This piece was updated on Tuesday, Nov. 26 at 1:00 p.m.
The stacked black coffins with yellow lettering — “Never again is now” and “ICE out of Alamance” — along with dozens of people sitting in the middle of Maple Street in Graham on Sunday afternoon clearly outlined the aims of Never Again Action, a group comprised of American Jews who organized this past summer to respond to migrant detentions at the border and ICE deportations.
“Today many of us have come here as
Jews linked with our immigrant brethren,” the group tweeted. “This is not an
abstract sentiment. As we know too well, the forces of white supremacy are
against them and against us.”
Off the street, hundreds more
people, many of them undocumented, gathered on the lawn of the Center for
Spiritual Living during the action co-hosted by Never Again Action with Siembra
NC and Down Home NC.
Although none of the social media
pages publicizing the event and none of the speakers referenced the
Confederacy, Sheriff Terry Johnson had encircled the Confederate monument with
squad cars and posted uniformed officers atop the roofs of the Alamance County
Historical Courthouse and the Alamance County Detention Center.
For reasons that remain unclear, the
police would not allow the immigrant protesters and Jewish allies to march,
even on the sidewalk. Three years ago, I witnessed the Greensboro Police
Department accommodate a group with a similar size that took to the streets to
protest police brutality against people of color. Different cause, different
jurisdiction, different era, I suppose.
A drone buzzed overhead as Graham
police officers held a line against the protesters and State Troopers milled
about.
The Never Again Action account
tweeted, “They threaten us with sound cannons; we respond with singing. We’re
praying with our feet and risking arrest in Alamance, NC. They’re monitoring us
with drones; our ancestors are watching over us.”
A woman from Jewish Voice for Peace North
Carolina told the group that many of her grandparents’ generation did not make
it out of Nazi Germany. “Today,” she said, “we’re taking the direct action we
wish more people had taken for our ancestors.”
A local man recording video on his
phone up the street told an officer standing nearby: “If nobody else ain’t
gonna do nothing about it, I reckon the people gonna do something about it.”
Getting no response from the
officer, he continued with growing agitation: “They’re wanting to take this
monument down!”
An organizer with League of the South, a white supremacist organization that advocates for a white ethno-state in the footprint of the old Confederacy, mingled in a nearby park with a group of locals gathering to observe the standoff. In addition to being racist, the League is also antisemitic. League founder and leader Michael Hill has described Jewish presence as a “pestilence” while insisting, “There must be no Jew influence in our new nation state.”
I joined Megan Squire, a professor
at Elon University, behind a metal fence at the edge of the park, and all of us
waited for the inevitable arrests.
“Down, down with deportation,” the
protesters chanted. “Up, up with liberation.”
Among the locals standing with us on the sidelines, the most vocal were taking a hard, angry stance against the protesters, while any who might have been sympathetic or neutral were keeping quiet.
As the police brought out a long-range
acoustic device threatening an ear-splitting audio assault, the protesters
chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, these racist cops have got to go.”
“Put their asses in jail,” one
bystander yelled.
“Get out of the way, and we’ll take
care of ’em,” another said.
A teenage boy standing behind us,
quipped, “Mustard gas would be nice, too.”
Just for reference, mustard gas is a
chemical agent used in War World I that is banned as a weapon of war under the
Geneva Protocol of 1925 and the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993.
Around this time, Squire had turned
her phone to record the bystanders, and one of the men gave her a startled
look. “Hey,” he said, “why are you videoing us?”
“You guys are saying some pretty
awful stuff,” she replied. “He was talking about mustard gas.”
The same man pointed to a sign held
by one of the protesters.
“What does it say about Jews?” he
asked.
“Jews Against ICE,” Squire informed
him.
He seemed caught off guard by the
information and paused for a moment.
“Why are they against ICE?” he asked.
“I think they’re connecting the
Holocaust to what ICE is doing now,” Squire told him. “They don’t want that to
happen again.”
As officers moved into the group of
peaceful protesters blocking the street, frog-marching them to a van to await
transport to jail, and in one case dragging a woman who went limp by the arms, the
bystanders laughed and jeered.
After nine voluntary arrests, the
rest of the protesters had retreated back into the yard at the Center for Spiritual
Living. They sang “Kumbaya.”
Despite the conclusion of the
orderly arrests, the bystanders were not placated.
Pointing at the group assembled on
the lawn, one woman admonished, “They’re breaking the law!”
For reasons that would seem to defy
any practical consideration of public safety, two squads of police in riot gear
marched down Maple Street to face off against the protesters, who continued to
lawfully assemble in the yard at the Center for Spiritual Living.
“It’s about time,” the League of the South organizer enthused. “This is great.”
UPDATE: Byron Tucker, the public information officer for the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office, called me back and responded to my questions about security around the Confederate monument and the deployment of “officers trained in crowd control.”
Tucker said the sheriff’s office has been maintaining security around the Confederate monument, which is located on county property, “for quite some time because of the threats that other counties have seen.” He said that within the protest group on Sunday “there were folks that we were unsure of, and we chose to err on the side of caution.”
The decision to not allow protesters to march was made by the Graham Police Department, which has jurisdiction over the streets, Tucker said, adding that he believes if the organizers had applied for a permit they would have been allowed to march.
As for the sheriff’s deputies wearing helmets and protective padding, Tucker said, “We have officers trained in crowd control.” The sheriff’s office doesn’t use the term “riot gear,” but Tucker acknowledged the uniforms are designed to protect officers from being hit with “solid objects or liquid.” When I shared my observation that the situation appeared to be deescalating and that virtually all of the protesters appeared to be on private property when the “crowd control officers” arrived on the scene, Tucker responded: “We still had some people that were in the street because our folks had protective gear.” In response to my invitation to share any additional information that I may not have observed, Tucker said, “That’s not going to be intel that we’re going to share.”
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As Graham tries to grow back into modern society, there are going to be lots of situations like these. The town will see a quick end to its revitalization with these displays of brute force and intolerance.