In today’s insult-driven, hate-filled and fear-mongering world, it’s too easy to find outrage in the least things.
A Chattanooga women’s march fizzles when “balance” becomes a slight. A Tennessee law honoring Confederate General and early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest remains on the books despite some saying Forrest’s bust has no place in the Capitol. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee last month became one of the nation’s first Republican governors to say the Volunteer State would continue to welcome vetted refugees despite a Trump administration offer to let states ban them, and in keeping with the canon that no good deed goes unpunished, Hamilton County’s commissioners and mayor waffled on a similar open-door humanitarian policy for people persecuted in their home countries.
Tennessee doesn’t have a monopoly on short-sighted bigotry. We see headlines every day of similar problems across the nation – including a neighbor to our south – Newnan, Georgia.
But there, shaken by an April 2018 Saturday when a group of neo-Nazis held a long-planned rally in the little town of 40,000, some Newnan residents decided to embrace their town’s growing diversity. A year after the white nationalist rally, the town put up 17 large banner portraits of ordinary – and diverse – town residents. And it was all good. Well, almost.
There was acceptance and pride for the banner celebrating Helen Berry, an African-American woman who for years worked at a sewing factory, and Wiley Driver, a white worker who folded and packed blankets at a local mill before his death in 2017. There were nods for Jineet Blanco, a waitress who arrived in Newnan carrying her Mexican traditions and dreams. There was dignity for two Baptist pastors – one black and one white.