Charlottesville Quotes

I'm going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There's something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave." - from a letter to his mother Helen Pancake that Breece wrote in Charlottesville, where he was studying writing.

Privilege is when your voice is the norm but still you claim to be unheard.

Extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism, driven by fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of economic and social stress—a period like our own. Americans today have little trust in government; household incomes lag behind our usual middle-class expectations. The fires of fear in America have long found oxygen when broad, seemingly threatening change is afoot. Now, in the second decade of the new century, in the presidency of Donald Trump, the alienated are being mobilized afresh by changing demography, by broadening conceptions of identity, and by an economy that prizes Information Age brains over manufacturing brawn. “We are determined to take our country back,” David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, said in Charlottesville. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. And that’s what we gotta do.

Let’s see if I remember all of this—born in Charlottesville, Virginia, but raised in Salem by her mother, Susan, a teacher, and her father, Jacob, a police officer. Attended Salem Elementary School until your tenth birthday, when your father called into his station to report an unknown child in his house—” “Stop,” I muttered. Liam looked over his shoulder, trying to divide his attention between me and the boy reciting the sordid tale of my life. “—but, bad luck, the PSFs beat the police to your house. Good luck, someone dropped the ball or they had other kiddies to pick up, because they didn’t wait around long enough to question your parents, and thus, didn’t pre-sort you. And then you came to Thurmond, and you managed to avoid their detecting you were Orange—” “Stop!” I didn’t want to hear this—I didn’t want anyone to hear it.

Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris in a table in the back, when I fell under the spell of Renée’s bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star’s Radio City. Renée was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song – the acoustic ballad Thirteen. She’d never heard their third album, Sister Lovers. So naturally, I told her the same thing I’d told every other woman I’d ever fallen for: “I’ll make you a tape!

In Germany, displaying the swastika is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. In the United States, the rebel flag is incorporated into the official state flag of Mississippi. It can be seen on the backs of pickup trucks north and south, fluttering along highways in Georgia and the other former Confederate states. A Confederate flag the size of a bedsheet flapped in the wind off an interstate in Virginia around the time of the Charlottesville rally.

The model for South America was Broadway actress Maxine Elliot. North America, a pretty blonde, was modeled on Maud Coleman Woods of Charlottesville, Virginia. (Sadly, she would die of typhoid fever that summer, ten days before McKinley arrived in Buffalo, thereby never living to see herself on a coaster, every southern belle’s dream.)

David Duke, the well-known former Ku Klux Klan leader, tweeted, “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville.

Senator John McCain called Charlottesville “a confrontation between our better angels and our worst demons. White supremacists and neo-Nazis are, by definition, opposed to American patriotism and the ideals

As we watched the Neo-Nazis march through Charlottesville chanting ‘The Jews will not replace us’ on their way to defend a statue of a man that fought a war to keep slavery, we are confronted by the lunatic contradictions of white- supremacist identity. While claiming to be supreme, these people clearly do not believe what they are selling, for if Aryans are inherently superior there would be no need at all to worry about Jews or niggers ‘replacing’ them. Surely an innate Aryan supremacy should make them by definition irreplaceable? This constant articulation of supremacy and victimhood has long been a cornerstone of white-supremacist discourse.

I don’t know what to say.” “Don’t try,” she said, sighing. “Oh, it’s so hot!” And thought, Indeed if I consider Charlottesville that will be all. Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the Brink. Which will be soon, and then the dark, and then be done with this ugliness …

Nuance is anathema to his thinking, which is why he can maintain such fidelity to his ideas in a-hundred-and-forty-character bursts.

