Eight years ago, Wes Bellamy and Zyahna Bryant stood shoulder to shoulder against the hordes of White supremacists who would have had Charlottesville keep its Confederate memorials standing.
Today, the two — now considered among Charlottesville’s best known advocates for racial justice — stand on opposite sides of a picket line.
Bryant ascended into the national spotlight in 2016, when, as a student at Charlottesville High School, she penned a petition to City Council calling on leaders to remove the “offensive” statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee sitting in a downtown park.
Bellamy, who had recently won a seat on Council, answered Byrant’s call to arms. Her petition, he has said, was the catalyst for the city’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces and the eventual 3-2 Council vote in favor of removing the statue in February of 2017.
The vote faced vocal and violent pushback from White supremacists. Hundreds of racists from across the nation descended on Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017, for a rally protesting the decision, dubbed Unite the Right. That rally, however, was called off after protesters and counterprotesters clashed in the streets. By the end of the day, a self-avowed neo-Nazi had plowed his car through a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring multiple others.
It would be another four years before Lee was finally removed from the park in July of 2021, but Lee was removed.
The fight over Charlotteville’s Confederate memorials is over. Now begins the fight over who gets credit for their removal.
On June 25, a new documentary premiered at Charlottesville’s Paramount Theater purporting to tell the story of what happened before, during and after Aug. 12, 2017. The screening attracted hundreds, and a question-answer session afterward was moderated by MSNBC’s Symone Sanders-Townsend, most known for her press work on the Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden presidential campaigns.
Ahead of its premiere, “A Time to Yell: More Than a Statue” was marketed in promotional material as “the untold story from the one man who was the catalyst for these monumental events.”
It’s that “one man” that caught Bryant’s attention.
At a “rededication” ceremony reflecting on the 100th anniversary of the Lee statue’s installation on May 21, more than a month ahead of the premiere, Bryant took the microphone to express her concern that she was being left out of the narrative.
“There’s an upcoming documentary that will center an individual, ‘the great one man,’ as the caption read, who apparently was the catalyst for this movement,” Bryant told a crowd of roughly 80 people, Bellamy among them. “I almost didn’t come today, because I feel like it’s necessary for me to stop putting myself in spaces where Black women are stepped on, stepped over, spoken over and pushed to the back.”
Bryant would put herself back in one of those spaces more than a month later, when she attended the premiere of Bellamy’s documentary.
The audience also included friends, family and supporters of Bryant who came to protest, carrying signs reading “A Time To Yell or Tell The Truth?” and “Stealing the work of 15-year-old?”
Several of the protesters were asked to leave by security. The protest was not addressed by either Bellamy or the premiere organizers.
Julissa Bishop, a friend of Bryant’s, told The Daily Progress after the premiere that like her friend she was shocked by the promotional materials’ use of "one man."
"I was shocked, because I knew how much work that Zyahna did," Bishop told The Daily Progress after the premiere. "She’s always cited the people that have inspired her and the people that she’s worked along with, but I didn’t see much acknowledgement of the work that Zyahna did, especially to be so young, from Wes, and that’s what particularly bothered me, because, she was a young Black woman, and I’m a young Black woman myself, like seeing a lot of the work that she did being erased — it was hurtful."
Zaneyah Bryant, Bryant’s sister who was among the protesters at the premiere, also said that her sister has always given credit to the entire community in Charlottesville who fought to bring down the Confederate memorials.
"Every time Zy goes up to speak, it don’t matter if she’s here, Richmond, California, anywhere, she credits other Black women and people in the Charlottesville community. Not only does she credit Black women, she credits everyone who took a role in doing what they did over the past few years," she said.
Zaneyah Bryant"Wes is gaslighting Black women. Wes is not praising Black women." – Zaneyah Bryant, sister of Zyahna Bryant
She said Bellamy isn’t giving the same credit to others who collectively pushed for the statue’s removal.
