It’s comfortable to think the virulent racism of long ago is no longer part of our lives.  But it is.  It’s hidden and when it exposes itself it does so with such vengeance that witnesses might be left gasping.

More likely it’s white witnesses who are left gasping by the searing viciousness that is not so surprising to black people, even today in our supposedly accepting society. And I suppose it shouldn’t have been the surprise that it was in this time of increasingly-public white nationalism.

It happened last week at a meeting of a city council committee considering whether to remove a rock with a bronze plaque on it saying Confederate General Sterling Price decided in 1864 not to attack Jefferson City.  I had thought it was a fairly benign thing a few months ago when people asked me about it.  But the more I have looked into it, how it wound up where it is, who Price was, and what his brief siege was about, the more convinced I am that the continued presence of this marker is a blot on my town.

Some brief background: General Sterling Price was a former Missouri governor who had three times sworn loyalty to the United States and vowed to defend it from enemies, foreign and domestic.  But in 1861 he turned his back on those oaths and became one of those enemies who sought to destroy our nation as it then existed. In the fall of 1864 he led a last-gasp effort to recapture Missouri for the South, leading a rag-tag army of 12,000 poorly-equipped soldiers, thinking he might be able to capture St. Louis (impossible because it was full of Union troops), Jefferson City (where Confederate Governor Thomas C. Reynolds who was traveling with him could be sworn in as the legitimate governor of a now-Southern state) and then Westport and in the process turn the tide in the 1864 election and get rid of Lincoln so a truce could be arranged that would preserve the South and its slaves.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group aligned with the Ku Klux Klan at the time the marker was presented in 1933 (its webpage makes it clear it no longer subscribes to its past attitudes), wrote the language on the bronze plaque.

We won’t go into a lengthy discussion of why some people think the marker should be removed but, in short, the idea is that the values behind its presentation are not the city’s values, does not reflect the true history of what happened here, and it casts a shadow over the lives of many African-Americans who see it as a symbol of a time when black people were told they had a place in this town and it wasn’t where white people were.

A woman named Jackie Coleman, who I did not know about until a couple of weeks ago, was among the list of people who shared with the city council their thoughts about “the rock” as it is called. She said she was “appalled” that the marker was on city property because, “It’s not what Jefferson City is about.”  A little later she told the council, “I know discrimination. If you don’t want to get rid of the rock you are saying you don’t care about me.”  The council took no action but referred the issue to two of its committees.

At the Public Works Committee meeting last Thursday I suggested the council pay more attention to what she and others said about their experiences in Jefferson City—and the experiences of their ancestors—more than the council pays attention to the philosophical arguments about history that people like me were making, valid though they might be.  While most of the argument is about Price, the KKK, the UDC, the proper telling of history, etc., the feelings of Jackie Coleman and others who spoke with her are about LIFE and how the marker casts a shadow over them, even now.

She spoke right after I did last Thursday and I was gratified that she found my remarks good. I hope I was not the only person stunned in the council chamber by what came next.

Before I tell you about it I want you to understand that there are some words that we have become too cautious in using when their use is most valuable in understanding what a circumstance is.  Some words are so brutal and so cruel that referring to them as “the –word” relieves us of confronting the remorseless attitude behind them.  I am going to use one of those words and by now you know what it is.

Jackie read an unsigned letter she received after the City Council meeting saying, “What is wrong with teaching our youth about history, that the Civil War was not fought over slavery but over state rights. People like you are causing a racial divide.”   She said the letter called her a nigger or referred to niggers thirteen times. It concluded, “Why don’t you just move and leave our nice town. I don’t belong to the KKK but you are an example of why it should exist.”  She told the committee the rock created that letter. “This is an offensive rock to me. We have to call it what it is,” and she concluded, “A citizen of Jefferson City getting a letter like this is appalling.”

Of course the letter was unsigned. Flaming bigotry has never counted courage as one of its qualities. If the writer thought he or she could intimidate Jackie Coleman, that person is stupid along with being a coward.

One of the points I hope I made with the committee—and that I will make again at the full council meeting if given a chance to speak—is that the Capital City of Missouri has no business protecting a symbol that excites cowards such as this letter-writer to prove once again that the worst we can be is never far away.

The rock must go. But I’m afraid its shadow will remain, not visible but resentfully lurking beneath the surface waiting to erupt.

And that, to use Jackie’s word, is appalling.