Five years later, racial justice advocates see the terror at Charlottesville as a turning point for the country — one that encouraged far right political violence, including the attack on the U.S. Capitol last year.
Debbie Elliott, NPR NewsCHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — In a downtown park, grass grows over the spot where there once stood a massive bronze statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, astride his horse Traveller.“It’s much more serene,” he says.
On the night of Aug. 11, 2017, Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen and other white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia campus bearing torches and terrorizing students with chants of “Blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” As demonstrators were pushed from the park, they dispersed through town, leading to pockets of violence and ultimately the deadly attack on a group of anti-racists. Neo-Nazi James Fields rammed his car into the crowd, injuring dozens of people and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Two state police officers monitoring the scene died in a helicopter crash.
“I think Charlottesville really was a catalyst for much of the white supremacist chaos that has ensued since,” says April Muniz, who was in the crowd when the Neo-Nazi drove his car into the counter-protesters.Muniz says she suffered PTSD and panic attacks and was unable to work for a time. And she grew increasingly frustrated that Fields was the only person arrested in the immediate aftermath of the Unite the Right violence.“Everybody left town.
At the time, Trump drew criticism when he condemned what he called an “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” seemingly equating neo-Nazis and white nationalists to the anti-racist demonstrators. It was certainly a wake-up call for Susan Bro, who was forced in the most painful way imaginable to understand the consequences of hate when her daughter Heather Heyer was murdered. She comes regularly to the memorial at the spot where Heather was run over, removing dead flowers and making sure the sidewalk is clear.
Bro says that’s a sign of progress. But she thinks more work is needed to combat a well-organized white supremacist movement, a movement she wasn’t really aware of until her daughter was murdered for standing up to it. One survivor of the violence, Emily Gorcenski, is tracking white supremacists and Neo-Nazis through online projects, including“These projects were designed to try to help aid the understanding of how white supremacists live in our society and how they act in our society,” she says.
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