It’s Time to Stand Against White Supremacy, Fort Mill
The time has come for Fort Mill to reckon with its leading role in the long history of white supremacy. While white supremacy is the dominant thread that ties American history together, from 1619 to today, there is no town in this country that has celebrated — truly celebrated — white supremacy more than ours. Fort Mill is well known nationwide for its monuments, in particular the “Faithful Slaves” monument, even as most local residents ignore these town-owned statues and their historical significance. We hope our action today changes that.
The “Faithful Slaves” monument has been the subject of academic interest since at least 1916, when Freeman H.M. Murray included it in his important Emancipation and the Freed American in Sculpture. Murray was one of the founders of the Niagara Movement, which in 1909 evolved into the NAACP
The same year Murray’s book was published, the Fort Mill Chamber of Commerce lobbied to have a monument to the Ku Klux Klan placed next to it. Had that Klan memorial been constructed, it would remain there, by law, covered by the South Carolina Heritage Act of 2000.
In modern times, the “Faithful Slaves” monument has received a new spotlight of attention, placing Fort Mill into the national consciousness as a place that houses one of the most racist of all American monuments.
“Fort Mill, S.C., is the kind of place neighboring Charlotte, N.C. and its National Football League Carolina Panthers probably would like to forget. Even the most savvy public relations machine would find it difficult to put a positive spin on the ‘faithful slave’ monument that stands in the town’s park,” wrote Mike Sajna in the October 23, 1997 issue of the University Times of the University of Pittsburgh.
In the August 2017 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, historian Kevin Levin presented the town of Fort Mill to a readership of 1.84 million people as a place that celebrates, as stated in the title of his article, “The Pernicious Myth of the ‘Loyal Slave’.”
“If we only focus on monuments that honor Confederate leaders, we miss the many monuments and memorials that intentionally distort history by presenting a false narrative of the ‘loyal slave.’ Well into the 20th century, ‘Lost Causers’ relied on this idea to clearly justify maintaining and extending the ideology of white supremacy. In 1895, local cotton mill owner Samuel E. White and the Jefferson Davis Memorial Association dedicated a memorial in Fort Mill, South Carolina, to honor the “faithful slaves who loyal to a sacred trust toiled for the support of the army with matchless devotion and sterling fidelity guarded our defenceless homes, women and children during the struggle for the principles of our Confederate States of America.”
Levin addressed precisely what makes the “Faithful Slaves” monument a dangerous totem to systemic racism.
What is often missed, however, is that the depiction of African-Americans as loyal and submissive itself constituted an erasure of history in favor of a fictional narrative that ultimately justified segregation and disfranchisement. The push to remove these monuments is recognition of the damage they have done and continue to do in communities across this country.
Historian Kali Holloway further placed Fort Mill’s unwillingness to address the “Faithful Slaves” monument in its embarrassing context in the March 25, 2019 issue of The Nation.
“One of the oldest loyal-slave monuments was erected in 1895 in Fort Mill, South Carolina, and today stands in the appropriately named Confederate Park. Two opposing sides of the 13-foot-tall marble monument feature bas-relief carvings depicting enslaved blacks, including a ‘mammy’ figure cradling a white baby and a black man cutting wheat. The inscription on one panel praises the ‘faithful slaves who, loyal to a sacred trust, toiled for the support of the army with matchless devotion and sterling fidelity [and] guarded our defenseless homes, women and children during the struggle for the principles of our ‘Confederate States of America.’’ The most famed speaker at the monument’s 1896 unveiling was Polk Miller, a white defender of slavery who often performed black music under the stage name ‘The Old Virginia Plantation Negro.’ In their exhaustive history of Charleston, South Carolina, Denmark Vesey’s Garden, Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle note that Miller’s remarks ‘pitted what he called the ‘uppity,’ turn-of-the-century African American against the ‘negro of the good old days gone-by,’ suggesting emancipation had been an unfortunate development.”
In the February 6, 2020 issue of The New York Times, the monument that is central to Fort Mill’s annual July 4 celebration was discussed by University of Delaware history professor Alison M. Parker in a piece describing the 1923 bill that would have sponsored a national monument built to honor “mammies,” which passed the U.S. House of Representatives after heavy lobbying from the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Southern white women in organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894, raised funds to build many of the Confederate memorials and placed “loyal slave” plaques nearby. These celebrations of the “loyalty” of formerly enslaved people implied they had been happier in subordination, were still unequal and so should be segregated and treated as inferiors. In addition to the plaques, many formal monuments to “faithful slaves” were proposed; three were built, including the Faithful Slave Monument in Fort Mill, S.C., in 1895.
