Charlottesville Mayor Likens Her City to Rapist

Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker was apparently not in the mood for any civic boosterism Wednesday. Walker posted a poem on social media likening the Virginia city she leads to a rapist, CBS19 reports. The "beautiful-ugly" city "rapes you, comforts you in its **** stained sheets and tells you to keep its secrets," she wrote in the poem, which she tweeted after Facebook removed it for violating community standards. She later tweeted a longer version, asking whoever reported it to Facebook, "Is this better?" It read, in part, "Charlottesville rapes you of your breaths. It suffocates your hopes and dreams ... Charlottesville is anchored in white supremacy and rooted in racism. Charlottesville rapes you and covers you in sullied sheets."

In the longer poem, Walker, the city's first Black female mayor, also described Charlottesville as "void of a moral compass" and a place where white people "say gentrification started with the election of a Black woman in 2017." The poem led to a backlash online, especially for the rape analogy, the Washington Post reports. "Rape survivor here," tweeted a woman who said she was from Charlottesville. "This is horribly offensive to every single one of us." Walker did not respond to media requests for comments, but later tweeted about Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves on a plantation near Charlottesville and is believed to have fathered six children with one of them. Jefferson "raped Sally Hemings," Walker wrote. "He 'owned' and raped her." (More Charlottesville, Va. stories.)