Very Fine People: Charlottesville, Eight Years Later

Aniko Bodroghkozy considers recent books on the 2017 Charlottesville attack as a watershed moment in contemporary neo-Nazism.

By Aniko BodroghkozyNovember 4, 2025

• Politics

• History

“CHARLOTTESVILLE.”

It has been eight years since an assortment of alt-right white nationalists, fascists, neo-Confederates, gun-toting anti-government militias, and Ku Klux Klan members descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, to “unite the right” and build a movement under the pretext of protesting the potential removal of a Confederate monument. It culminated in predictable violence, including a terrorist car attack by a neo-Nazi that injured dozens of counterprotesters and killed Heather Heyer. The movement then appeared seriously, and perhaps fatally, diminished, with various participants convicted and jailed, and ultimately the main organizers of the Unite the Right (UTR) rally found guilty of conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence. The civil trial, Sines v. Kessler (2021)—led by attorney Roberta Kaplan, famous for winning a sexual abuse conviction of Donald Trump—was intended to bankrupt the individuals and organizations behind UTR. It appeared to succeed. Until, that is, Trump won another term as president and his administration began putting into policy and practice much of the alt-right’s wish list from 2017.

The event now typically referred to as “Charlottesville” presaged something ominous about the direction of American politics and culture, and there is an ever-growing bookshelf of volumes attempting to make sense of what we locals call “the Summer of Hate.” Since last December, we have seen two new books of note: Deborah Baker’s Charlottesville: An American Story, a work of narrative nonfiction, and Timothy J. Heaphy’s Harbingers: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy.

These recent volumes share space with several other books that have come out in the intervening years since August 2017. The earliest efforts to tell the story of Charlottesville arrived within a year of the event, including a rushed-into-print volume (without index or bibliography) by a prominent Charlottesville journalist, Hawes Spencer, who had covered the events. He decided to tell the story thematically rather than chronologically, likely confusing readers without basic knowledge of what happened when and why. Also in 2018, University of Virginia faculty members produced an anthology with contributors bringing their various scholarly tools to the task of understanding the historical, political, ethical, and personal context of Charlottesville’s Summer of Hate.

Three Virginia politicians then jumped into the publishing fray. Virginia’s Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe published a book in 2019 that relied significantly on his law enforcement partners to tell his story, thereby inviting ire from Charlottesville’s anti-racist counterprotesters who had faced down the UTR rioters with little to no protection from either local or state police. Charlottesville’s mayor Michael Signer and vice mayor Wes Bellamy, both of whom had garnered a lot of mass media attention during and immediately after the calamity, followed with their own books. Each of these three men told the story by putting himself at the center.

In 2023, journalist Nora Neus published an oral history that foregrounded those who stood up and confronted the white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Another book from that year was mine. As a media historian who has written about the Civil Rights Movement and its television coverage, I tried to make comparative historical sense of it all (and also wrote about it for LARB). Noted fiction writer Ann Beattie, who lived in Charlottesville until 2013 and taught at the University of Virginia (UVA), shone a fictional lens on the subject with a collection of short stories, most of which focused on privileged white Charlottesville residents largely trying to ignore what had occurred in 2017 and the ongoing reverberations.

That’s a lot of books about one event. So why do Americans need to revisit and reexamine “Charlottesville,” especially now? The UTR rally put on worldwide display a media-savvy and well-organized manifestation of American fascism and emboldened masculinist white supremacy. American national politics have faced protofascist and right-wing extremist threats before, from the resurgent KKK in the 1920s to a domestic Nazi movement in the 1930s and early ’40s. They never reached right into the White House—until now.

Many Americans may still be uneasy equating Trump with UTR (he did, of course, proclaim that there were “very fine people” among the rallygoers). The New York Times recently published a front-page story about how Trump’s White House has embraced and mainstreamed the extremist politics championed by the alt-right in 2017. How Charlottesville as a community and as a set of institutions—law enforcement, government, university—responded in 2017 provides useful models and cautionary tales for how Americans and their institutions may need to consider responding to the current political environment.

Baker’s narrative history, with a significant focus on those who actively opposed and resisted UTR, and Heaphy’s more policy-oriented volume on how to preserve democracy, based on his investigations of both the violence in Charlottesville and at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, help to clarify the stakes of it all. Both volumes encourage readers to think about how to respond to the threat posed by the extremist politics gripping the country right now.

Every one of the books I’ve mentioned has one thing in common: authors who draw attention to their Charlottesville connections, whether they were in town during the weekend of August 11–12, 2017, or not. Since the events are not yet capital-H History, all attempt to demonstrate their standing and authority to tell their versions of the story (I did this myself, although only in an afterword of personal narrative in a book that was mostly a work of media analysis). Neither Baker nor Heaphy was in Charlottesville that weekend, but both go to considerable lengths to insist on their C’ville cred.