"Wes is not even from Charlottesville, and I think that’s where everybody gets lost in the sauce. Wes is not from Charlottesville. Wes came here, he got a job, he started doing some community work, but Wes is not a Charlottesville native," she said. "You don’t get to come in someone else’s hometown, where they’ve grown up, where they started the work, where they’ve done the work with other Black women, and then you come in, and you call yourself ‘the one man,’ and you take credit."
"Wes is gaslighting Black women," she added. "Wes is not praising Black women."
While others left the theater on June 25, Bryant remained and watched the film in its entirety.
Bryant said she was troubled that although her work is cited in the documentary, she was never interviewed. Moreover, she agreed with others’ assessment that Bellamy has taken undue credit for what was a community effort. That last point, Bryant said, underscores a pattern of behavior for Bellamy.
Bellamy no longer holds public office after a series of racist, misogynistic and homophobic remarks he published on Twitter resurfaced in late 2016.
The documentary’s producers provided The Daily Progress an early copy of the film.
It begins with Bellamy’s childhood in Atlanta and follows his move to Charlottesville, his work as a high school teacher, the start of his political career, his 2015 election to City Council, his fight to bring down the Lee statue, his eventual appointment to the Virginia Board of Education under Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s administration and his fall from grace and eventual resignation from both his seat on the Board of Education and teaching post at Albemarle High School.
In the film, Bellamy recalls receiving Bryant’s petition in 2016.
“Zyahna Bryant, 14 at the time, wrote this whole petition for a school project to get the statues removed,” he says. “I’m thinking, ‘That’s perfect,’ because we can then take that to Council and say ‘Yo, we have to support the youth.’”
Bellamy has said he considers this an acknowledgement of Bryant’s role in the movement.
She doesn’t agree.
“I don’t think social justice is about centering any one individual,” Bryant said at the rededication ceremony in May. “It’s actually about uplifting the collective.”
"At the end of the day, the work to better our community is what I’m concerned with," Bryant said in a statement delivered to The Daily Progress. "There is a long history of Black women being pushed to the side but constantly asked to provide consistent labor. My hope is that we move beyond that, and elevate as a collective because that’s what it’s always been about for me, and that is reflected in the care and mutual aid work that I choose to focus on with other organizers in our community."
Responding to Bryant’s complaints that she was not interviewed for the documentary, the film’s producers told The Daily Progress that she was asked on two occasions for an interview. Bryant told them that her schedule was too tight, seeing as filming could only take place over four days in August of 2022, during the fifth anniversary of the Unite the Right rally-turned-riot.
Instead, producers used archived footage of Bryant from prior interviews, press conferences and public gatherings. She is included on a list of “special thank yous” in the film’s closing credits.
In the wake of Bryant’s complaints, the producers have also removed the “one man” line from promotional materials for the documentary.
But that has not been enough for many of Bryant’s tens of thousands of social media followers, who have claimed that Bellamy is attempting to erase Bryant’s work.
“How can you as a BLACK man disregard the efforts of a young Black woman who as a young TEEN started the movement to remove this statue,” one Instagram user commented under one of Bellamy’s posts advertising the documentary. “Just know… that we will not let up about this and we will apply pressure. YOU ARE WRONG!!!”
Many referred back to Bellamy’s history of misogynist and racist remarks. Bellamy, they say, is guilty of misogynoir, characterized by disdain, contempt or prejudice against Black women.
In “A Time To Yell,” Bellamy brushes aside the controversy and the 2016 tweets in which he makes light of rape, uses gay slurs and generally demeans women.
“The tweets were from like five, six, seven years ago,” he says. “Now granted, I know me and my friends, we used to say some wild stuff. … We saying the craziest stuff you could think of ‘cause we young, we dumb, we’re trying to be funny, we trying to get girls.”
Bellamy has defended the documentary and said he has never meant to take away from the work Bryant has done and continues to do for the Black community in Charlottesville and Black communities across the country.
“I got love and respect for Zy,” Bellamy told The Daily Progress on the morning of the premiere. “We all owe a debt to everybody within this community who sacrificed and gave something collectively and collaboratively to be able to move our community forward.”
