On Nov. 7, 1837, the abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy was gunned down defending his printing press from an anti-abolitionist, proslavery mob. Nearly 180 years later, Heather Heyer lost her life standing up for what she believed was right.
Yet the celebration of Heyer’s sacrifice by those who oppose racism has been called into question. “While it’s beyond tragic and disgusting that her life came to an end in this way,” Kelly Macias wrote at the DailyKos, “we should also remember that white women are not the intended victims of white supremacy.” In a similar article in Allure, Hayley MacMillen glossed over the fact that Heyer herself was a white woman to argue that “white women have always been there at the most racist moments in our nation’s history” — as beneficiaries, not members of the opposition. On the other hand, the unrepentant neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer denigrated Heyer’s appearance and accused her of promiscuity.
It’s true that white Americans have perpetrated acts of racism throughout our nation’s history. But it is also easy to forget that there have also always been white Americans willing to fight and even sacrifice their lives for racial justice in this country. That American democracy has been watered with the blood of ordinary citizens — black and white, men and women — is a history worth remembering in these dismal times.
The tradition of interracial radicalism that Heather Heyer is an heir to goes back to the movement to abolish racial slavery. From the start, the black struggle for freedom and equality converted and acquired important white allies. As the pioneering 18th century Quaker abolitionist John Woolman wrote, “The Colour of Man avails nothing, in Matters of Right and Equity.” Abolitionist British and American women, inspired by “the young Afric damsel” Phillis Wheatley’s book of poems, took their pen to paper to write antislavery poetry and boycott the consumption of slave-grown sugar and cotton in their homes. Antislavery lawyers and politicians espoused the freedom claims of enslaved Africans to set the northern states along the path of emancipation. Indeed, Judge William Cushing of the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783 because two ordinary slaves, Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman and Quok Walker, sued their masters for their freedom. But after the American Revolution, slavery in the Southern states grew and became entrenched in the nation’s economy and government.