Tomorrow I want to get a New York bagel and see how it stacks up against Bodo’s.” Bodo’s Bagels are legendary in Charlottesville; we’re very proud of those bagels. Putting my head on his shoulder, I yawn and say, “I wish we could go to Levain Bakery so I could try their cookie. It’s supposed to be like no chocolate chip cookie you’ve had before. I want to go to Jacques Torres’s chocolate shop too. His chocolate chip cookie is the definitive chocolate chip cookie, you know. It’s truly legendary…” My eyes drift closed, and Peter pats my hair. I’m starting to fall asleep when I realize he’s unraveling the milkmaid braids Kitty pinned on the crown of my head. My eyes fly back open. “Peter!” “Shh, go back to sleep. I want to practice something.” “You’ll never get it back to how she had it.” “Just let me try,” he says, collecting bobby pins in the palm of his hand. When we get to the hotel in New Jersey, despite his best efforts, my braids are lumpy and loose and won’t stay pinned. “I’m sending a picture of this to Kitty so she’ll see what a bad student you are,” I say as I gather up my things. “No, don’t,” Peter quickly says, which makes me smile.

To proclaim 'America First' was to deny any need to fight fascism either at home or abroad. When American Nazis and white supremacists marched in Charlottesville in August 2017, Trump said that some of them were 'very fine people.' He defended the Confederate and Nazi cause of preserving monuments to the Confederacy. Such monuments in the American South were raised in the 1920s and 1930s, at a time when fascism in the United States was a real possibility; they memorialized the racial purification of Southern cities that was contemporary with the rise of fascism in Europe. Contemporary observers had no difficulty seeing the connection. Will Rogers, the great American entertainer and social commentator of his time, saw Adolf Hitler in 1933 as a familiar figure: 'Papers all state that Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini. Looks to me it's the KKK he's copying.' The great American social thinker and historian W.E.B. Du Bois could see how the temptations of fascism worked together with American myths of the past. He rightly feared that American whites would prefer a story about enmity with blacks to a reforming state that would improve prospects for all Americans. Whites distracted by racism could become, as he wrote in 1935, 'the instrument by which democracy in the nation was done to death, race provincialism deified, and the world delivered to plutocracy,' what we call oligarchy.

None of the men I had in mind were Nazis. None resembled the men who’d marched through Charlottesville with tiki torches shouting, “You will not replace us!” But there was another spin on the game, and this was the one that worried me: Who in a showdown would accept the subjugation of women as a necessary political concession? Who would make peace with patriarchy if it meant a nominal win, or defend the accused for the sake of stability? The answer was more men than I’d been prepared to believe. I’d have to work harder not to alienate them, if only to make it harder for them to sell me out.

Additionally, if Trump's statement that there were fine people on both sides was referring to the two violent sides of the conflict, then saying that Nazis were fine people would also be saying that Antifa were fine people; no one can seriously maintain that Trump considers Antifa to be fine people.

Dennis Prager, the conservative Jewish thinker, noted that the lie is easily debunked. Because the core tenet of the Nazis is a desire to kill Jews, no serious person could believe that Donald Trump, the father and father-in-law of a Jewish couple (the Kushners) and the grandfather of Jewish grandchildren, would consider Nazis to be 'fine people'.

Fine people on both sides? I was disgusted. Here was the same man I’d gone on television to defend when I believed it was appropriate. While I hadn’t been a supporter at the start of his campaign, he’d eventually convinced me he could be an effective president. Trump had proved to be a disrupter of the status quo during the primary and general election. Especially when he began to talk about issues of concern to black Americans. Dems have taken your votes for granted! Black unemployment is the highest it’s ever been! Neighborhoods in Chicago are unsafe! All things I completely agreed with. But now he was saying, 'I’m going to change all that!' He mentioned it at every rally, even though he was getting shut down by the leaders of the African American community. And what amazed me most was that he was saying these things to white people and definitely not winning any points there either. I’d defended Trump on more than one occasion and truly believed he could make a tangible difference in the black community. (And still do.) I’d lost relationships with family members, friends, and women I had romantic interest in, all because I thought advocating for some of his positions had a higher purpose. But now the president of the United States had just given a group whose sole purpose and history have been based on hate and the elimination of blacks and Jews moral equivalence with the genuine counterprotesters. My grandfather was born and raised in Helena, Arkansas, where the KKK sought to kill him and other family members. You can imagine this issue was very personal to me. In Chicago, the day before Trump’s press conference, my grandfather and I had had a long conversation about Charlottesville, and his words to me were fresh in my mind. So, yeah, I was hurt. Angry. Frustrated. Sad.

