Napans, rally, march, speak on Day Against Hate
- Queer Leader
- Nov 12, 2024
- 3 min read
Napa Register
JONATHAN BIGALL
Sept, 30 2024
More than 100 gathered Sunday afternoon at Westwood Hills Park in Napa to celebrate the inaugural Napa Day Against Hate, joining a rally and neighborhood walk meant to foster community and raise awareness of local hate controversies.
Napans of varying ages gathered for the rally’s debut, including young children, a high school chorus and two members of the Napa City Council. Several participants used chalk to draw hopeful messages on a sidewalk stretching the length of the park’s field area.
The rally saw community leaders speak on recent hate speech and vandalism controversies in Napa, as well as seek to inspire hope for the future.
“My faith teaches that hate and injustice should never be tolerated, that we must confront them, wherever and however they emerge,” Goldstein said before closing his speech with a poem.
Napa City Councilmember Beth Painter, who was joined by Vice Mayor Bernie Narvaez, presented a plaque commemorating the last Sunday of September every year as Napa Day Against Hate. Both councilmembers took turns reading the proclamation, which formally allied the city of Napa with the United Against Hate Week campaign.
Heather “Coach” Bailie, the Napa director of LGBTQ Connection and chair of the Napa Queer Leaders Coalition, was last to speak and reiterated that the LGBTQ community has borne much of the weight of recent hate-driven vandalism, but also stressed the importance of making an effort to see the beauty in others instead of focusing on their differences.
“Loving others starts with loving and accepting ourselves and I know many of you, like me, have struggled with that,” Bailie said. “The world can be relentless in making us feel small or like we don’t belong, but that is why we are here together.”
After the Vintage High School choir performed the New Seekers’ “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” Tracy Mayne, a Browns Valley resident who organized Sunday’s event, invited Napans to stroll the neighborhood in solidarity against hate. (Mayne writes a restaurant column for the Napa Valley Register.)
Mayne said he began organizing the Walk Against Hate in response to a spate antisemitic messages in the form of signs and flyers scattered across Napa, including in Congregation Beth Shalom’s neighborhood.
Mayne currently rents a U-Haul box truck with the message “Hate is not a Napa value” emblazoned on the side, a phrase Mayne repeated at the rally, among other anti-hate messages. He has kept it parked in front of a Browns Valley home to block a street-facing sign that has often been updated with various antisemitic messages posted by the home’s owner, Donald Snyder.
Mayne said that his father, a World War II veteran whom he said fought in the Battle of the Bulge, brought back only two boxes from his service in Europe — a box containing three Purple Hearts and a gray metal lockbox, the contents of which were not disclosed to Mayne or his brother until Mayne was 27, by which time his father had been diagnosed with cancer and had only six months to live.
Mayne said before his father died, he asked his son to see what was inside the lockbox and was given the key. Inside were black-and-white photographs of a Nazi concentration camp that his father had helped to liberate.
“They are the most horrific images I have ever seen in my life, worse than any horror movie because they actually happened,” Mayne recalled of his father’s request.
“I asked him, ‘How does something like this happen?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Tracy, this is what happens when men do nothing.’”
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