Listen to Andrea’s Story

“for me, that candlelight vigil and the participation of the candlelight vigil was more of the community saying this is an aberration that we won't tolerate.”

- Dr. Andrea Douglas

Andrea Douglas 

My name is Andrea Douglas. I'm the executive director of the Jefferson School African-American Heritage Center. So this night was particularly poignant for me because I was there with my husband and my son. And it's very rare that that we're together at the same time in this kind of way. And up until this point, this had been my job. I had been saying that the Heritage Center was activist adjacent, that we wanted to support activists, that we wanted to support people who were attempting to cause us to understand what was happening during this period. So but this is the night that it was most personal, and this is a night that I was able to share it with people around us. We didn't have candles even when we came there. We just wanted to come. And so people handed us candles so that we could participate. And people we knew around us, we were hugging them. We were feeling this moment not in its abstract, because in some ways some of this was a little bit abstract, but really deeply engaged in the communal piece of it. 

So what does it mean for community? You know. What had this community been through up until that point? Even this this in real terms, I believe, was the emotional part of this, that, you know, the Klan had come and there was a sense of defiance. But there was also a sense that…in some sectors of the community that we should not, Charlottesville should not engage with with white supremacy, should not come out into the streets. I mean, I remember people talking about the Klan as like, you know, this broken down group of toothless trailer park folk that were coming. You know, so it was kind of a joke. We didn't have to care about them in any way, but they were harbingers of things to come.

And so for me, that candlelight vigil and the participation of the candlelight vigil was more of the community saying this is an aberration that we won't tolerate. And I think, you know, as things began to progress, the reality of what it means to live this notion of “we take care of ourselves” became clear. And what better way to take care of yourself than to come together as a community in love? Because no, no one I know who was out on the streets from day one has ever said to me that they were only fighting because they hate white supremacy. I've always heard them say, “We're doing this because we love our community and we love this place, and so we won't tolerate this in our place.”

Music credit: Ebb & Flod / Seaweed / courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com