“They will be able to see the multiple vantage points of different people and how so many people are highlighted and given voice within this doc, and I hope it, more than anything else, encourages us all to be able to tell our story,” he added.
One of those community members who sacrificed and gave was former city councilor Kristin Szakos.
Szakos was a longtime supporter of removing the city’s Confederate memorials and joined Bellamy’s push for their removal on City Council in 2016.
She told The Daily Progress she found the documentary to be accurate, balanced and thoughtful.
“I really appreciated that this story they’re telling in this movie is the first time it’s really been told from an Afrocentric perspective and really talking about the impact of that sort of assault on the Black community in this town,” Szakos said.
She does not deny that Bryant’s 2016 petition was a rallying cry and garnered national attention. She did, however, emphasize that Bryant was not the first to call for the statue’s removal.
There have been calls to remove the statue since it was erected in 1924.
But Szakos was highlighting her own calls to remove the statue dating back as far as 2012, when she publicly raised the question of whether the statue should be allowed to stand to a Civil War historian at the Virginia Festival of the Book.
While she floated the possibility of removing the city’s Confederate memorials for years, neither Szakos nor any other city official ever brought a formal petition before Council. Szakos said this silence was due to the city attorney’s opinion that Virginia law prevented them from touching the statues. It was only after the Virginia Supreme Court upheld a decision to remove the city of Danville’s Confederate battle flag from public property in the fall of 2016 that Szakos said she felt it was possible to push the issue.
Szakos said she feels the documentary captures all of this accurately.
Zyahna Bryant"At the end of the day, the work to better our community is what I’m concerned with," Bryant said in a statement delivered to The Daily Progress. "There is a long history of Black women being pushed to the side but constantly asked to provide consistent labor. My hope is that we move beyond that, and elevate as a collective because that’s what it’s always been about for me, and that is reflected in the care and mutual aid work that I choose to focus on with other organizers in our community." – Zyahna Bryant, activist
“I think there are lots of perspectives on what happened in Charlottesville, and the story doesn’t purport to tell everybody’s experience,” Szakos said. “It’s really a film that uses Wes Bellamy’s story kind of as the focal point of a narrative. He didn’t write the film, he didn’t make the film and so it is what it is.”
Unlike Bryant, Szakos is interviewed in the documentary.
The film’s producers, New York-based Dan Levin and Los Angeles-based Eric Newman, said they were inspired to make the motion picture because they felt what happened in 2017 had not been examined, not fully, not deeply.
“Something as tragic and dramatic like this happens, and there’s a lot of news coverage immediately when it happens, but no real, in-depth follow-up of what the community is doing and how did it come to this point,” Levin told The Daily Progress. “So for us, I think the question of healing: Was there healing happening and how are the communities healing?”
Newman, who has previously produced documentaries focused on sports stars such as Minnesota Timberwolves basketball player Kevin Garnett, said he was first drawn to Bellamy’s story because of his involvement in the Tonsler League, Charlottesville’s summer basketball program. Bellamy became commissioner of the program in 2022.
“It was a great example of how one of the communities here in Charlottesville both gets together and stays together,” Newman told The Daily Progress. “In many ways, basketball is a safe haven for people and helps people heal, helps people bond. It was kind of a perfect example of that lane and that lens.”
One of the final scenes of the documentary depicts the Tonsler League’s 2022 championship game that was moved indoors due to bad weather. The climate indoors was nearly as terrible as it was outside. Tensions between the teams rose to a point that referees paused the game. Bellamy intervenes, soothes tempers, brings the players together. The game promptly resumes.
For Levin, that moment captured so much of what he and Newman wanted to say in the documentary.
Neighbors have their differences, but in order to progress as a community, they must lay their differences — and their egos — aside.
“A community can’t always agree or doesn’t always get along, but in the end, they have to figure out a way to push through something,” he said. “So for us, it was sort of a dramatic expression of that.”
This story was updated with remarks from Zyahna Bryant, Julissa Bishop and Zaneyah Bryant.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com