https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/08/charlottesville-liberal-college-town-ground-zero-for-white-supremacy
The funny thing about Charlottesville, the idyllic town home to Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, is that no matter how horrific the events that occur here, the place always looks so pretty. This past Sunday, parents walked through the downtown pedestrian mall with their children, patrons enjoyed drinks outside, and some U.Va. students started to arrive early back to school and move into their dorm rooms. There were still visible remnants of the weekend’s terrorizing violence. Paint marks stained the sidewalks and streets from paint bombs thrown the previous day. Pieces of the metal barricade still circled Lee Park, recently renamed Emancipation Park, where a statue of Confederate hero Robert E. Lee has stood since the 1920s. This statue, which was the locus of all the weekend’s attention, remained seemingly unperturbed. The only visible change on Sunday, the day after the violence ended here, was a makeshift poster that now obstructed Lee’s name with a suggested replacement: Heather Heyer Park, the 32-year-old Virginia woman who was mowed down on Saturday by James Alex Fields Jr. in his gray Dodge Challenger. Heyer was dead, Fields was being held in the local jail, awaiting arraignment, but Lee sat unperturbed, atop his horse staring off in the distance.
Lee’s statue was erected as one of four sculptures donated to the city by Paul Goodloe McIntire, a Charlottesville native and U.Va. dropout who became a successful stockbroker and a generous donor to the university. The immediate inspiration for the statue was not declared, but it is seen by most residents here as a response to the founding of a local K.K.K. chapter in Charlottesville, which happened just a few years before it was erected. The statue has been a focal point since earlier this year when a local high-school student started a petition for its removal. The City Council, after some back and forth, voted to have it sold. Not long after, Richard Spencer, the U.Va. alum who came to national prominence when he hosted a Nazi rally in Washington shortly after Donald Trump’s election, subsequently led a torch-lit rally to protest its removal. In July, the K.K.K. held a rally here to once again protest the statue’s removal. Around 50 Klan members faced several hundred counter-protesters, and police made 23 arrests and used tear gas to disperse the crowds.
In June, Lee Park was renamed Emancipation Park by the City Council. Similarly, the Jackson Park, named after Stonewall Jackson, was renamed Justice Park. But no one had yet told Google Maps, or most of the older inhabitants of the city, among others. What descended on Charlottesville on Friday was, as U.Va. professor Charles Mathewes told me, “a kind of fascist lollapalooza,” in which a mix of white supremacist groups gathered here, led by two U.Va. alums—Spencer and Jason Kessler, a local Charlottesville man whose rhetoric has grown more vitriolic in recent months. Other Unite the Right protesters, with online troll names such as Baked Alaska and Millennial Matt, showed up promising to do battle.
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