Any book that discusses the “Lost Cause” — the fabulous concocted concept that the antebellum South represented a particularly noble and moral manifestation of the Founders’ intent — or Civil War memory inevitably namechecks Fort Mill and its unrepentantly racist founder, Capt. Samuel Elliott White. Yale Professor David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion describes the “Faithful Slaves” monument as a “unique paean to slavery” whose “images of dedicated labor and loving care” placed the so-called “faithful slave” in “a permanent place in the Lost Cause landscape.” Kimberly Wallace-Sanders of Emory University, the author of Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory, calls “the Fort Mill monument … the first representation of the ‘faithful slave’ in a postbellum movement.” She cites University of Pittsburgh art historian Kirk Savage’s work Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, which calls the statue “a monument generated from a former slaveholder’s perspective designed not to celebrate slavery’s demise but to nostalgically mourn over its passing.” The renowned sociologist James Loewen of Catholic University points out in his Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong
On the base of the Fort Mill obelisk are carvings of a field hand resting under a tree and a black woman holding a white child on the steps of the ‘big house.’ Neither panel quite depicts work, and work was what slavery was all about. Instead, the illustrations invite visitors to think of slavery as a time of relaxation and interracial caring.
The most damning words about the “Faithful Slaves” monument, and Fort Mill’s role in the history of white supremacy, do not come from modern historians, however. They come from the historic figures — our former neighbors, our ancestors, and our most celebrated former residents — themselves.
The monument itself claims that “faithful slaves … loyal to a sacred trust, toiled for the support of the [Confederate] army … during the struggle for the principals of the Confederate States of America,” namely that they themselves, their children, and generations yet unborn would be held in permanent bondage without hope of payment, freedom, or a better life. A further inscription notes the obelisk was raised by Samuel E. White “in grateful memory of earlier days” when nearly every African-American in Fort Mill was permanently enslaved. The monument was built “with approval of the Jefferson Davis Memorial Association,” an offshoot of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which devoted untold hours and resources into incorporating the Lost Cause myth into school curricula and monuments nationwide.
The day the “Faithful Slaves” monument was unveiled, the program was planned to underscore the concept that this statue was built in appreciation of white supremacy. The opening prayer was offered by Rev. James Henley Thornwell, an active Fort Mill clergyman whose wife served on the board of the local Jefferson Davis Memorial Association. Thornwell, a Confederate veteran himself, was the son and namesake of the elder James Henley Thornwell, who is most remembered today for his 1861 pro-slavery treatise “A Southern Christian View on Slavery.” This purported follower of Jesus begged the Presbyterian Church to make no statement on slavery as, he stated, “we have no right, as a Church, to enjoin it as a duty or condemn it as a sin.” He insisted “Moses and the apostles alike sanctioned the relation of slavery.” He also insisted upon white supremacy:
“We are profoundly persuaded that the African race in the midst of us can never be elevated in the scale of being. As long as that race, in its comparative degradation, coexists, side by side with the white, bondage is its normal condition.”
The man who led the prayers the day this monument was unveiled shared his father’s stridently white supremacist views, and that is why he was selected.
One of America’s most famous practitioners of minstrelsy, Polk Miller, was chosen for the keynote address. Rather than performing in blackface, Miller represented himself as something of a narrator in defense of the old order. He told a Richmond newspaper in 1897 “As an entertainer, it has been my aim to vindicate the slave-holding class against the charge of cruelty and inhumanity to the negro of the old time.” Kirk Savage wrote in Standing Soldier, Kneeling Slave that Miller “made clear that this ‘real negro’ was not ‘the young negro of today,’ who he despised, but the ‘old issue darky’ of his boyhood.” Miller referred to enslaved African-Americans as “the happiest creature on earth.”
