New Author Introduction:
Charlottesville is my hometown. The University of Virginia, founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, is my alma mater. Though I haven’t lived in the city for years, after the Unite the Right rally took place there in August 2017, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. My book about the events of that weekend – the nighttime torch march on university grounds, the violent street clashes that culminated in the car attack that killed Heather Heyer—came out of a desire to reckon with the darker undersides of Charlottesville’s genteel façade. And to fully fathom why this small southern city provided the perfect backdrop for these events.
Because the city views itself as “the cradle of democracy,” that also meant revisiting the story I was taught about Virginia’s – and America’s–colonial and revolutionary beginnings. Haunting this alternative history is what Toni Morrison once called “the ghost in the machine;” white supremacy. In Charlottesville that ghost inhabited a statue of the Virginian and Confederate general, Robert E. Lee. Located in Lee Park, this statue had long been the centerpiece of the city’s historic downtown. In early January 2017, after a year of public hearings under the rubric of a Blue Ribbon Commission, the city council voted to move the statue and rename the park. This was the supposed rationale behind Unite the Right’s arrival that August.
Three months before, on Mother’s Day weekend, Richard Spencer, a white nationalist and UVA alum, made a surprise visit to the city. Accompanied by 150 far right followers, he staged a daytime rally in a park where a statue of Stonewall Jackson stood and then returned that night for a torch rally in Lee Park, now called “Emancipation Park.” The two rallies featured speeches, chants of Blood and Soil, and off-key renditions of “Dixie.” When footage of the torch rally went viral, I had my first inkling that something unsettling was underway back home. Within months of Trump’s first inauguration, Charlottesville and Albemarle County, better known as the home of Monticello and several Founding Fathers, had become a harbinger of another dark turn in American history. Chapter 8, “Fuck White Supremacy,” comes about halfway through Charlottesville: An American Story. It takes place in the days and weeks following Spencer’s surprise pop-ups. The principal organizers of Unite the Right have already been introduced. The news that a Spencer associate, a local rabble-rouser and Proud Boy named Jason Kessler, had applied for a permit for a far larger rally had yet to break. In the meantime, Virginia Flaggers, a neo-Confederate organization, have shown up to guard the two Confederate statues. At this point, the narrative turns back to the city’s Black and white civic leaders. It is these individuals, not the far-right media darlings, who are at the heart of the story I set out to tell. Would members of the city council, clergy groups, and social justice organizations reach a consensus on how to defend their city and their community’s most vulnerable? Could they agree on a strategy to thwart the overt threat posed by armed Flaggers in the city’s parks and Proud Boys spoiling for a fight on the streets of its prized historic downtown? Or would the more insidious forms of white supremacy divide them?
From Chapter 8: “Fuck White Supremacy”
The morning after Spencer’s torch rally, word spread that a “Take Back the Park” vigil, organized by a group calling itself the Anarchist People of Color Collective, would take place in Emancipation Park that evening. While the fate of the Lee statue remained in limbo until the court case was resolved, Lee Park was now Emancipation Park. At 9:00 p.m., roughly five hundred city residents, including Don Gathers, the chair of the Blue Ribbon Commission, Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy, with his wife and daughters, and numerous clergy, showed up at a candlelit vigil to “Outshine Their Torches with Love.” Hymns and protest songs replaced the previous night’s chants of “Blood and soil.” Showing Up for Racial Justice, the city’s public housing association, and a UVA student group calling for a living wage for university workers were among the organizations in attendance. Unaffiliated residents showed up too. Lisa Draine, a local arts administrator, came with her daughter Sophie, a UVA student about to leave town for the summer. Wes Bellamy told them, “It’s great you’re here, but don’t let this be the end of the story.”
Though various threads of civil society were beginning to work together, they sometimes struggled to find a common language. A bedsheet reading “Black Lives Matter, Fuck White Supremacy” was draped over Traveller’s flank that evening. Not everyone was happy with the obscenity. And not everyone was clear on what was meant by “whitesupremacy,” a phrase now on everyone’s lips. Kessler said he wasn’t a white supremacist but an advocate for white civil rights. Richard Spencer was a white nationalist. Was there a difference? More to the point, could anything be done? The activists of color who spoke at the vigil tried to provide answers, encouraging potential white allies to fight with them against white supremacy however and wherever it manifested itself.