In thirty years, the narratives of my sons will be different from mine. Because today I am telling my truth and standing in a pool of my trauma, making myself uncomfortable and, hopefully, making you uncomfortable too. Today, I am making it known that when color is clear, when race and inequity are not ignored, and when our differences are not only acknowledged but championed as one of the most valuable aspects of life, we can work together to make meaningful strides toward true social justice.

But as I reflected on what the president could have done or said differently, I also remembered what it felt like in the weeks following 9/11. When, for a few glorious weeks, we were all united as Americans. For a brief time, it didn’t seem to matter if you were black, white, or brown. We were all brothers and sisters because we were Americans. We shared certain values, a certain past, a certain goal. We haven’t really seen that since. Charlottesville, I knew, had the same potential to unite us. But Trump’s response derailed that opportunity. America didn’t need a stock statement. The country was pleading for a serious discussion about race, about our fundamental need to completely stamp out the Klan and neo-Nazis. I couldn’t help but think of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and the Charleston church shooting. Emmett Till and Jimmie Lee Jackson. Black Codes and the Southern Manifesto. Trump, I felt, had betrayed black America. And Jewish America. And American decency.

Through the fall, the president’s anger seemed difficult to contain. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury,” then followed up with a threat to “totally destroy” the country. When neo-Nazis and white supremacists held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one of them killed a protester and injured a score of others, he made a brutally offensive statement condemning violence “on many sides … on many sides”—as if there was moral equivalence between those who were fomenting racial hatred and violence and those who were opposing it. He retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda that had been posted by a convicted criminal leader of a British far-right organization. Then as now, the president’s heedless bullying and intolerance of variance—intolerance of any perception not his own—has been nurturing a strain of insanity in public dialogue that has been long in development, a pathology that became only more virulent when it migrated to the internet. A person such as the president can on impulse and with minimal effort inject any sort of falsehood into public conversation through digital media and call his own lie a correction of “fake news.” There are so many news outlets now, and the competition for clicks is so intense, that any sufficiently outrageous statement made online by anyone with even the faintest patina of authority, and sometimes even without it, will be talked about, shared, and reported on, regardless of whether it has a basis in fact. How do you progress as a culture if you set out to destroy any common agreement as to what constitutes a fact? You can’t have conversations. You can’t have debates. You can’t come to conclusions. At the same time, calling out the transgressor has a way of giving more oxygen to the lie. Now it’s a news story, and the lie is being mentioned not just in some website that publishes unattributable gossip but in every reputable newspaper in the country. I have not been looking to start a personal fight with the president. When somebody insults your wife, your instinctive reaction is to want to lash out in response. When you are the acting director, or deputy director, of the FBI, and the person doing the insulting is the chief executive of the United States, your options have guardrails. I read the president’s tweets, but I had an organization to run. A country to help protect. I had to remain independent, neutral, professional, positive, on target. I had to compartmentalize my emotions. Crises taught me how to compartmentalize. Example: the Boston Marathon bombing—watching the video evidence, reviewing videos again and again of people dying, people being mutilated and maimed. I had the primal human response that anyone would have. But I know how to build walls around that response and had to build them then in order to stay focused on finding the bombers. Compared to experiences like that one, getting tweeted about by Donald Trump does not count as a crisis. I do not even know how to think about the fact that the person with time on his hands to tweet about me and my wife is the president of the United States.

As she’s scrolling through her feed, a picture from the ski trip pops up. Haven’s in the Charlottesville Youth Orchestra, so she knows people from a lot of different schools, including mine. I can’t help but sigh a little when I see it--a picture of a bunch of us on the bus the last morning. Peter has his arm around me, he’s whispering something in my ear. I wish I remembered what. All surprised, Haven looks up and says, “Oh, hey, that’s you, Lara Jean. What’s this from?” “The school ski trip.” “Is that your boyfriend?” Haven asks me, and I can tell she’s impressed and trying not to show it. I wish I could say yes. But-- Kitty scampers over to us and looks over our shoulders. “Yes, and he’s the hottest guy you’ve ever seen in your life, Haven.” She says it like a challenge. Margot, who was scrolling on her phone, looks up and giggles. “Well, that’s not exactly true,” I hedge. I mean, he’s the hottest guy I’ve ever seen in my life, but I don’t know what kind of people Haven goes to school with. “No, Kitty’s right, he’s hot,” Haven admits. “Like, how did you get him? No offense. I just thought you were the non-dating type.” I frown. The non-dating type? What kind of type is that? A little mushroom who sits at home in a semidark room growing moss?

