How a Hate Crime in a Southern City Foretold the Rise of the Far Right
Charlottesville always seemed like an odd place for Charlottesville to happen. Tucked away in Virginia's Blue Ridge foothills, the city long projected an image of gentility, civility and rationality. In 2017, before everything changed, Charlottesville was home not only to Thomas Jefferson's complicated legacy but also to a Jewish mayor, a substantial Black population and one of the country's elite public universities.
Now, however, the site of Jefferson's Monticello and 'Academical Village' is so synonymous with the frightful and portentous Unite the Right rally of August 2017 that no explanatory subtitle was needed for Deborah Baker's searching and personal exploration of her hometown's violent invasion, 'Charlottesville: An American Story.'
Baker's vividly detailed reconstruction is a worthwhile addition to a growing canon of narrative nonfiction aimed at documenting and interpreting the outburst of race- and hate-driven violence in America between 2015 (the massacre at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C.) and 2020 (the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis). Charlottesville, with its indelible video of torch-wielding Nazis and a careening Dodge death mobile, fell squarely in the middle of this stretch, an inevitable allegory for the rightward swerve of American politics under Donald Trump.
Baker left Charlottesville for New York after graduating from the University of Virginia in 1981 but was drawn back to examine how such a shockingly regressive act could take place in her seemingly progressive hometown. She is transparent from the get-go about her bewilderment that the storm troopers who gathered in Charlottesville might represent something enduring in American politics. 'Were they, like the election of Donald Trump, a harbinger of some future I was too old or ill-equipped to grasp?' she asks in her introduction. Many Americans — perhaps just under half — can likely relate.
Baker is clearheaded, however, about the 'direct path' between Charlottesville and the insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and, implicitly, the revival of Trumpism in 2024. She is equally clear that there were not 'very fine people on both sides,' as President Trump asserted three days after one of those people accelerated his car into a crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring at least three dozen others.
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