On July 8, 2017, roughly one week after I moved back to Charlottesville, where I had completed undergraduate studies at the University of Virginia some eight years before, the Ku Klux Klan held a rally near the courthouse, in defense of the city’s memorial to Robert E. Lee. The following month, several far-right groups converged on the city for the “Unite the Right” rally, where they attempted to intimidate UVA students and faculty by marching across Grounds, tiki torches in hand, chanting “Jews will not replace us” and other hateful taunts. Later that weekend, the motley assortment of neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, and more neatly attired garden-variety white supremacists engaged, often violently, with counter-protestors in a series of large and small encounters that left dozens of people injured and, after a vicious vehicular assault, a young woman named Heather Heyer dead.
It has been eight years since “Charlottesville” became a metonym for far-right violence in the United States. That is where it remains in the national imagination, or, at least, that is what people tend to refer to whenever I mention the place I call home. What is less apparent to observers, however, are the ways the city has struggled to mark, commemorate, and make sense of that summer. In trying to process the events of August 2017, Charlottesville has looked to its past for context and, specifically, its history of discrimination and inequality.