I was standing amid floor-to-ceiling shelves of books in wonder and awe when my view of stories suddenly and forever changed. There were enormous piles of books lying in corners. Books covered the walls. Books even lined the staircases as you went up from one floor to the next. It was as if this used bookstore was not just a place for selling used books; it was like the infrastructure itself was made up of books. There were books to hold more books, stories built out of stories. I was standing in Daedalus Books in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I had recently read Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book. I was alive with the desire to read. But at that particular moment, my glee turned to horror. For whatever reason, the truth of the numbers suddenly hit me. The year before, I had read about thirty books. For me, that was a new record. But then I started counting. I was in my early twenties, and with any luck I'd live at least fifty more years. At that rate, I'd have about 1,500 books in me, give or take. There were more books than that on the single wall I was staring at. That's when I had a realization of my mortality. My desire outpaced reality. I simply didn't have the life to read what I wanted to read. Suddenly my choices in that bookstore became a profound act of deciding. The Latin root of the word decide—cise or cide— is to "cut off' or "kill." The idea is that to choose anything means to kill off other options you might have otherwise chosen. That day I realized that by choosing one story, I would have to cut off other stories. I had to choose one thing at the expense of many, many other things. I would have to choose carefully. I would have to curate my stories.... Curating stories used to be a matter of luxury. Now it's a matter of necessity—and perhaps even urgency.

Charlottesville, Va. IT was 50 years ago tomorrow, on June 14, 1965, that I was arrested in Jackson, Miss., for parading without a permit. I’d driven south alone, at 18, from my home in upstate New York, as a volunteer in the civil rights movement on break from college.

A veces, a los políticos les gusta pensar como economistas y utilizan incentivos económicos para fomentar la buena conducta. En los últimos años, muchos gobiernos han empezado a basar sus impuestos de recogida de basura en el volumen. Si la gente tiene que pagar por cada bolsa de basura de más, razonan, tendrán un fuerte incentivo para producir menos. Pero esta nueva manera de gravar también da a la gente un incentivo para llenar aún más sus bolsas (una táctica que los responsables de la basura de todo el mundo llaman ahora «Seattle Stomp») o para tirar su basura en los bosques (que es lo que ocurrió en Charlottesville, Virginia). En Alemania, los evasores del impuesto de basuras tiraban tantos restos de comida por el retrete que las alcantarillas se infestaron de ratas. En Irlanda, un nuevo impuesto de recogida de basuras generó un aumento de la quema de basuras en los patios traseros, que no solo era mala para el medio ambiente, sino también para la salud pública: en el Hospital de St. James de Dublín casi se triplicaron los casos de pacientes que se habían prendido fuego mientras quemaban la basura.

Although it is useful to specify the incongruities of the fox-hunting ban, the definitive word on the hunt is Oscar Wilde’s: “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”. PAGE NELSON Charlottesville, Virginia

But data gathered by The Post shows that U-Va. campus police officers made the most arrests against students involving the purchase or consumption of alcohol last year, and 46 of the department's 89 total arrests concerned charges of public swearing or intoxication. In comparison, ABC special agents arrested seven people between the ages of 18 and 22 in 2014, two of whom were Hispanic, and the rest were white. Of the seven arrested, only three were charged with buying or drinking alcohol underage, all of whom were white. The other four were restaurant and convenience store clerks arrested for allegedly selling alcohol to underage patrons. During the same period, Charlottesville city police officers made 35 arrests against U-Va. students in connection with alcohol-related violations, while Albemarle County officers made seven arrests, five of which occurred at the spring Foxfield steeplechase races. The Post obtained arrest statistics from three local departments that patrol in Charlottesville: the city police, the Albemarle County police and the university's campus police. All three departments retain records noting how many U-Va. students are arrested annually. The departments did not provide demographic data related to the arrests. The ABC does not keep records about arrests of U-Va. students, said spokeswoman Becky Gettings, but does retain information related to offenders' ages. The data shows that Charlottesville and Albemarle

