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July 28, 2020 This letter serves as a reminder of your role and responsibility to do “Justly” for all of the citizens of Portsmouth. A little more than a year ago, The Virginia Pilot did an article on the city of Portsmouth and its racial divide. Divided along racial lines, the majority responded by saying, they didn’t see any racial problems. If that’s true, then I’m concerned that the members of council have chosen to remain color blind. My Momma taught me as a boy that, “You will never truly understand a person until you walk a mile in their moccasins.” I think its time for all the members of city council to walk a mile in the moccasins of my fore-parents and all of their descendants who now call America home, and more particularly Virginia and Portsmouth. As you walk in those moccasins, you will travel down a road that legitimized forced labor, inhumane lynching’s, brutal rape and merciless murder, to fuel a slave economy. Laws, legislations and codes were passed to institutionalize one of the worst forms of inhumanity to humanity that this world has ever known. Deeply entrenched in that sordid history is the site of the confederate monument in downtown Portsmouth. Complicitous support of these past inhuman acts of violence, viciousness, and vulgarity includes the display and strategic placement of confederate flags, and the confederate monuments in the commonwealth of Virginia and the city of Portsmouth. It hurts to see the veneration, glorification and seemingly deification of men, who by our own legal and judicial standards today would be imprisoned or executed by capital punishment. To be fair to these treasonous pre and post war criminals, I tried to wear the moccasins of the ancestors of the confederates. I asked myself: • What if it was my fore-parents who bought and sold people like cattle? • What if my fore-parents, who in the name of conditioning, beat another human being until their flesh was permanently marred, or worse, till life left their body? • What if it was my fore-parents, that exploited a race of people for centuries only so that I could enjoy, “black privilege.”? • What if it was my fore-parents who further intimidated and terrorized a race of people by restricting their freedom to read, travel, and keep their families together? I wouldn’t have to walk far in those moccasins before I called a spade a spade. I would see evil for what it was, and for what it is. I would not build nor display a monument of indignity and disgust. I would not bleach the history by calling it a “necessary evil.” I would not be disingenuous by disguising it as “States rights”. I would see the acts and actions as abhorrent, reprehensible, repulsive, disgraceful, disgusting, wrong, inexcusable, unacceptable, and evil. I ask each member of the council to do a soul search and let’s walk together. To take off the color blind, and cease to remain complicitous in this crime of conscience and civility against the creator and His precious creation. I ask that each member take a stand against the egregious evils of the past and vote to remove the monuments to the cemetery. In Memory of those who endured Slavery, Dr. Kelvin E. Turner Senior Pastor Zion Baptist Church 216 Hatton Street 42. It is past time to remove the Confederate monument from its current location in the town square and relocate it to a museum or cemetary where it can be properly contextualized. Its current location serves its very purpose of further oppressing Black citizens, as it was originally erected in the very location where the sales of slaves were finalized and slaves were publicly whipped and punished. My husband and I watched live footage online in June as citizens took the fate of the monument into their own hands after years of pleading for relocation were ignored by