
Christopher P. Stolz, Williamsburg
Sow violence
We agree that there needs to be robust enforcement against illegal entry to the U.S. The problem lies in how this is undertaken. President Donald Trump killed bipartisan legislation that was intended to build up the system for processing and enforcing the law for immigration. Now that he is in power, and he loves power, he has implemented a brute-force effort to grab and deport aliens. Constitutional rights, inalienable rights, don’t seem to matter. They search without warrants, breaking into homes; they stop people randomly or grab them and haul them away; and now they are shooting people for monitoring them and protesting.
Protesters, if they have any training, are generally told to be nonviolent and law-abiding. The federal government is asserting that anything that interferes with their actions is unlawful and treating protesters brutally with physical violence or chemical weapons. No doubt some protesters have crossed the line and no doubt federal agents have too. However, the government is supposed to take the high road and protect citizens. It is failing miserably. Rather than clean up the problem, the feds are blaming the protesters and claiming that all the detainees are dangerous criminals. This is false.
The real objective of the Trump administration is to sow violence and unrest to justify additional troops and the eventual control of elections before the midterms.
Robert Neece, Yorktown
Pure racism
I have heard some of some of President Donald Trump’s supporters say that he is not a racist. He posted on his Truth Social account a video of the former president and his wife as apes. What else does he have to do, not say, but do? The former President and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama are the best that this country has to offer. They are both Harvard-educated. They have conducted themselves with dignity, grace, compassion and honor. They are not in the Epstein files. They have not been convicted of a felony.
For the president of the United States to post this says more about him than the Obamas. Also, what does it say about us as a country to continue to allow this despicable man to lead our country? To continue to support this obviously disturbed, cruel, acute narcissist to stay in office, says more about us as a country to the rest of the civilized world. For people of good conscience, this is a defining moment as to what kind of country we are living in.
Vernon Crump III, Portsmouth
