Black protector of Confederate statues dubbed a Dave Chappelle ‘skit come to life’ by Twitter users

A black Alabama man vowing to defend symbols of the pro-slavery Confederate States of America went viral as his atypical persona reminded Internet community of a character from a sketch on comedian Dave Chappelle’s show.

“Regardless of how the next person feels, I’m not going to take my flag down,” Daniel Sims said on Wednesday to the local WHNT news in Alabama’s Marshal county. He aims to protect the monuments to the US Civil War Confederacy from being taken down by vandals or any local authorities that may be pressured by the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests. “If I’ve got anything to do with it, ain’t no monument going to come down,” he proclaimed.

Sims, a member of ‘Sons of Confederate Veterans’, explained his seemingly unusual position for an African American man: “My grandfather was white and he was the main one that fought in this war here.” The activist was adopted by a white family as a child. “My whole family is white … [I] went to all-white school, grew up in all-white neighborhood,” Sims said.

He confessed that attempts at vandalism of Confederate statues “make [his] blood boil”. “That monument ain’t hurting nobody. That monument ain’t killing a soul,” Sims lamented, adding, “It ain’t even racist!”

Internet users, however, mostly seemed to mock him for defending Confederate symbols, comparing him to a 2003 comedy sketch by comedian Dave Chapelle titled “Clayton Bigsby, the world’s only black white supremacist”. In the story a blind man played by Chaplle himself is unaware that he is black, and so he becomes a top Ku Klux Klan ideologue.

Twitter users called Sims “Clayton Bigsby come to life.”

They also said that Chapelle turned out to have been “ahead of his time” and joked about the comedian being a “prophet.”

Even though Sims’ persona was deemed unusual, his position seems to be motivated by common events. The rise of the anti-racist Black Lives Matter protest movement following the death of George Floyd at the end of May mounted pressure on many local authorities to removed statues considered “racist.”

The movements’ surge coincided with increased instances of vandalism as self-proclaimed activists aimed to take down the undesirable statues themselves, with varying degrees of success.

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