A SMALL VIRGINIA TOWN THAT’S DEALING WITH RACE ISSUES

 

                        … Army 2nd Lt. Caron Nazario, afraid to get out of his car

 

This is a good example of many of today’s small, southern towns

 

I was born in a small, rural town in Virginia.  Fortunately for me, my parents took my sister and I out of the small, southern town and we then lived in many locations around America.  The following is a story that I believe could have been the small Virginia town that I came from.

It is also probably why a number of my relatives left a town that was like the one that is described below.

So, I give you a story about Windsor, Virginia, and it is a good example of the issues that many small, southern towns in the U.S. are dealing with today.

The story starts with a Rev. Willie Williams, who saw the news video on TV like most of his neighbors.  The video showed an Army lieutenant, Black and Latino, that had been pepper-sprayed by the local policeman and the Black lieutenant had been hauled from his SUV laid out onto the pavement.

The reverend’s phone had then lit up with texts and emails and a pastor friend called from outside Richmond asking: “What’s going on in Windsor?”

To  Rev. Williams, 75, who is also Black and he had grown up in the surrounding Isle of Wight County.  The Rev. had being taught early on to say “yes, sir” and “no, sir” to all White men.  It was a shockingly public example of what he once viewed as just “the way it is” in that part of the old Confederate state.

But as he kept changing between his phone and watching coverage of the trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer charged with murder in the death of George Floyd.  Williams began to realized there could be power in the spotlight, if the light was suddenly being shone on his little corner of rural Virginia.

The raw footage of the police pointing guns at Army 2nd Lt. Caron Nazario, 27, who was in his military fatigues, and it was captured at the BP gas station in Windsor on Dec. 5.  But the footage, having just now come to light, was obviously going to shake things up. “Perhaps this incident here will open up eyes of more people and may be the catalyst to challenge the culture of Windsor,” Rev. Williams said this week.

But this time, Rev. Williams did something he’s never done before.  He made the 10-minute drive into town to attend a Windsor Town Council meeting.  Dozens of other people had the same idea, and the local TV news crew showed up.  Protesters from BLM 757, a Black Lives Matter group from Virginia Beach, were also on hand with a bullhorn and a large protest flag.  Squads of county sheriff’s deputies and Virginia state police provided the security, but the local town police were all absent.

Mayor Glyn Willis arrived about an hour early and paced the cavernous gymnasium outfitted for the meeting.  There were folding tables set up for the council, and folding chairs for the audience, arranged at pandemic-safe distances across the parquet floor.

Mayor Willis seemed nervous about all the attention. Especially after the Virginia-Pilot newspaper broke the story that Nazario was suing the town.  The video had been posted and the town council put out a news release assuring the public that disciplinary action had been taken. Gov. Ralph Northam (D) called for a state police and federal probe.  The Virginia Attorney General, Mark Herring (D) vowed to investigate the department’s civil rights practice.  Pressure was mounting, and the town announced that on Sunday, it had fired Officer Joe Gutierrez, who was seen in the vide screaming that Nazario was “fixin’ to ride the lightning.”   (That’s a slang term that usually refers to using a stun gun.)

Now Willis, who is White, found himself having to deflect questions about whether his seven-member police department was racist and whether the town would take any further action.  A lawsuit is pending, he explained. And the town council was meeting later in private with its lawyer.

Does he believe his town has a problem with systemic racism? “No, I don’t think so,” he said. Mayor Willis, is 64, and he was a software consultant, who grew up in the town, spent 30 years away and has been back for about 14 years.  “There are a lot of good people in Windsor,” he said. “As I see the many emails about people characterizing Windsor as this, that or the other, all in negative terms, I’d love to invite them over to my house, when the azaleas are in full bloom, and let them recognize a different aspect of Windsor than the impression they might be getting.”

He excused himself and ducked away to consult with the town manager, while people were filling the seats in the gymnasium.  Some local residents, others from cities throughout the county who said they had never spent time in Windsor beyond sitting at a stop light or filling their car with gas.

But that the town of Windsor, had their attention now.