The Yorkville Enquirer described Miller’s speech, now lost, as “a splendid tribute to the slaves, and also took occasion to refute some of the popular fallacies as to their treatment. Among other things, he said that the faithful slave was generally the companion and best friend of his master. The slaves, as a rule, enjoyed their condition, and there was no creature on earth that was more detested by a slave than a free Negro. There were cases, it is true, where slaves were badly treated, but this was generally when they deserved it. There were no penitentiaries in those days for bad Negroes, and bad Negroes were generally punished by being sold to men who could control them and make them work.”
According to a 1912 Fort Mill Times article, later excerpted in The Missionary Survey of the Presbyterian Church, keynoter Miller addressed the formerly enslaved and their children with a direct plea to submit to white supremacy: “I want to say to you, my colored friends here this morning, that if you want to rise in the world, the way to do it is to teach your children to respect law and order.”
Contemporary onlookers also sounded the familiar language of white supremacy when describing the monument. The Yorkville Yeoman published a report of the yet-to-be-built obelisk that was reprinted in Roxboro, North Carolina on July 31, 1895, noting
“no monuments of like character have ever yet (sic) on Southern or other soil, and the patriotic honor of these deserves a hearty ‘well-done!’ from all who love Dixie land and who realize the suffering and bravery of the Southern women, and the trusting faithfulness and affection with which the colored slaves remained in voluntary submission.”
On the man of the hour, Samuel Elliott White, who announced his planned monuments near and far for months and then feigned surprise when he was among the honored at the unveiling, his contemporaries described him as “an ‘unreconstructed son of the south,’ who vowed to never again go north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The Yorkville Enquirer noted in October 1909 that “Captain White’s love for ‘The Lost Cause’ is attested in his home place — Fort Mill — where he has erected four handsome monuments in commemoration of the Confederacy.” The Fort Mill Times wrote in March 1900 that “nowhere in the State of South Carolina is there to be found a more devoted ex-Confederate … he loves everything that bears on the glorious history of the South.” His Fort Mill Times obituary in 1911 noted “Confederate Park, Fort Mill, S.C., tells the history of the races that is made known in no other place in the land.”
A religious periodical, The Spirit of Missions, noted in its January 1911 issue that the “Faithful Slaves” monument not only recognizes “the loyalty and devotion of the Negro in the hour of the South’s greatest peril, but equally a monument to the humanity, justice, and kindness of the southern slave-holder.” It seems White’s eternally modest hope for recognition had not gone unrealized.
In 1919, “Reminiscent Spinster” wrote into the Charlotte Observer to remember one special day from Capt. White’s life: the day he got to meet the brother of one of his heroes, the man who killed President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth. Edwin Booth, an actor, had come to Charlotte for a show in January 1876. “Spinster” recounts the rest of the story:
“At this time Booth was quite frail and could not exert himself for social duties, however, he expressed his desire to meet Cap. Samuel Elliott White, of Fort Mill, S.C., who was an open and avowed admirer of John Wilkes Booth. Captain White named a street his his town — Fort Mill — ‘Booth’ Street.”
The day of the unveiling, formerly enslaved Fort Mill residents were gathered to sing a Stephen Foster minstrel song lamenting the death of their master:
Round de meadows am a ringing
De darkeys’ mournful song,
While de mocking-bird am singing,
Happy as de day am long.
Where de ivy am a-creeping
O’er de grassy mound,
Dare old massa am a-sleeping,
Sleeping in de cold, cold ground.
Nothing could be more inauthentic than a group of the formerly enslaved singing, at a white man’s behest, a song by a white man about their sadness over the death of the man who enslaved them.
In what can only be seen as a modern irony, the monument to the women of the Confederacy, unveiled the same day, depicts a woman kneeling on the Confederate flag.
White Supremacy in Fort Mill: Beyond the “Faithful Slave” Monument
By the early 20th century, as Lost Cause ideology took root in a generation with no actual memory of slavery or the conflict it begot, Fort Mill became a centerpiece in the crown of South Carolina’s white supremacist structure. The Fort Mill Times of March 8, 1905 proudly recounted Fort Mill’s role in the elevation of Wade Hampton and his terrorist Red Shirts, with a kicker that ought to put chills in the spine of any modern Fort Mill resident.
