Standing Up in a Small Town

If you haven't already read this article about a small demonstration organized in the southern Ohio town of Bethel in support of Black Lives Matter, I highly recommend reading the whole thing. The writer, Ann Helen Peterson, spent three weeks reporting and writing it.

The demonstration took place on June 14, 2020, almost three weeks after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, during a period of many other protests but well after some devastating property damage had occurred. It was organized by a couple of women from the town (who grew up in the town, live in the town, work in the town). Several of them are teachers at the local school, which didn't surprise me, because it reflected the way teachers in my own conservative small town were often more aware of social issues than the other residents.

They went out of their way to call it a demonstration in solidarity rather than a protest because even the word protest, they sensed, was inflammatory in the Fox News-drenched world they live in. I was not aware of that fine-grained difference, myself. I guess the time-honored concept of protest is inherently associated with violence now. Thanks, right-wing propaganda!

Bethel doesn't have a local newspaper anymore, just social media. All of their community events have died, as have their "third places" like the Blue Haven restaurant, famous for its pies. As one person quoted put it, "Now it’s just a bunch of people loosely living together in the same place."

Yet the organizer were immediately told in the comments on Facebook, where they put the word out: "You can't bring this into our town." This. A demonstration? This. Looting? Riots? Busing in anarchists? It's sad that so many people are being brainwashed by propaganda.

Another local resident, known for railing against "political correctness," used his own Facebook following to urge people to turn out in opposition, and defined the demonstration as "hate":

"Sunday at 3 o’clock, they’re supposed to be bringing a Black Lives Matter,” he said. “I’m gonna tell you right now, I hope that everybody that feels like me, I hope we outnumber those people a thousand to one, and not let that shit happen here in our little town of Bethel.”

“You’re not going to bring hate to our town,” he continued. “We don’t have hate in it right now. You’re gonna bring hate.”

On the day of the event, he went on Facebook Live and exhorted people to show up and "protect your community," claiming to have seen multiple "antifa people" scoping things out.

The upshot is that the 50 to 80 people who came out to demonstrate and say Black Lives Matter were met by more than almost 700 counter-protesters, including armed biker gangs, who tore the signs from their hands. One person was sucker-punched in the head. Meanwhile, the "handful of cops" present did nothing about it. (I guess we should be glad they didn't make it worse.)


A Black Lives Matter sign that was ripped up by counterprotestors in Bethel, Ohio, June 14. Photo by Maddie McGarvey

Most of the attackers were not from Bethel, according to the demonstration's organizers, though they recognized some faces in the crowd.

Some quotes:

The people who showed up to “protect” the town say a Black Lives Matter demonstration doesn’t belong in a place like Bethel, Ohio. There’s no need, they say, for those sorts of conversations. Others blame the demonstrators for giving Bethel a bad name: for the dozens of articles in the national press, the outsiders flooding local Facebook comment sections, the Wikipedia entry for the village briefly changed to describe it as “composed of many, many racists.”

"...was it really the right thing to do, bringing that protest here? It’s okay to have one of those in the city, but in a predominantly white town — what they were doing was basically doing was inviting racists in.”

If there hadn’t been a protest, the reasoning goes, there wouldn’t have been a problem, and everything in Bethel would’ve been like it always has been: just fine. But what happened on that Sunday afternoon showed just how unsustainable that belief has become.

The middle part of the story is about a Black man who grew up in the town and is held up as kind of a "black friend" example by the jerk who incited the counter-protest to prove that Bethel is not racist. Well, the reporter tracked this Black man down and found that he does indeed think Bethel was (and probably still is) racist. He hasn't been back to find out, though.

I hope you take the time to read the whole story. 

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This cincinnati.com story has additional reporting on what happened on June 14, including police estimates on who was there, such as 250 people on motorcycles, and that there were six cops and one sheriff's deputy total.

Quoting that story:

The Facebook video [co-organizer Andrea] Dennis recorded shows a woman trying to wrestle a BLM sign away from one of the demonstrators. One man repeatedly shouts, “Don’t put that in my face” at the demonstrators. Another man with his face covered by a confederate flag rips a poster to the sound of cheering. Two men can be seen down the street carrying semi-automatic rifles.