Almost nobody sees Windsor in its best light. With a population of about 2,700, it’s a place most people pass through, a strip of businesses along Route 460.  It has a Food Lion, car repair shops, three gas stations, a grain elevator, a Dollar General store, and a hardware store.  The Burger King faces the Dairy Queen across Prince Boulevard. The town sits at the intersection of a road leading north to the meatpacking plants of Smithfield and south to the paper mill of Franklin. The surrounding Isle of Wight County is about 73% White and 23% Black.  This is according to U.S. Census Bureau.

Similar hamlets are strung along Hwy 460 from Suffolk northwest to Petersburg, most with names from romantic British literature, Ivor, Waverly, Wakefield.  All with old train stops that no longer have depots.  The highway that links them follows the rail line, four undivided lanes with long, hypnotically straight stretches and no shoulders, just ditches and scruffy pine forest and sandy fields of peanuts.  And in each town, the speed limit drops to 45 mph, then sometimes 35 mph, and regular drivers know not to push it.

Traffic fines account for about 6%, or $120,000, of Windsor’s current-year budget.  For last December, the month Nazario was stopped for not having a license plate on his bumper, the department reported one felony arrest, 10 misdemeanor arrests and 177 traffic stops.

But the highway is only part of Windsor’s nearly four square miles.  Some families count their time here, not in years but in generations.  Just off the main road, a sign points to Centennial Park.  It is a postage-stamp oasis with two park benches and a picnic table. Down the street, across from a row of comfortable old homes, is a deluxe baseball field for the high school, “Welcome to the Castle — Home of the Dukes” spelled out on the fence.  In the distance beyond Town Hall, a tractor passes up and down a dusty field as daylight fades.

On a recent weekday, many local residents were leery of talking about their town and the current situation with police. One older White man, riding a mower along a field in the county said he knows that everybody regards Windsor as a speed trap, and wondered if that negative reputation partly explains why the reaction to the police video was so harsh.

“It is hard to do well when everybody despises you,” he said on the condition of anonymity because he goes to town a couple of times a week and doesn’t want to stir up trouble.

But Robert Johnson, 52, a tow-truck operator from the nearby hamlet of Zuni who said his family’s roots in the area and go back to the 1600s.  He defended Windsor and its police.

“It’s a congested area, people should slow down,” said Johnson, who is White, as he unloaded a stack of tires from the back of a pickup. And regarding the furor over the Nazario video? “People are blowing it out of proportion,” he said. “I think the cops were justified in doing what they did.”

Asked if Black people are disproportionately targeted by police, Johnson said “no”.  “More than half of the people in Virginia prisons are Black”, he said, adding that he “thinks that they’re there because they don’t know how to behave.”

The incumbent Donald Trump, won Isle of Wight County last year by about 18% in the presidential election, and his campaign signs still dot the landscape.  Windsor is one of just two incorporated towns in the 316-square-mile county, along with Smithfield to the north on a tributary of the James River.

The county was not immune to the changes that have been sweeping the country in the past year. Its five-member board of supervisors, one of whom is Black, voted unanimously in February to take down the Confederate statue outside the courthouse.  It offered to relocate the monument to a cemetery in Windsor, but the town declined.

But Rev. Williams said there is a sharp cultural divide within Isle of Wight County.

The southern part of the county “is…how do I want to say it,,, it’s redneck country, it really is,” he said.

A business along U.S. Route 460 in Windsor displays a sign crediting former President Donald Trump with their vaccine distribution.

Williams had pointed out a yard sign near his home, put up by a White family, that says: “We the People demand honest and fair voting in Virginia and in our Country.”

To him, the sign evokes the spectacle of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and contains a subtle but powerful message about race and power.

“Who are ‘the people’ ?” he said. “The most frightening thing for White America is the fact that America is browning, and they are actually fighting to maintain superiority. But they’ve got to give it up.”

County Sheriff James Clarke, who is Black, said he is not aware of any extra racial tensions in the Windsor area. “But I would be remiss if I don’t say that Isle of Wight is almost like two different counties,” he said, noting that the north is a bedroom community to the shipyards and military bases of Hampton Roads.

