To the Editor:

So, let me get this right. A large group of white people, visibly armed to the hilt with semi-auto long guns and pistols, and wearing all types of body armor, including flak vests, helmets and chest plates, basically taking a stand for war, hold a ‘rally’ in downtown Emmaus, and, while there, start yelling at and trying to provoke a smaller number of counter-demonstrators who are peacefully holding signs that say “Black Lives Matter.”

Why?

Don’t they feel safe with their weapons? Can’t they take the ‘heat’ of people protesting against them?

No, it is because they have brought and openly carried their weapons to intimidate, harass and otherwise try to keep black people and those who stand with them quiet, by implicitly saying that anyone who goes up against them will be destroyed.

That such a ‘rally’ would happen in downtown Emmaus is no surprise. Violent hate, steeped in white racial homogeny and privilege, has long been alive and well there. Emmaus was a closed settlement, open only to white Moravians, from 1741 until the 1850s, and the Moravians enslaved black people.

In the 1930s, with the white-biased Pennsylvania Dutch as the cultural background, the Ku Klux Klan held ‘rallies’ at the old Emaus High School football field on South 4th Street. In the 1980s and ‘90s, when my 1987 high school graduating class of over 425 students, and the entire school of over 1,200, had no black students, teachers or administrators at all and only two or three students of color, Emmaus and Macungie were the #1 recruiting grounds for neo-Nazi skinheads.

As recently as a few months ago, one of the two gun stores now in Emmaus had Confederate flags and symbols prominently displayed in its front window and I have seen more Confederate banners on houses and vehicle vanity plates in the past two years here than in the nine years before that in Texas.

But change has been coming, thank God. Black students and other residents are living in Emmaus. My black wife and my black son live in the area. And black people, black Americans, demand the same rights and privileges that have long been enshrined in our Declaration of Independence – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In the old Emmaus Borough Hall when I was growing up, in fact, there was a Union Battle Flag from the Civil War, a cause fought expressly for the purpose of defeating all those rebels and traitors who would keep and hold slavery – and enslaved black people – an intact and vital part of America.

And so when anybody, but particularly white people, band together with guns and try to menace and frighten black people when they stand for their rights, it all flies in the face of everything this country, and Emmaus, is supposed to stand for.

Let Emmaus, and let us all, become fully committed to moving into the true reality of equality and justice that our country is supposed to embody.

The Rev. Geoffrey S. Whitcomb Coopersburg