Daniel Hosterman
An anti-fascist column pauses in Charlottesville's Downtown Mall before marching to the location where Heather Heyer was killed a year ago, August 12, 2018.
Carrying banners declaring, “Good Night, White Pride,” a column of protesters almost fifty strong gathered inside the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville on Saturday, August 11, wearing caps, sunglasses, and bandannas—but not masks.
After each person passed through a security checkpoint, they paused briefly, fists held aloft, and then marched silently past the gracious cafes that line the pedestrian mall, then rounded a corner and proceeded down a narrow alleyway to pay respects to Heather Heyer, a thirty-two-year-old paralegal who was killed last year when a young man who had rallied with the white supremacist group Vanguard America drove his Dodge Challenger into counter-protesters.
Many in the anti-fascist group who came to pay respects had witnessed the gruesome attack. They asked the battery of videographers and journalists flanking the column to give them two minutes to themselves. Then they marched out again, taking up the victorious chorus of an accordion-playing busker singing, “This Little Light of Mine.”
Daniel Hosterman
UVA Students United activists rally outside a building at University of Virginia, August 12. 2018.
The twelve months since the violent white supremacist Unite the Right rally have forced a painful reckoning on Charlottesville, a liberal college town of about 48,000. Although the coalition of internet trolls, alt-right streetfighters, hardcore neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates that converged on Charlottesville a year ago came from all across the country, the event was organized by a local resident, Jason Kessler, a former contributor to the Daily Caller who had voted for Obama and participated in the Occupy movement. The marquee speaker was Richard Spencer, a University of Virginia graduate.
The statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson that rise magisterially at the center of two downtown Charlottesville parks were erected in the 1920s as an assertion of white supremacy against claims of dignity made by black soldiers returning from World War I. This coincided with the establishment of a Ku Klux Klan chapter in Charlottesville and series of race riots and racial pogroms against black people from Washington, D.C., to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Richard Johnson, a past vice-chair of the Charlottesville Democratic Party, appraised the scene on August 11 as Virginia State police patrolled a buffer zone fashioned from a double line of metal barricades on Market Street in front of the Lee statue in what was formerly known as Emancipation Park, and before that Lee Park. He recalled witnessing Unite the Right ralliers descend on the park as street brawls erupted on Market Street and the police stood by and watched.
‘We have residents suffering from their failure to protect us last year, but we’re being subjected to a situation where we’re not able to circulate freely and not able to avail ourselves of our recreation centers. Whatever that balance is supposed to be, this ain’t it.’
Johnson said his white shorts were spattered with his friend’s blood after his friend got hit with a stick. Another friend recognized an unmasked Klansman rallying with the Unite the Right as a co-worker, and Johnson said the Klan retains a strong presence in the rural counties surrounding Charlottesville.
“There’s a lot of tension between blacks and whites, but it’s more of a socio-economic thing,” said Johnson, who was born in Charlottesville. “There’s not a lot of upper-middle class African Americans here. There’s a lot more African Americans who are making minimum wage at the University of Virginia. There’s a lot of frustration because they feel like they can’t get ahead.”
Johnson said he appreciated the heavy police presence.
“I think they got it right this time,” he said.
Daniel Hosterman
Anti-fascist students, local residents and visitors congregate outside security perimeter near the Rotunda at University of Virginia, August 12, 2018.
Police restricted access to several blocks containing the Mall and the parks that were the focal point of white nationalist rallies last year. The state police deployed 700 officers, part of an overall force of more than 1,000 officers.
Not everyone in Charlottesville was happy about the militarized response.
Jalane Schmidt, an organizer with Black Lives Matter Charlottesville, noted that the state police engaged counter-protesters while in riot gear and launched teargas during a July 2017 Ku Klux Klan rally in Charlottesville, adding, “There’s no love lost here.”
She said, “They’re over-compensating for last year. We have residents suffering from their failure to protect us last year, but we’re being subjected to a situation where we’re not able to circulate freely and not able to avail ourselves of our recreation centers. Whatever that balance is supposed to be, this ain’t it.”
In advance of this weekend’s commemoration, the university erected barriers around the campus and instituted a clear-bag policy. On Saturday, several hundred activists gathered outside the main gate. Activists inside the barrier unfurled a banner reading, “Last year, they came with torches; this year they come with badges.”
On Sunday, police made four arrests, including two people whose argument over the Robert E. Lee statue turned physical.
While Charlottesville healed and raged over the anniversary weekend, Kessler brought his Unite the Right 2 rally to Washington, D.C., on August 12. With only about twenty supporters encircled by police on motorcycles, bicycles, and foot, they briskly marched roughly three blocks, accompanied by a rolling wave of photojournalists and videographers while enraged counter-protesters yelled, “Why are you here?”
With virtually all of the leadership of the original Unite the Right coalition absent from the anniversary rally in Washington, D.C., Kessler attempted to portray himself as a “moderate” free-speech champion being hounded by both the far right and the far left. But one of the rallyers sported a “14” tattoo on his shaved head, representative of the “14 words” white nationalist slogan.
Daniel Hosterman
Virginia National Guard members with “Stonewall” Jackson statue in Charlottesville, August 11, 2018.
During comments broadcast by C-SPAN, Kessler said he gave the alt-right credit “for waking me up to the fact that my people have a voice,” but added, “The jokes just aren’t funny anymore.” He said, “There is a way forward to help white folks, but we cannot be associating with hate or violence or oppression.” Yet one of the few prominent far-right figures who was willing to march with Kessler was Jovanni Valle, a member of the Proud Boys in Brooklyn, New York. Less than a week before, Valle posted a Facebook Live video in which he said, “I’m not for violence, but beating up antifa is your American duty.”
The anger many Washington, D.C., residents felt towards Kessler’s rally grew from the broken belief that their city should be a refuge. During a press conference in the lead-up to the rally, Mayor Muriel Bowser talked about a ninety-six-year-old constituent from North Carolina who has lived in the nation’s capital since 1946.
“She looked at me and said, ‘They’ve never come to Washington,’ ” Bowser recalled. “And that to me represented the kind of anxiety that many people feel—that see Washington as a refuge from that type of hate, anti-Semitism, tiki torch-burning and the like. And they don’t want to see it here.”