“Fort Mill was the birthplace of the ‘straight-out’ movement of 1876. Nearly every white man in the State thought that South Carolina’s only hope was in a combination of the Southerner with the Chamberlain wing of the Republican party. Fort Mill believed in white supremacy, denounced all compromises, and called for a ‘straight-out’ Democratic ticket. This cry found an echo in grand old Edgefield county, and her sons led the men of Carolina to the election of Hampton. To Edgefield has been given the praise of that victory, and Fort Mill is satisfied and gratified for her to have it. Still it remains true that this village began the fight that established white supremacy and redeemed the State. The stand taken by Fort Mill was the morning star of that day of deliverance.”
The reference to Edgefield County is a reference to the Hamburg Massacre, an 1876 mass killing by white men in Wade Hampton’s Red Shirts of dozens of African-American Republicans. It catapulted the “straight-out” movement to the forefront and Hampton to victory. Among the murderers of Hamburg was “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, who became governor in 1890 and U.S. Senator from 1895 until his death in 1918. A statue of Tillman has been on the South Carolina State House grounds since 1940, and the Old Main Building at Winthrop University was renamed Tillman Hall in 1962, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
Fort Mill’s place at the heart of white supremacy came to the forefront in 1916, as novelist Thomas Dixon — whose book The Clansman inspired the landmark film Birth of a Nation — agitated for construction of a monument to honor to Ku Klux Klan. By early October 1916, Dixon’s proposed Klan memorial was national news — and Fort Mill was glad to put itself at the center of the story. A first column editorial in The Charlotte Observer of October 8, 1916 endorsed “the claims of Fort Mill as a fitting place” for the KKK Monument, and noted “the country will be in agreement in her appreciation of Fort Mill.” The monument was to have come up for discussion at the then-upcoming meeting of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Gastonia. That editorial followed an article run under the headline VETERANS FAVOR ERECTION OF KU KLUX STATUE, in which Confederate veteran R.G. Graham recounts when
“that moving picture came through Charlotte not long ago telling the tale of Reconstruction and showing just what happened along in those days. When I went to see that show and when the boys on the horses in full regalia came sweeping around the bend … I rose up in my seat and gave the old yell while a bunch of the boys who were around me cried. It was all true.”
He continued, noting “many a night I know of a Klansman band in Fort Mill which donned its white shrouds and rode 30 and sometimes 50 miles to protect the homes and loved ones of some friend.”
In the October 8, 1916 Charlotte Observer, a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy from Concord, North Carolina — where the UDC erected a now-destroyed KKK monument in 1926 — advocated Fort Mill as a “fitting place for this monument among so many others perpetuating the Southern cause erected by the late Capt. Samuel E. White, a true and loyal Confederate veteran.”
Fort Mill’s friendliness to the Klan extended at least through the late 1950s.
The continued silence of the Town of Fort Mill and its elected officials on the issue of white supremacy does not suggest that tone has changed, does it?
Timeline:
1860. In the 1860 census, 880 free residents were listed. Just four of them were black. In York County, the population of free and enslaved residents was nearly equal: 11,515 free to 11,315 enslaved. Samuel Elliott White’s father, William E. White, is listed as the owner of 66 enslaved African-Americans. Richard Austin Springs is listed as the owner of 41, Thomas D. Spratt 24. Had his father predeceased him, Samuel Elliott White would have inherited the largest number of enslaved human beings in the Fort Mill area.
1863. Capt. Samuel Elliott White returns to Fort Mill after fighting on behalf of the Confederate States of America. He resigned his commission after a head injury at the Battle of New Bern.
1865. The Civil War ends. On his retreat from Richmond, Confederate President Jefferson Davis spends a single night at Springfield, the home Col. Andrew Baxter Springs. Other members of his traveling party stay at the White Homestead, home of William E. White and Samuel Elliot White. A marker celebrating the visit is seen by every visitor to Fort Mill on their way from Interstate 77, the only such historical marker on the way into town. (EDIT: that historical marker has since been removed.)
1867. African-Americans are permitted to vote for delegates to the 1868 South Carolina Constitutional Convention, which would be the first to guarantee suffrage to black South Carolinians. In Fort Mill, Black voter registrations outnumbers white voter registrations 171 to 144.
1868. A new state constitution is passed, giving black South Carolinians an enormous majority among voters in the state. Nearly all formerly enslaved voters become Republicans, joining the party of Abraham Lincoln. Black voters, and whites who choose to vote Republican, face violence and intimidation.
