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ROCKY MOUNT, Va. — A photograph of two local police officers popped up on Bridgette Craighead’s cellphone after a long day at her beauty shop. The two men peering out at her from the selfie image had befriended her while on duty at a Black Lives Matter protest she led months before. They stood beside her and held her homemade signs that read “Silence is Violence” and “No Justice. No Peace.”
Now, there they were, proudly posing inside the nation’s Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection — amid a mob of people, many bearing symbols of white supremacy as they sought to overturn the presidential election to keep Donald Trump in power.
What happened next is inflaming a culture war in this southwest Virginia town of 5,000 people, a microcosm of the schisms across America as explosive disagreements over the election, race and the role of police are fracturing relationships between relatives, friends and neighbors.
People are quarreling over who was treated with kid gloves — Black Lives Matter protesters or the largely White throng that stormed the U.S. Capitol. They are arguing over the fairness of the presidential election and whether the former president should still be in office. And there’s a simmering standoff between activists such as Craighead who see this as the moment to redress injustices, and those who believe the activists are fomenting racial tensions by pushing too hard and too fast. Some see no need for change, no problem to be solved.
Minutes after receiving the photo of the officers in a private Facebook message three days after the riot, Craighead, who is Black and the mother of a young son, made it public on her own page.
Officers Thomas “T.J.” Robertson, second from left, and Jacob Fracker, third from left, with Bridgette Craighead, right, at a Black Lives Matter protest at the Rocky Mount farmers market on June 3. (Bridgette Craighead)
Jacob Fracker, left, and Thomas “T.J.” Robertson in front of a statue of Revolutionary War Gen. John Stark inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. (FBI)
LEFT: Officers Thomas “T.J.” Robertson, second from left, and Jacob Fracker, third from left, with Bridgette Craighead, right, at a Black Lives Matter protest at the Rocky Mount farmers market on June 3. (Bridgette Craighead) RIGHT: Jacob Fracker, left, and Thomas “T.J.” Robertson in front of a statue of Revolutionary War Gen. John Stark inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. (FBI)
“I can’t believe someone I trusted was a…
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