Baker grew up in Charlottesville and attended UVA, and in 2017 her mother still lived in town. But Baker has resided in New York for decades. She visited on the second anniversary of UTR with a bunch of questions, including “what hadn’t I understood about the city I was born in?” Heaphy still lived in Charlottesville (he was UVA’s chief legal counsel and went on to lead the investigations into both UTR and the Capitol insurrection) but felt it important to tell his readers why he’d been absent that particular weekend: he was in Washington, DC, watching his daughter’s baseball game, and family came first. Like Baker, in trying to grapple with the whys and hows of UTR, Heaphy realized that “his” Charlottesville obscured a less lovely version of the city experienced by the less privileged. It was only following the Summer of Hate, Heaphy writes, “that I began to understand my community in all its contradictions.”

Baker and Heaphy come to their projects articulating a similar privileged white innocence. Charlottesville in 2017 ripped that innocence from them, and their books are an attempt to come to grips with what they had never quite noticed before.

In Baker’s case, she relies on the wisdom of a local African American pastor, Reverend Brenda Brown-Grooms, who asserts that no one in the Black community was surprised by UTR or thought the rioters were all outsiders. Baker finds that she needs to listen to the counterprotesters and clergy (many of the same people platformed in Nora Neus’s oral history) in order to begin to understand and examine the town’s long history of systemic racism.

Heaphy’s naivete largely revolves around law enforcement. He points out his own personal and family background related to policing. His father was head of the Washington DC Police Foundation and had written a book in the 1970s on the future of policing, with an argument that police agencies needed to be responsive to their communities. Heaphy’s own stint as US attorney for the Western District during Barack Obama’s presidency necessitated relationships with law enforcement. Heaphy declares his respect for police officers, most of whom, he insists, want to serve their communities. But the scales fall from his eyes as he discovers woeful mismanagement by police leadership, both in Charlottesville and at the Capitol. There were ample resources and good intelligence available to law enforcement agencies to protect the safety of the Charlottesville public and people at the Capitol. In both cases, those leaders didn’t act on what they knew. Why not? Because law enforcement leaders underestimated violence from white men while overestimating potential violence from people of color. No one in Black or Brown communities would have found Heaphy’s discovery anything but obvious.

Baker, a historian and essayist, brings storytelling and a compelling cast of characters to her attempt to make meaning of what happened in Charlottesville, focusing on those directly involved in the events. While Baker interviewed numerous individuals in Charlottesville who opposed the white supremacists, she made the conscious decision not to seek out any UTR participants to avoid normalizing them or their perspectives. Instead, Baker relies on their own often copious social media postings and, most productively, on the testimony given by key organizers of the rally under oath in the Sines v. Kessler civil trial.

Why does it matter how white nationalists and neo-Nazis are portrayed in accounts of what happened in Charlottesville? In the lead-up to the UTR rally and in its aftermath, local anti-fascist activists excoriated journalists who, in the name of balance, wanted to pair their interviews with counterprotesters alongside interviews of UTR leaders. For anti-fascists, this false moral equivalence only served to platform neo-Nazis, suggesting that they were legitimate political actors. Many activists refused media requests if alt-right figures were going to be given space to speak.

Baker largely embraces this deplatforming philosophy, but because she’s doing a narrative history, she does highlight particular individuals. Richard Spencer, the face of the alt-right movement at the time, figures prominently in Baker’s narrative. Could she have given readers what they needed to know without devoting so much attention to Spencer? Probably not, but I felt a certain queasiness about the amount of space he commands in this book, even as Baker avoided interviewing him or any of his confederates.

One of the book’s heroes is Emily Gorcenski, a trans anti-fascist data scientist who infiltrated the UTR’s online organizing spaces and publicly taunted Spencer and his fellow organizers in order to deflect attention from vulnerable counterprotesters. Gorcenski was also physically present during the protests, standing at the Thomas Jefferson statue, the terminus of the August 11 tiki torch parade on UVA’s Central Grounds. This is where the marchers encountered a small contingent of student counterprotesters and proceeded to pummel them while Gorcenski live streamed and was herself attacked. Her actions have received significant attention in the other Charlottesville books (including mine) and in news documentaries.

Baker’s book also focuses attention on the role of the clergy in the growing anti-racist, anti-fascist movement in Charlottesville. Baker covers the Clergy Collective, a group formed in the aftermath of the 2015 Mother Emanuel church massacre committed by a white supremacist, as well as the more militant Congregate C’ville, which grew from the Clergy Collective and became, as Baker puts it, “the holy core” of the town’s activist response to the alt-right onslaught. Baker notes that the collective was led by Black clergy with actual congregations for which they had pastoral responsibility; Congregate’s leaders, on the other hand, were young white ministers without their own parishes and flocks, and with more radical politics. The latter were the ones who put their bodies on the line on August 12, presumably because their white privilege made that risk a little easier.

