‘Charlottesville’ Is an American Story That Refuses To Let Hate Win https://ift.tt/dewCYrV
Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker didn’t return to her hometown of Charlottesville in early 2018 knowing she would write about the events of the previous August. She was shaken, of course, by that recent history, but her research was originally focused on the Massive Resistance movement led by Senator Harry Byrd to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs Board of Education and preserve segregated schools in Charlottesville. Byrd, ever the Southern gentleman, was not the man orchestrating an August 1956 rally in McIntire Park, the one leading the chant: “Honor, pride, fight. Save the White.” That man was John Kasper, a Columbia grad from New York, described as a “Hollywood version of the All-American boy.” Kasper set burning crosses on the lawns of Chief Justice Warren and Justice Frankfurter’s and then mailed photographs of the spectacle to the Virginia General Assembly. After his arrest when soliciting members for his Seaboard White Citizens Council without a permit, police officers gathered around him to shake his hand, apologizing for how he had been treated. They wanted to join his Council.
Perhaps I should admit now that I don’t know how to write this review. Perhaps I should explain that Deborah Baker’s Charlottesville: An American Story is brilliant, heartbreaking, and incredibly well-researched. Perhaps I should tell you just how much I didn’t know about the events of August 2017, the compounding tragedies that came to be known simply as “Charlottesville.” Perhaps I should urge you to discover – as I did – the way Charlottesville’s history informed those events, the way Charlottesville’s past illuminates our future.
When I first heard about Baker’s book, I knew I wanted to read it, even as I equally knew I did not want to. In 2017, I was living in Chattanooga, far from my years at UVA and the life I led in Charlottesville. Still reeling from the 2016 election and trying to hide a deepening depression from my young children, I avoided the details rolling out of Charlottesville that weekend. I’m ashamed to admit that after receiving assurance that my friend in the city was safe, I looked away.
Admitting that, I must also admit that my interest in the deeper history that Baker so skillfully interweaves throughout her detailed account may be yet another form of looking away from the reality unfolding that summer. But Baker’s careful assembling of a history that extends far beyond that time and that place is what makes this account so remarkable. Reading it, you can no longer believe these events “came out of nowhere.” As Baker explains, “The ground has been prepared for them; the path clear only in retrospect.” There is a direct line between John Kasper and Richard Spencer. There is a direct line between those who fought back in the past and to the activists that stood against hate in August 2017.
Baker chooses to orient her narrative around those activists and ordinary residents, the ones “who had known something awful was going to happen; people who had done their best to prepare themselves and the city.” They gathered intelligence in advance, sharing it at every turn with law enforcement and city and state officials. They trained in nonviolent direct action, organized prayer vigils and support stations, made signs. And they showed up. Even when they were vastly outnumbered and entirely outmatched, they showed up.
They showed up, most of them unarmed and uninterested in violence, all of them terrified. They showed up, despite knowing they might be killed. And then, when their worst fears were confirmed, when the police stood by as innocent people were assaulted and a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens more, they were blamed.
You might ask, as Baker does: “How do you explain that those protesting the arrival of Nazis on their doorsteps shouldn’t be blamed for the death and destruction Nazis always bring? When did the act of protest become more troubling than the presence of Nazis?” You might agree that “there were not, as President Trump has said, ‘very fine people, on both sides’” and still be shocked to read the details of a hate and violence of this magnitude. You might read Charlottesville: An American Story and wish you could still look away, averting your eyes from an evil you’d like to believe is rare and strange.
Despite all that, I’m grateful for Baker’s careful work, grateful for the chance to look long at these events and at myself. I am awed by the bravery and fierce determination of the counterprotesters, humbled by their commitment to justice in the face of real danger. I mourn what we lost that day, what we continue to lose as hate and cruelty continue to advance. I would like to hope I’ll never be called upon to stand in between those most vulnerable and the ones who want to harm them, but if I am, I want to be listed among those who stood.
Sarah Patton Lindsay Boyle, known by friends as Patty, serves as an example. When Gregory Swanson won admission to UVA’s law school in 1950, Patty “decided this was the moment for the good people of Virginia, her people, to show the world who they really were” and welcome him in. Unfortunately, they did not. Finding herself alone in speaking out in favor of desegregation, cast out from polite society, Patty went to Kasper’s rally, and recognized him as a “sinister” force, a man starting fires just to see how they burn. Baker explains, “Eventually she stopped telling herself, Now they’ve gone too far, and the decent Southerners will rebel. Because they never ever did.”
But, in August of 2017, they did. Charlottesville: An American Story is not exactly a hopeful story, but it is one that refuses to let hate win. And that’s the version of this country I still want to believe in.
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