This article quotes vulgar language.
Charlottesville, Virginia Mayor Nikuyah Walker compared her city to being raped in a poem she published to her Facebook and Twitter accounts on Wednesday.
“Charlottesville: The beautiful-ugly it is. It rapes you, comforts you in its c—-stained sheets and tells you to keep its secrets,” she wrote.
— Mayor Nikuyah Walker (@NikuyahWalkerCC) March 24, 2021
Facebook quickly removed the post for violating its community guidelines, prompting the mayor, who was first elected in 2017, to repost an edited version that outlines how the city “lynched you,” “hung the noose at city hall,” and is “void of a moral compass.”
“It’s as if good ole [Thomas Jefferson] is still cleverly using his whip to whip the current inhabitants into submissiveness. Charlottesville rapes you of your breaths,” Walker wrote. “It suffocates your hopes and dreams. It liberates you by conveniently redefining liberation. It progressively chants while it conservatively acts. Charlottesville is anchored in white supremacy and rooted in racism. Charlottesville rapes you and covers you in sullied sheets.”
https://www.facebook.com/nikuyahwalker.cvillecouncil.5/posts/990010514868585
Walker also made a point to post a picture of a mug emblazoned with “my art doesn’t understand you either” on her Facebook and a screenshot of one of her older tweets discussing Jefferson’s “ownership and rape” of one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings.
https://www.facebook.com/100015789365512/posts/990070104862626/?d=n
— Mayor Nikuyah Walker (@NikuyahWalkerCC) March 24, 2021
Walker previously sought to exchange her city’s celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday with a “Liberation and Freedom Day” to commemorate the emancipation of local slaves. The proposal was praised by Dr. Wes Bellamy, a then-city councilman and Walker supporter who was ousted from his position as a member of the Virginia Board of Education in 2016 after offensive tweets about rape, racism, and gay people resurfaced online.
“Bellamy retweeted a description of performing a sex act on a sleeping woman and the comment that ‘if she moan it aint rape.’ ‘Word,’ he said in response to the comment,” the Washington Post reported. “Earlier that year, he retweeted a message from another user saying: ‘this weekend I’ll be on a whitegirl diet.’ He shared the message, then added ‘a rape charge waiting to happen’…he wrote that white women “smell like future assault charges n deli meat.”