Baker brings a sympathetic stance to most of the Charlottesville characters she profiles, but she provides very little grace to Mayor Mike Signer (full disclosure: since C’ville is a small place, I know Signer personally, as well as many of the other Charlottesville people profiled in Baker’s book). If Signer isn’t quite a villain in this story, he’s a bit of a heel. She emphasizes his flip-flopping on the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, his attempt to move the UTR rally to a bigger park outside the Downtown core, and his penchant for publicity. Signer actually had little authority to do anything (Charlottesville has a “weak mayor” system, in which an unelected city manager makes most of the operational decisions), but Signer did make himself the official face of the city. In Baker’s narrative, Signer uses his mayoral position as a platform for higher political aspirations and cynically deploys his connections to Judaism (suspect to one interviewee, apparently) in order to advance himself.

Signer was despised by some in the anti-racist activist community; the criticism of local and state political and law enforcement leadership is quite valid. Heaphy, in particular, castigates the last-minute attempt to move the UTR rally location as one of the reasons the city had less time to focus on properly planning for a confrontation downtown. Heaphy places the blame on an all-Democratic city council and speculates about whether a more politically diverse body, perhaps less inclined to placate Democratic constituents, might have made better decisions. Baker blames Signer. It’s possible that, because Baker wants to uplift the activists who stood up to the alt-right, she ends up amplifying the animus against Signer that some of those activists continue to feel.

Baker’s storytelling abilities are at their best when narrativizing the city’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces, whose recommendations put Charlottesville in white supremacists’ crosshairs. The commission was established in 2016, after Zyahna Bryant, at the time a 15-year-old African American high schooler, started a petition to take down the Lee statue and rename the park where it was located. The petition was then taken up by Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy, and in response to growing interest in the cause, the city established the commission to take public comment and explore options (in his own book, Signer takes credit for its creation). Five months of public meetings could make for dry reading, but Baker, who relied on audio recordings of the hearings and deliberations, makes the process come alive, as citizens and others grapple with what the statues mean.

One citizen, for example, Lewis Martin III, argued that the Lee statue wasn’t an emblem of Jim Crow (the statue went up in 1924, when segregation laws were becoming fully entrenched in the South) but rather a commemoration of the local soldiers who had defended the town during the Civil War. Martin’s nemesis in the hearings was Jalane Schmidt, a UVA faculty member who had been delving into local history. She pointed out that when Union soldiers liberated the town on March 3, 1865, 52 percent of the population consisted of enslaved African Americans. Who were Confederate soldiers “defending,” exactly? For the majority of Charlottesville’s population, this was Liberation Day. (Starting in 2019, Charlottesville has officially commemorated Liberation and Freedom Day every March 3.)

Reflecting the conflicted ways that residents understood the Confederate statues, the Blue Ribbon Commission ultimately came to a similarly conflicted recommendation: the city could either alter the Robert E. Lee statue or remove it. Following the UTR rally, few Charlottesville residents could look at the Lee statue and see anything but a reminder of that violent weekend. In the summer of 2021, all the city’s Confederate monuments were finally removed by a Black-owned removal company.

Baker’s book culminates with the violent clashes of August 12, as counterprotesters faced off against UTR participants in the streets around the renamed Emancipation Park. There were cameras everywhere, with both credentialed and citizen journalists, along with activists, recording and live streaming. The visual archive for reconstructing what happened on the streets that day is quite massive.

For historians and chroniclers, there is both benefit and curse in having such abundant documentary evidence. Baker clearly sees her book as a definitive account, and so provides an exhaustive, kaleidoscopic detailing of it all. We get an almost minute by minute multiperspectival account, starting with the foggy, humid early morning gathering and march led by clergy and counterprotesters, followed by the clashes around Emancipation Park that began a few hours later and seemed to go on forever while police stood by as onlookers behind barricades. We later witness the horrifying car attack on the counterprotesters who were marching down a narrow Downtown side street two hours after officials had finally declared an unlawful assembly, scattering angry UTR participants throughout the Downtown area.

Baker tries to hold it all together by highlighting specific counterprotesters and what they did and thought, giving readers characters to follow. I appreciated the forensic description, since media coverage made it difficult to distinguish between UTR participants and counterprotesters. Still, Baker’s account is sometimes so painstakingly granular that some readers might have appreciated a less maximalist approach.