Last month, Charlottesville's police chief announced that his department was unable to confirm the gang-rape allegations published in the magazine. The police review, which included interviews with 70 people connected to the case, also showed that university administrators acted quickly to offer assistance to Jackie and investigate the allegations.

Let other people worry about the mafia, or gang-related organized crime. I live in the South. We’ve got Baptists. Their church-women whisper campaigns make J. Edgar Hoover look like an amateur. And anything found in Vogue or, in some cases, Charlottesville, was the lure of the devil and Satan’s snare.

We don't say "freshman" or "senior," etc, at UVA because Mr. Jefferson felt that education is a lifelong process. Thomas Jefferson- another gorgeous white boy who would not have been interested in me. This was my problem in a nutshell. To get some play in Charlottesville, you had to be either a Martha Jefferson or a Sally Hemings.

President Trump has changed the presidency by speaking for himself. A signature aspect of this characteristic is his facility with quick denunciations of melting intensity. In June 2017, the president criticized the mayor of London for being soft on terrorists just hours after his city was attacked. He dinged California forest management officials in the middle of record fires that were scorching acres in November 2018. The president sent twenty-seven tweets about NFL players protesting racial injustice by choosing to kneel during the national anthem, a practice he found repugnant. He tweeted eighty-four times suggesting that President Obama was not born in America. Whether his target is a federal judge, Gold Star parents, or weather-battered officials in Puerto Rico, Donald Trump says what is on his mind immediately and doesn't sweat the nuances. By contrast, the president's six tweets in the aftermath of the Charlottesville violence never referred to racism or bigotry or white nationalism. When Trump is passionate about something, it's unmistakable. So why did the president lapse into vagueness when it came to Charlottesville?

But I had planted a flag here. Answering a question about the Confederacy was even more foolhardy than investing campaign time. We had convened in the shadow of a Civil War battle, but I had every intention of responding to a question that might undo the goodwill I’d accrued. Patiently, I explained my deep animosity toward the Confederate generals’ carvings. The men glorified in the etchings had fought to keep blacks as slaves, and they had been willing to terrorize a nation to achieve their ends. I had grown up in a town where visiting the last home of the president of the Confederacy was a rite of passage for some, even though it meant tourists tromping around shacks where enslaved black men and women had lived in squalor and horror. Still, I explained, while I despised the monument to their evil, its removal wasn’t top of my to-do list. I’d not campaigned on the issue, but I refused to mince words when the question had been put to me in the wake of the tragic death in Charlottesville, Virginia. My beliefs and my biography could not change because of controversy.

For the rest of her life, this would be what Marilyn thought of first when she thought of her mother. Her mother, who had never left her hometown eighty miles from Charlottesville, who always wore gloves outside the house, and who never, in all the years Marilyn could remember, sent her to school without a hot breakfast

His grandfather, Carson Vandegrift, a Baptist deacon, was wounded during Pickett’s Charge, and young Vandegrift grew up hearing war stories from him and other Confederate veterans in Charlottesville.

Any influence that the journal might have had eroded further in the summer of 2017, after Trump’s tin-eared and self-indulgent response to the death of a counterprotester at an alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Krein disavowed his support of the president. In the pages of the New York Times, he wrote, “Mr. Trump has betrayed the foundations of our common citizenship.