1869. The Ku Klux Klan attempts to assassinate Republican county commissioner P.J. O’Connell of Fort Mill. They succeed in killing his father, on a street in Fort Mill.
1871. Disguised Klansmen attempt to force O’Connell’s resignation. A group of unmasked men, including Samuel Elliott White, later returned and succeeding in forcing O’Connell from office. Contemporary press accounts suggest the group was composed of the same men both times, outing Samuel Elliott White as a Klansman.
1873. The town of Fort Mill is incorporated. The main drag is named Booth Street, in honor of the man who murdered Abraham Lincoln.
1876. Fort Mill and York County become stridently “straight-out,” with most Democrats refusing to vote for any man who “had received negro votes.” The Straight-Outs, the most white supremacist members of South Carolina’s white supremacist Democratic Party, were led in York County by Samuel Elliott White and B.H. Massey of Fort Mill. York County votes Democratic by a 786-vote majority.
1877. Backed by the violent paramilitary Red Shirts, former Confederate General Wade Hampton becomes governor of South Carolina, ending Republican rule that has persisted since African-Americans had received the right to vote. Reconstruction ends. Black participation in the political process shrinks to nearly zero as explicitly white supremacist policies take over. Black suffrage would not recover until after the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
1891. Samuel Elliott White, the largest land owner and employer in Fort Mill, erects the first monument in Confederate Park, dedicated to Confederate soldiers from the era. It is surmounted by a generic depiction of a Confederate soldier.
1895. Samuel Elliott White represents Fort Mill at the 1895 Constitutional Convention, supporting the explicit view that only legal white supremacy can keep blacks out of power despite their 40,000 vote majority statewide. “The governor says that the main issue at stake is white supremacy.” — Yorkville Enquirer, February 27, 1895. Delegates were chosen “with the understanding … such qualification of the suffrage as will guarantee white supremacy, and that no white man shall be disenfranchised except for crime.” — Yorkville Enquirer, March 6, 1895.
1896. The second and third statues are erected in Fort Mill’s Confederate Park, paid for by Samuel Elliott White, who makes sure that word of his generous largesse appears in every paper in the country even before the monuments are finished.
1901. Samuel Elliott White endorses Wade Hampton, the leader of the paramilitary terrorist Red Shirts of 1876 and the former governor of South Carolina, for Senate.
1910. The Fort Mill Times, almost as friendly to the Ku Klux Klan and to white supremacy as the boldly pro-Klan Yorkville Enquirer, goes on the record as a pro-lynching newspaper. In the December 1, 1910 issue, the Times discussed the recent lynching of Henry Clark in Newberry. “Certainly there is little to be said in condemnation of the men who put the negro to death,” the editor wrote. “The negro deserved to be summarily executed and in disposing of him the men of Lexington and Newberry counties did just what would have been done in York or any other South Carolina county.” Instead of stopping there, the editor continued. “We sometimes hear the statement that it does no good to lynch black brutes for murder or assaulting white women and girls. The Times does not subscribe to the statement. We are confident that lynching does have a deterring effect and that the crime for which most blacks would be lynched would multiply ten-fold but for lynchings.” The racist editor continued with a preference for extralegal murders of Black men instead of prosperity for all. “And the argument that we should allow the law to take its course when the women of the South are thus assaulted lest this section be injured in a commercial way is too wholly specious and too contemptible to consider. If outside capital can be attracted to South Carolina only at the sacrifice of our manhood, we are better off without it.”
1911. Samuel Elliott White dies. He is interred beneath the largest monument in Unity Cemetery in Fort Mill. It is often seen decorated with Confederate flags in the present day, and has a permanent Confederate marker in front of it.
1915. Based upon Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman, the film Birth of a Nation appears in theaters nationwide. The protagonist of Dixon’s novel is based on York County’s Dr. J. Rufus Bratton, who led lynchings and violent uprisings in western York County that were put down by the Seventh United States Cavalry, which occupied Yorkville (now York) from 1871 to 1873. Dixon becomes a local hero. The film romanticizes the Ku Klux Klan and gives birth to the second, modern Klan within months.
1916. Thomas Dixon begins a campaign to have a monument built to the Ku Klux Klan, identifying Fort Mill’s Confederate Park as the perfect place. The Fort Mill Chamber of Commerce lobbies hard to add the monument erected here.
