Charlottesville
An American Story
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- ¥1,500
発行者による作品情報
In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city’s historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far right cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a throng of counterprotesters, killing a young woman and injuring dozens.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker has written a riveting and panoptic account of what unfolded that weekend, focusing less on the rally’s far right leaders than on the story of the city itself. University, local, and state officials, including law enforcement, were unable or unwilling to grasp the gathering threat. Clergy, activists, and organizers from all walks of life saw more clearly what was coming and, at great personal risk, worked to warn and defend their city.
To understand why their warnings fell on deaf ears, Baker does a deep dive into American history. In her research she discovers an uncannily similar event that took place decades before when an emissary of the poet and fascist Ezra Pound arrived in Charlottesville intending to start a race war. In Charlottesville, Baker shows how a city more associated with Thomas Jefferson than civil unrest became a flashpoint in a continuing struggle over our nation’s founding myths.
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In this captivating account, Pulitzer finalist Baker (The Last Englishman) brings a historian's insight to bear on a minute-by-minute report of the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., when white supremacists rioted against a city council vote to relocate a statue of Robert E. Lee. Baker begins by profiling Zyahna Bryant, a Black high school student whose school paper set in motion the series of events that led to the vote to remove the statue. Baker follows Bryant as she organizes protests and stands up to the neo-Confederate Army of Northern Virginia Mechanized Cavalry, so named "for their fondness for high end pickups." The group undertook a harassment campaign against Bryant that Baker points out merged old-school Southern racial intimidation with a new online style of attack forged during 2014's Gamergate. Later, Baker narrates the harrowing events of August 12 in exacting detail. As it progresses, her account becomes, fittingly, a description of battle: anti-fascists create a "corridor" in the crowd; advancing columns of Nationalist Front militia outflank members of the far-left Industrial Workers of the World with "furled flags and locked arms." Throughout, Baker offers historical context, from an analysis of the "Lost Cause" myth to a particularly fascinating tangent on John Kasper, a Greenwich Village bohemian turned vociferous segregationist who traveled to Charlottesville in the 1960s to oppose school integration, armed with speeches "all provided to him" by his mentor Ezra Pound. This brings history and current events into illuminating dialogue.
