About 120 people attended a peaceful rally in downtown Nashville Saturday afternoon to talk, listen, register to vote and show support for equal rights and justice for all.
Local law enforcement and National Guard soldiers blocked off streets and kept watch around the event at the Village Green (Four Corners). Chief of Police Ben Seastrom said he was pleased with how it went. “Everybody was really patient with each other,” he said. “It was a good day.”
Christopher Shelton came to Nashville from Indianapolis to attend the Solidarity Rally for Racial Justice, which was organized by a group of local people. The purpose was “to provide a space for solidarity, education, awareness and positive change regarding racial injustice in Brown County, Indiana.”
“I want a world where all of us can be free to be able to grow and experience the freedoms that America promised,” he told the crowd at the Village Green.
“I want us all to be able to have these things and do things to advance this agenda, but this is just the beginning,” he said. “No one has ever built a house and stopped with the foundation.”
Across the street, resident Quinn Surface was listening. Surface and some of his friends, who make up the Brown County, Indiana Second Amendment Freedom Fighters, had decided to attend “to see what this was all about,” he said.
He said he had heard about threats made on Facebook, so “we wanted to come out here, make sure everything was going to be peaceful.”
Surface decided to approach Shelton, who is Black, after hearing him speak.
“It was just a beautiful exchange of ideas and understanding,” Shelton said after that conversation, “just some things that he didn’t know about that he had to be made aware of.
“These conversations are really, truly important, because if we don’t learn how to communicate with each other, we can never find commonalities within the issues that we have within our communities and ourselves.”
Surface said he has not witnessed racism in Brown County. He thought the rally organizers could have gone about fighting injustice in another way.
“Do we really have that down here? Do we really have racism down here in Brown County?” he asked.
“That’s why I approached him (Shelton) and wanted to talk to him. He told me some stories from when he was a kid that I can’t relate with by any means, but I understand where he’s coming from, and I can see where he would say that there’s racism or that there’s bias towards them,” Surface said.
Shelton said he told Surface that it’s important to stand up for all rights — including the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms — and now is the time to go to lawmakers about things that need to changed, together.
“We can address racial injustice, we can address social injustice, we can address education, we can address human rights violations, we can do all of these things. We have a captive audience with our government right now,” Shelton said.
“Let Black Lives Matter stand with Native Americans, let Black Lives Matter stand with Hispanic Americans that are being treated badly on the southern border or inside our northern cities, let Black Lives Matter stand with poor, rural whites that are receiving just as awful an education and going through food deserts like they are in urban areas. Let Black Lives Matter stand with these groups. Let all of us band together.”
Surface said he was happy to see the rally had gone on peacefully, with everyone being respectful.
“We actually talked to quite a few of them. They’re totally normal and nice people. I can understand, I guess, what they are trying to do, but I just don’t think they are going about it the right way,” he said, about rally attendees coming to Nashville.
Instead, he suggested, “If they really want to make a difference and they are talking about systematic racism, well, let’s go to where there’s an urban population, where there’s a black community, reach out there, help them out,” Surface said.
Read more in the June 24 issue of the Brown County Democrat.
A video story from the event also is being produced.