If Trump had followed the example of his predecessors and conceded power graciously and peacefully, he would have been remembered as a disruptive but consequential populist leader who, before the coronavirus pandemic, presided over an economic boom, reoriented America’s opinion of China, removed terrorist leaders from the battlefield, revamped the space program, secured an originalist majority on the US Supreme Court, and authorized Operation Warp Speed to produce a COVID-19 vaccine in record time. Instead, when historians write about the Trump era, they will do so through the lens of January 6. They will focus on Trump’s tortured relationship with the alt-right, on his atrocious handling of the deadly Charlottesville protest in 2017, on the rise in political violence during his tenure in office, and on his encouragement of malevolent conspiracy theories. Trump joined the ranks of American villains from John C. Calhoun to Andrew Johnson, from Joseph McCarthy to George Wallace.

Biden’s commitment to this (Charlottesville ‘very fine people’) lie… showed how deeply committed the Democrats were to inciting racial hatred for their political gain...With racial progress in America so profound and widespread, the left had to escalate racial tensions to maintain an electorally advantageous level of outrage.

Preaching tolerance and respect for alterity while ignoring capitalism’s systemic violence produces a toothless anti-racism, an anti-racism only comfortable with blaming the type of behavior witnessed in the events of Charlottesville. This type of anti-racism is never sufficient to produce meaningful change.

Places we decide to stop. Monticello Plantation, Charlottesville, Virginia: Where Thomas Jefferson committed several sins; we go to stomp on hateful plantation ground.

Over one thousand people have left our church since I called out [the White supremacy rally in] Charlottesville and reminded our people “only Jesus is supreme.” And by the way, I’m bold and stubborn but very loving, gentle, and measured with my words. Yet we “beat people up over race,” “White people are second-class citizens,” and “it’s all Pastor talks about.” Never mind one would be hard-pressed to find a staff more committed to the exaltation of Jesus and His Word. Sigh. And then George Floyd and the Chauvin trial. . . . Still more loss, anger, and cost. It is idolatry and sinister and sick.

Why haven’t these Christian leaders spoken up about the killings of black men by police? Why haven’t they supported the #MeToo movement or railed against immigrant children being taken from their families? Why were they silent in the aftermath of the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia?

district court, Kirstein v. University of Virginia,20 may well mark the turning point in the long effort to place equal opportunity for women under the aegis of the Federal Constitution.21 The court held inconsonant with the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause the exclusion of women from the University of Virginia’s undergraduate school at Charlottesville; it approved a plan which, after a two-year transition period, requires the admission of women on precisely the same basis as men. Although sixteen years have elapsed since Brown v. Board of Education,22 Kirstein v. University of Virginia is the first decision to declare unconstitutional exclusion of women from educational opportunities afforded to men by a state institution.23 Significantly, “private” institutions of higher learning that might escape a constitutional prod confined to “state action” are beginning to volunteer similar reforms. For example, Cornell University’s College of Arts and Sciences announced during the 1969–70 academic year that it would admit women on the same basis as men and would offer students of both sexes the same options with respect to housing accommodations

Examples of this type of propaganda include the false and debunked portrayal of Trump as having mocked a disabled person, the false claim that Trump supported white supremacists and Nazis at the Charlottesville Virginia riots and the false claim that Trump supported a “Muslim ban.

Trump barely won the election, but his victory felt like he had split the land in two, and whatever was released from below sucked up most of the oxygen. For many, the far right had taken hold of the reins of government. Trump refused to condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. Tried to ban Muslims from entering the country. Turned on “enemies” within and without. He embraced draconian immigration policies—separating children from their parents and building tent cities to hold them—and declared the so-called caravan of refugees at the southern border a carrier of contagion (leprosy) and a threat to the security of the nation. Contrary to what he declared during his inaugural address, Trump did not stop the “American carnage.” He unleashed it. As the country lurched to the far right and reasserted the lie, Black Lives Matter went relatively silent, or it was no longer heard. Activists scattered. Many had suffered the

Following the 2017 attack in Charlottesville and the rise in white-nationalist terrorism over the past few years, Niya sees her work not just as an extension of her personal and intellectual commitments but also as a political commitment. She thinks Monticello has an important role in helping people reckon with who they are in relation to this country's history. "I think people come to us because they're grappling with their own identity," she said. "And Monticello in particular is a place that is so intimately connected to who we are, or who we believe we are, as Americans with freedom and democracy. Yet it's also a place of bondage, and now people are really, really grappling with that question. I think it makes our work here that much more important, that we are able, maybe, to navigate people through the conversation.