1919. Fort Mill resident Tom Hall dies in France in World War I and is posthumously recognized with the Congressional Medal of Honor. The Fort Mill town council passes an ordinance renaming Booth Street, originally named for assassin John Wilkes Booth, as Tom Hall Street.
1922. Tom Hall Street is officially renamed. The local press makes no mention of the event. The world does not end. In November of that year, on Tom Hall Street, robed Klansman appear at the First Baptist Church of Fort Mill to present a letter to the pastor of the St. John’s Methodist Church to thank him for his “great and noble work” and to reaffirm the Klan’s principles (as enunciated in the November 9, 1922 issue of The Fort Mill Times of “enforcement of the laws, free speech, free public schools, separation of church and state, liberty, white supremacy, just laws, and the pursuit of happiness.”
1951. Paradise, a traditionally African-American community in Fort Mill, names a street after Ralph Bunche, the 1950 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and perhaps the most well-respected African-American political figure of the age. About the same time, the former “African Street” is renamed Joe Louis Street, after the popular boxer of the day. Despite the street’s name being changed to honor a contemporary hero of relevance to the local community, the world does not end. Fort Mill receives plaudits nationwide for “allowing” the local African-American community to name a street after Ralph Bunche.
1957. Aided by splashy coverage in the local press, the Ku Klux Klan returns to York County with a vengeance. At least two cross burnings take place in Fort Mill. The leader of the Fort Mill Ku Klux Klan, George Tinker, forms a breakaway group called the Association of Southern Red Shirts, inspired by Wade Hampton’s terrorist organization that killed African-Americans who sought to vote in the 1876 election.
1965. The Voting Rights Act gives South Carolina’s African-American citizens ostensibly equal access to the franchise for the first time since 1876.
1968. Fort Mill schools integrate.
1972. Black students at Fort Mill High School stage a sit-in to protest unequal treatment, disciplinary discrimination, lack of African-American teachers and coaches, and more. School administrators call police, who employ tear gas on the children. Five Fort Mill schools are closed. School officials rebutted each of the students’ demands in the newspaper, “explaining why the School Board could not meet the demand.” (“Before the Corridor of Shame: the African American Fight for Equal Education After Jim Crow,” by Luci Vaden)
2002. The Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan demonstrate at Fort Mill welcome center against NAACP Confederate Flag boycott.
2019. Fort Mill again makes the news when a white nationalist group places a sticker to promote itself in downtown Fort Mill.
Our Requests
- The Town of Fort Mill, led by Mayor Guynn Savage, releases a statement on the history of white supremacy in Fort Mill and Fort Mill’s long position of leadership in this racist cause.
- The Mayor will lead the appointment of a commission to address this history and how it affects Fort Mill in 2020, including to what extent white supremacy continues to play a role in town governmental functions. This commission should include members of the town government, local law enforcement, representatives to the state government, leaders in the African-American community, leaders in the faith community, and local historians.
- The Town of Fort Mill will issue a report identifying every government-sponsored symbol of and monument to white supremacy within town limits. The report will address the potential renaming and/or relabeling with additional historical context each of these symbols, along with the problems raised by the South Carolina Heritage Act. These symbols include but are not limited to:
The “Faithful Slaves” Monument
The name of Confederate Park
The names of the following streets: Confederate, Calhoun, Lee, Jackson, Sidney Johnson, Morgan, Forrest, and Leonidas.
4. The elected legislators of Fort Mill — Sen. Greg Gregory and Reps. Bruce Bryant, Raye Felder, and Brandon Newton — will explain why they oppose repealing the Heritage Act and why they have not introduced legislation to end it.
Our Next Step
Each of this area’s major employers will be asked why they support the furtherance of white supremacy with their silence on this issue. Ross Stores, LPL Financial, Lash Group, Piedmont Medical Center, Schaeffler Group, Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, US Foods, Shutterfly, Domtar, Daimler Trucks North America, Onemain Financial Group, Stanley Black & Decker, and more depend upon a diverse workforce and customer base. Each has outsized influence on local elected officials. Their voice is louder than ours, and we’ll be asking them for it.
And to every elected official who remains silent on the subject of white supremacy: we will vote you out.
