Simon Cox Blog: Dispatches from Charlottesville: What Happens When Neo-Nazis Are Outside Your Church Doors

Monday 14 August 2017

Dispatches from Charlottesville: What Happens When Neo-Nazis Are Outside Your Church Doors

The protesters came with torches. We sang, “This Little Light of Mine.”

I have lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, for five years. I used to work along the city’s Downtown Mall, the shop-lined pedestrian street where Heather Heyer was killed this weekend by a participant in a neo-Nazi rally.

The place I viewed as a microcosm of Charlottesville’s contented citizens and progressive politics—packed with townies in hiking gear or polo shirts and families making their way to the children’s museum—turned into a landmark for racist violence.

Inspired by the legacy of its beloved founder, Thomas Jefferson, Charlottesville is a town enamored with its values. We pride ourselves on community, innovation, and progress. Yet, throughout the city’s history, the economically secure white population has experienced a very different Charlottesville than the rest.

It took me a while to realize the extent of segregation in the city, but the signs were there. Beyond the racial segregation by neighborhood, there’s the cultural divide between conservative Southerners and liberal-leaning University of Virginia (UVa) professors and grads. Heightened economic disparity and rising housing costs in this “happiest town in the USA” certainly aren’t helping. We are united by our bordering-on-idolatrous love for our city, but sometimes that’s all that connects us.

Because of this demographic diversity, Charlottesville lives in the tension of its progressive values and its failure to live up to them. Nothing more effectively demonstrates this tension than the events of last weekend. While the majority of white supremacist protesters were not from here, notable UVa grads Jason Kessler, who initiated and organized the rally, and Richard Spencer, who popularized the ...