Windsor and points south, he said, “is generational farmers….Rural land.”

Volpe Boykin, 63, who is White, said he grew up near Windsor during the time when public schools were being integrated and never saw any problems. Race relations, he said, are “extremely good.” A private investigator who spent 13 years as a Norfolk cop, Boykin said he’s seen far worse racial tensions in the city than in his rural hometown.  “I’ve got people of different colors that I love like family and they love me like family,” he said.

At the council meeting, Boykin spoke on behalf of an organization called the Southern and Central Isle of Wight Citizens Group. Wearing a lapel pin depicting a police shield with a black band across it, Boykin said the group “wishes to express its support for the town of Windsor police department and town council. We agree with and support the actions they have taken in reference to the December 5, 2020, incident.”

That included the firing of Gutierrez but also the continued employment of the other officer in the incident.  He was a recent police academy graduate named Daniel Crocker who grew up in Windsor.

Few of the other dozen or so people who spoke at the meeting had anything good to say about the police. One after another, Black and White, local and out-of-town, the speakers poured out their anguish, about policing, but ultimately about race.

Williams, the pastor, walked slowly to the microphone and addressed the council quietly.

“It is a rare time when a symptom of a problem so clearly shows itself,” he said. “There is a problem. The problem is not just the town of Windsor, but we have a more deep-seated problem in Isle of Wight and ultimately in America. And that is that we have a problem of racism.”

“Enough is enough,” said Taylor Copeland, 19, a nanny who is White and grew up in the town. “This brings the issue of police brutality and abuse of authority close to home. . . . America has a racism problem, one that we can’t sit by and allow to happen anymore.”

“You made me ashamed of a town that I grew to love,” said Judith Dempsey, who has lived in Windsor for 20 years since retiring from the Air Force. Her voice cracked with emotion as she spoke.

Pointing out that no one from the police department was at the meeting, she said, “Why should I pay you guys my taxes for you to hide? Where’s the Windsor Police Department?”

She singled out a council member who had been writing on a notepad as people spoke. He immediately put down his pen and looked up.

“Writing on a piece of paper, not paying attention to what half the people are saying, it breaks my heart. Because that tells me he really doesn’t give a damn,” she said. “That’s how a lot of people are feeling. . . . I’m hurt, Windsor!”

The council members sat silently.

It wasn’t until the next day, that town Police Chief Rodney Riddle finally addressed the issue, speaking at a news conference. He blamed Nazario for creating the situation by not complying immediately when police told him to pull over and get out of the car, but condemned the actions of Gutierrez and pledged to work with the community to heal wounds.

Chief Riddle said he would seek “implicit bias” training for his seven-member force, and he pledged to make diverse hires.  But he pointed out that Gutierrez had been one of two Hispanic officers on the force, and said that while he has an adjunct officer who is Black, he has had a hard time recruiting people because other departments pay considerably more.

In the face of the public onslaught, Mayor Willis seemed to struggle with how to respond.

“As I sat through the past few days, it’s many mixed emotions of how could this happen in the town I grew up in,” he told the audience.

As the meeting broke up and council members prepared to meet with their lawyer, BLM 757 leader Japharii Jones, who had carried his black-and-white flag into the meeting, buttonholed Willis.

What Windsor needs, Jones told the mayor, is to talk more about its problems.

Willis agreed. Someone asked earlier, “is there systemic racism in town?” Willis said. “I think it’s a lack of communications. There are problems that we don’t communicate well enough in to figure out how to work around. And both sides get frustrated by things that happen and we’ve just got to figure out how to make it productive.”

BLM Leader Jones said his group could help. “We’ll extend the olive branch to be the ambassador,” he said. “People are afraid to talk openly about race in their own community”, he said, “and sometimes outsiders can help”.

“I’d be interested to see what I can learn from that,” Mayor Willis said.

And, I’ll leave it there.  These small, rural southern towns have a long way to go.

Copyright G. Ater 2021