We all wish there were more of Laura’s stories. We have come to know and cherish their qualities of character and spirit. They have entered our lives and given them meaning. But if there cannot be more, may we make life stories of our own worthy of hers. Roger Lea MacBride Charlottesville, Virginia July, 1970

Against this background (North Korea missile threats), almost no one paid attention to the announcement by the Trump supporter and American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer that he was organizing a protest at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. "Unite the Right," the theme of the rally called for Saturday, August 12, was explicitly designed to link Trump's politics with white nationalism.

In the fall of 1958, Virginia’s governor Lindsay Almond chained the doors of the schools in localities that attempted to comply with the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. Thirteen thousand students in the three cities that had moved forward with integration—Front Royal, Charlottesville, and Norfolk—found themselves sitting at home in the fall of 1958.

As I prepared to publish this book, a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia took place. One woman, Heather Heyer, was killed protesting the hate spewed by the organizers of the rally, while several more were injured. Writing about a family dealing with its ancestors’ involvement with the KKK was at times uncomfortable. I was very concerned with getting the tone right for all readers, and I hope I’ve done so. One thing I do not worry about getting right is condemning hate speech and the very existence of white supremacist groups. We absolutely must do this—as a nation, as communities, as members of the human race. Hate is hate and I can’t ever fathom why anyone would choose that when love feels so much better and takes far less effort.

At some point it’s irresponsible not to connect what a man says with what he does... “Who Goes Nazi,” Dorothy Thompson’s famous Harper’s piece from 1941, sprang to the collective mind... None of the men I had in mind were Nazis. None resembled the men who’d marched through Charlottesville with tiki torches shouting, “You will not replace us!” But there was another spin on the game, and this was the one that worried me: Who in a showdown would accept the subjugation of women as a necessary political concession? Who would make peace with patriarchy if it meant a nominal win, or defend the accused for the sake of stability? The answer was more men than I’d been prepared to believe. I’d have to work harder not to alienate them, if only to make it harder for them to sell me out.

1834. In 1835 she died, and was buried in an unmarked grave that likely lies under a parking lot near the Hampton Inn in downtown Charlottesville.

During the Charlottesville protests, Trump saw nuance—there was violence on “many sides,” there was “blame on both sides,” and there were “many fine people” among the neo-Nazis.

And you had people - and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists - because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.

IN CONCLUSION Most of us alive before and during the 1960s have had images from the civil rights conflicts of that time held up as the epitome of racism. Today we have images of white nationalists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, to hold up. And while speaking up against these explicitly racist actions is critical, we must also be careful not to use them to keep ourselves on the “good” side of a false binary. I have found it much more useful to think of myself as on a continuum. Racism is so deeply woven into the fabric of our society that I do not see myself escaping from that continuum in my lifetime. But I can continually seek to move further along it. I am not in a fixed position on the continuum; my position is dictated by what I am actually doing at a given time. Conceptualizing myself on an active continuum changes the question from whether I am or am not racist to a much more constructive question: Am I actively seeking to interrupt racism in this context? And perhaps even more importantly, how do I know?

So when Trump, in his defense of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, claims that there is “literally no difference” between Lee and George Washington—both “owned slaves,” both “rebelled against the ruling government,” “both were great men, great Americans, great commanders,” and both “saved America”—he is equating Confederate nationalism and American patriotism. He is equating the defense of slavery with the revolutionary cause of independence and scolding the media for not getting the parallel.