Ultimately, Baker’s narrative is dedicated to the activists and counterprotesters, as well as to the sheer necessity of showing up even when (or especially because) the threat of fascist violence was so great. Had community members stayed home (Beattie’s short stories in Onlookers largely focus on these kinds of people), not “taken the bait” as local politicians like Signer counseled, the alt-right would have declared a win and departed Charlottesville further emboldened.

Unlike Baker, Timothy Heaphy is not a storyteller. Harbingers is mostly a policy book, and inevitably a drier read than Baker’s page-turner. Heaphy, ultimately, wants to propose solutions to the alarming rise of political violence in the United States. His tale of Charlottesville is inextricably linked to the story of what happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Of course, Charlottesville activists saw that linkage right away. One of Heaphy’s key takeaways is the way that law enforcement leadership underestimated white male violence, which resulted in a lack of preparation, despite access to reliable intelligence and ample warnings. Police should have been prepared because both events were planned online in plain view. Both the alt-right and the January 6 “Stop the Steal” organizers exploited the power of social media and the algorithmic amplification of increasingly extreme content. Additionally, the echo chamber quality of contemporary media and politics encouraged the metastasizing of anger and distrust of institutions (and still does). So couldn’t law enforcement have seen this all coming?

Heaphy proposes legislative remedies. He highlights a bill repeatedly brought before Congress called the Filter Bubble Transparency Act, which would require internet companies to disclose algorithms used to curate content in users’ social media feeds and allow those users to switch and see content that has not been secretly tailored via algorithms. This bipartisan proposal died in 2023. It’s hard to imagine anything like it succeeding in today’s environment, wherein tech overlords like Mark Zuckerberg have toadied up to Trump by dismantling much of their companies’ already anemic protocols for curbing disinformation and hate speech.

This is the problem with Heaphy’s policy and legislative-remedies approach to understanding Charlottesville and January 6: he obviously finished this book before Trump 2.0. Consider some of his other policy suggestions. He argues for ongoing (not one-and-done) training for law enforcement personnel on implicit bias. He helpfully points to Obama-era training requirements for federal law enforcement agents. Considering how the Trump administration has been dismantling anything that bears the slightest whiff of diversity, equity, and inclusion, this all feels sadly obsolete.

Heaphy also writes about our current inability to protect democracy, providing a long discourse on gerrymandering and incumbency, and how they, along with algorithmically fueled echo chambers, increase partisanship and extremism. He characterizes American politics as “frozen,” unable to address pressing issues. And yet, at the moment, American politics is anything but frozen. Heaphy’s book may have been published in 2025, but he speaks to a political landscape that has been almost entirely washed away. An emboldened Trump has bypassed Congress, ignored the courts, and, via executive fiat, remade the United States in his own image and the images of his most ardent supporters—those who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 and rioted at the Capitol in 2021. Those events were harbingers of the current breakdown in pluralistic democracy. “You will not replace us” is now White House policy.

Heaphy notes the frightful landscape of political violence and the precarious state of American democracy, but he doesn’t have a lot to say about forms of communal resistance like Baker does. Instead, he points to individual heroes: in Charlottesville, Heather Heyer, who gave her life standing up for racial justice, and her mother Susan Bro, who publicly took up her daughter’s cause. He also extols the lone Charlottesville police officer who defied stand-back orders and tried to prevent violence around Emancipation Park. With January 6, it’s notable that many of his heroes are Republican politicians—most of whom no longer hold office. Ironically, Heaphy’s book only stands to highlight how policy and individual activity have not been sufficient. Increasingly, it appears that collective resistance may be one of the few remedies left.

We have to remember that this has worked in the past. A week after Charlottesville, 40,000 people in Boston shut down a planned neo-Nazi “free speech” rally slated to include UTR speakers. Richard Spencer canceled his campus speaking tour because he encountered so much opposition. “Antifa is winning,” he conceded. The crescendo of that particular movement was the mass protest during the 2020 “Summer of George Floyd.” It seems as if, with Trump’s 2024 win, that energy dissipated, but there are very notable exceptions—for example, pro-Palestinian protests on campus, as well as the pushback around ICE raids on immigrant communities. And most recently, the “No Kings” rallies across the country that drew millions may suggest collective resistance is staging a comeback.

Baker’s epilogue quotes an activist who had joined clergy at the edge of Emancipation Park trying to block UTR marchers from entering. He spoke to the situation in 2020, but I think what he observed then is even more relevant in 2025: “We’re in the shit. America is Charlottesville now. Everywhere is Charlottesville.” And yet, despite being in the shit, he stood up and resisted. This was the Charlottesville model of how to respond effectively to the threat posed by American far-right extremism. If America is Charlottesville now, all of these books should be required reading.

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Featured image: Cover of Charlottesville: An American Story by Deborah Baker, photo originally by Ézé Amos.