In Alexander Stephens’s Cornerstone speech, the Confederacy rested on the intertwined principles of “slavery and white supremacy.” In the war’s aftermath, Henry Grady, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution and apostle of the New South, told Southern politicians and businessmen nothing had to change, that their economic future could still turn on the availability of cheap Black labor. “The supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all points.” The fear that Black people would end up dominating white people found legal remedy in the form of Jim Crow and extralegal remedies in acts of racial terror. Though Jim Crow laws had been dismantled, the reflexes underlying those laws persisted, like an inherited gene sequence passed from one generation to the next. As defined by Charlottesville’s anti-racists, white supremacy wasn’t just a historical wrong, limited to the South; it was an ongoing power dynamic, readily found in a penumbra of internal attitudes and sensibilities, institutional reflexes, and policy choices that, on casual perusal (or calculated dissembling), seemed to have little to do with race. Bred in the bone, white supremacy readily crashed the gates of policies and laws devised to contain it. As Ta-Nehisi Coates saw it, George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin wasn’t a miscarriage of justice, but American justice itself. “This is not our system malfunction-
ing,” he wrote. “It is our system working as intended.”
At the vigil there was a lot of talk of “enemies” and what it would take to defeat them. Don Gathers spoke of taking back control of the city from those who had taken it over. He didn’t name Jason Kessler, but with Richard Spencer’s departure, Kessler now became white supremacy’s local standard bearer. For such an unprepossessing individual, this was quite the promotion. Kessler, too, tended to inflate the power and stature of his adversaries, turning them all into violent “Antifa” cadres.
That night activists surrounded a Kessler associate who had shown up to film them. When he didn’t answer their questions, his cell phone was knocked from his hand. Pam Starsia, a lawyer who had cohosted the first planning meeting of Showing Up for Racial Justice in Bekah Menning’s living room, defended the action by saying videos were being used to identify and dox local activists. Then, as the park was about to close, Kessler himself appeared, bullhorn in hand, intent on rectifying the “vandalism” of the Lee statue by pulling down the Black Lives Matter, Fuck White Supremacy bedsheet. He then assaulted a woman of color in view of the police. When he refused to put down his mega-phone, he was charged, not with assault, but with disorderly conduct and walked off in handcuffs.
Emily Gorcenski was in Berlin when Richard Spencer came to town. Suddenly, the crisis she’d seen her country steaming toward had arrived on her doorstep. “WHAT. THE. FUCK,” she tweeted. “That’s not like a small number of torch-bearing fascists.” She tweeted a screenshot of the front page of the Daily Progress with the comment “Charlottesville is fucked.” She followed this with a brief summary of the city’s past, one rooted in the “best and worst of American history.” Charlottesville, where Emily had now lived for nine years, was nothing like the gritty and depressed towns of rural Connecticut she had known growing up. Its aura of gentility, she said, made it an unlikely candidate for a hot-bed of activism. “How the liberalist community in Cville responds,” she tweeted, “will be a bellwether for how America responds to this growing issue.” Then she returned to the real obscenity: Nazis bearing torches and shouting “Blood and soil” a half mile from her Fifeville home. From that moment, she began to mobilize her skills on the city’s behalf.
Two weeks later, on May 31, to forestall another Flagger rally at the Lee statue, Solidarity Cville, a newly launched activist message board, announced that faith leaders planned to occupy Emancipation Park from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 in the evening. Smash reached out directly to the faith community, asking them to bring their voices, bodies, and prayers. She asked that white people in particular not be scared into silence. Veronica Fitzhugh, a leader of Anarchist People of Colorand a recent target of Jason Kessler, sent out an email inviting people to join in community defense and to put out the word “discreetly” to their friend circles. Local activists were increasingly cautious in their use of social media, preferring face-to-face communications or phone calls. Some had begun using Signal, an encrypted messaging app that enabled people to send text alerts, voice messages, files, and videos to trusted groups or individuals. After a set time, these communications would vanish automatically.
Rev. Phil Woodson and Rev. Elaine Thomas from the Clergy Collective joined activists Don Gathers and Jalane Schmidt that morning. Grace Aheron and her crew arrived from Charis. The Catholic Worker couple from Casa Alma came, as did Bekah Menning and members of Showing Up for Racial Justice. Having returned from Europe in time for her thirty-fifth birthday and the beginning of Pride, Emily was also there. She reconnected with the people she’d met at the Sage Smith vigil and was added to their Signal chat groups. More people showed than Smash had expected, with their numbers growing as the day wore on.
By the time the Flaggers arrived, there was no room for them. They unfurled their Confederate flags and glared from the sidewalk. One wound up holding hands in a circle of clergy, singing movement songs. It eventually dawned on him they weren’t his fellow Flaggers. Coming two weeks after the “Take Back the Park” Mother’s Day vigil, this gathering was, in Smash’s view, transformative. Both she and Seth Wispelwey left the park that night feeling hopeful. By breaking down the misperceptions that had once kept them apart, the city’s residents were coming together.