Most of us alive before and during the 1960s have had images from the civil rights conflicts of that time held up as the epitome of racism. Today we have images of white nationalists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, to hold up. And while speaking up against these explicitly racist actions is critical, we must also be careful not to use them to keep ourselves on the “good” side of a false binary. I have found it much more useful to think of myself as on a continuum. Racism is so deeply woven into the fabric of our society that I do not see myself escaping from that continuum in my lifetime. But I can continually seek to move further along it. I am not in a fixed position on the continuum; my position is dictated by what I am actually doing at a given time. Conceptualizing myself on an active continuum changes the question from whether I am or am not racist to a much more constructive question: Am I actively seeking to interrupt racism in this context? And perhaps even more importantly, how do I know?

many Trump scandals and conspiracies—tool of the Russians, Charlottesville, Stormy Daniels, “shithole” countries, Sharpiegate, Ukraine, tax returns, Trump Foundation, and on and on—that I don’t think people could keep track of them all.

Standing on the back porch was Charlie Sneed, Clay’s friend and companion in hunting and fishing, woodcutting, drinking and poker-playing. Before the Depression he had worked beside Clay in the machine shop. Since the mill had closed he had become a backwoods Robin Hood, poaching game, some of which he sold in Charlottesville for cash money; the rest he gave to friends or families he knew to be in special need.

I want to make this clear: Putin’s government used intelligence tradecraft and social media savvy to lie to the American public throughout the 2016 campaign and afterward, and it was those lies that led directly to the deepening of divisions in our society, to the erosion of our government institutions and destabilization of our democracy, to Donald Trump’s election, and to the demonstrations of hate in Charlottesville.

appear “crazed or ugly or victims or just stupid.”4 Let’s step back for a moment from Charlottesville and try to figure out who these marchers are and what they represent. The ideologies motivating them are white power and white supremacy, ideologies that include a foundational belief in the evil nature of the Jews, Muslims, and people of color. According to the supremacists, these minorities are intent on harming “regular Americans.” They find one another at white power gatherings. They visit websites that promote neo-Nazism, white nationalism, and antisemitism.5 Many of them adhere to Christian Identity, a racist interpretation of Christianity that posits that there were two creations—one that failed, which explains the existence of people of color, and one that produced Adam and Eve.

Among the groups at the Charlottesville rally was the National Socialist Movement (NSM), which is probably the largest American neo-Nazi group. It reveres Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.

Also present in Charlottesville was Vanguard America, a group with increasingly strong ties to neo-Nazis. Its members believe that the United States is exclusively for white Americans and not for non-Christians, Jews, Muslims, or people of color. The car used to murder the counterdemonstrator sported a Vanguard America decal.

Charlottesville did not come out of the blue. We saw these extremists at work during the 2016 presidential campaign. They took particular aim at those Jewish journalists who they believed were either opposed to Trump or insufficiently supportive of him. During the primaries, Bethany Mandel, a self-described political conservative who has written for, among other publications, the Federalist and Commentary, tweeted what she described as “an offhand remark” about Donald Trump’s “legions of antisemitic fans.” She described the responses she received as “unlike anything [she had] seen before on Twitter.

In the month that followed the intolerable events in Charlottesville, America’s six top broadsheet newspapers ran twenty-eight opinion pieces condemning anti-fascist action, but only twenty-seven condemning neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Trump’s failure to disavow them.

At that point in the show, I broke down in tears. The pain and sadness I felt, that our president, this man I’d defended on prior occasions, could not bring us together when the country so desperately needed it. I have, of course, never met anyone who lived through slavery, but I have met people who lived through Jim Crow. The anger and frustration I felt at this time made me feel as though we were back in those very dark times. After the segment was over, I wiped away my tears and got in the car. I needed sleep, needed to clear my mind and heart.

The 2017 demonstrations against the planned removal of the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, established one thing beyond doubt: Nazis are not just a German problem. You may prefer to call the demonstrators white supremacists, but that’s a distinction without a difference. The deliberate use of Nazi symbols—swastikas, torches—and slogans—Blood and Soil! Jews will not replace us!—leaves no room for doubt. Not everyone who wants to preserve those symbols is a Nazi. But American Nazis’ embrace of the Confederate cause made clear that anyone who fights for those symbols is fighting for values that unite Nazis with racists of all varieties.

Trump bundles together Mexicans, Muslims, journalists, climate change scientists, “elites,” and the counterdemonstrators in Charlottesville as the enemy of what in his inaugural address he called “a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before.