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Black Lives Matter Comes to Vidor--Yes, Vidor
Vidor is a small town between Beaumont and the Louisiana border that we will not stop in. It has an active KKK chapter. This amazes me
Link to tweet
Vidor, Texas,” boomed the Reverend Michael Cooper, thin and tall in his cowboy hat, “will now be known for love!” The crowd, assembled at a dilapidated pavilion on the grounds of Vidor’s Raymond Gould Community Center, cheered. Vidor has been known for many things—among them the activities of the local Ku Klux Klan; its status as a “sundown town,” in which blacks were not allowed in city limits after dark; and an ugly fight in the early nineties over a federal effort to desegregate public housing in the city, which caused Texas Monthly, in a cover story that year, to describe Vidor as Texas’s “most hate-filled town.” The census estimates it to be 91 percent white.
So when word started to circulate that a Black Lives Matter rally was being planned in Vidor, many people on social media thought it was a trap—and expressed skepticism the event’s supposed planner, 23-year-old Maddy Malone, even existed. (She does.) To black folks with knowledge of the region, who had been told never to stop in Vidor, the idea seemed insane. “A civil rights rally in Vidor” is the punchline to a joke, not a thing that could happen in this world. C’mon.
Yet on Saturday, there they were, some 150 to 200 people standing in the sun, in the draining humidity and heat of Southeast Texas, “to come together in love and unity and to bind together under God,” as Malone told the crowd. “My generation is reaching to break the cycle.” They heard from a number of speakers, including Cooper, who is the head of the Beaumont chapter of the NAACP, but also young Vidorians like Malone.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about the Vidor rally was the demographic mix of attendees. There were a good number of African American marchers, but the crowd was predominantly white. Many were young people in their teens and twenties, like Maddy. But there were also middle-aged white women with homemade T-shirts and hats bearing slogans like “I can’t breathe” handing out chilled water and snack packs. A white mother bore a sign that said she had been “radicalized” by Floyd’s calls for his mama as he was losing consciousness. After the event, a well-built white man with an American flag and an airborne infantry pin on his baseball cap came up to thank Malone for putting the event together. There was a guy in a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey. (There’s always a guy in a Steelers jersey.)
So when word started to circulate that a Black Lives Matter rally was being planned in Vidor, many people on social media thought it was a trap—and expressed skepticism the event’s supposed planner, 23-year-old Maddy Malone, even existed. (She does.) To black folks with knowledge of the region, who had been told never to stop in Vidor, the idea seemed insane. “A civil rights rally in Vidor” is the punchline to a joke, not a thing that could happen in this world. C’mon.
Yet on Saturday, there they were, some 150 to 200 people standing in the sun, in the draining humidity and heat of Southeast Texas, “to come together in love and unity and to bind together under God,” as Malone told the crowd. “My generation is reaching to break the cycle.” They heard from a number of speakers, including Cooper, who is the head of the Beaumont chapter of the NAACP, but also young Vidorians like Malone.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about the Vidor rally was the demographic mix of attendees. There were a good number of African American marchers, but the crowd was predominantly white. Many were young people in their teens and twenties, like Maddy. But there were also middle-aged white women with homemade T-shirts and hats bearing slogans like “I can’t breathe” handing out chilled water and snack packs. A white mother bore a sign that said she had been “radicalized” by Floyd’s calls for his mama as he was losing consciousness. After the event, a well-built white man with an American flag and an airborne infantry pin on his baseball cap came up to thank Malone for putting the event together. There was a guy in a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey. (There’s always a guy in a Steelers jersey.)
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