The five children of Johnny Cash have issued a statement about the right-wing violence in Charlottesville that makes it pretty damn clear that not only would the music legend have been opposed to all this white supremacist bullshit, but that the stormtrooper wannabes of the so-called “alt-right” are a “poison.”
The Cash kids—Rosanne, Cindy, Tara, Kathy, and John—were compelled to speak out against the mob of bigots who gathered last week to protest the removal of a Confederate monument at the University Of Virginia after learning that one of them was filmed wearing a T-shirt with Johnny Cash’s name on it. (If you can stomach it, you might be able to spy the racist in Vice’s documentary about the Charlottesville “rally,” which was attended by many armed white supremacist thugs.) They’re “sickened by the association” with those neo-Nazis, who “are poison in our society, and an insult to every American hero who wore a uniform to fight the Nazis in WWII. Several men in the extended Cash family were among those who served with honor.”
The Cashes describe their father as a man “whose heart beat with the rhythm of love and social justice,” who received humanitarian awards from organizations like the Jewish National Fund, B’nai Brith, and the United Nations. Together with June Carter Cash, the artist worked with and donated to the SOS Children’s Villages from 1973 until the time of their deaths. The statement goes on: “To any who claim supremacy over other human beings, to any who believe in racial or religious hierarchy: we are not you. Our father, as a person, icon, or symbol, is not you. We ask that the Cash name be kept far away from destructive and hateful ideology.”