THE STORY WENT something like this: A white woman pulled up to a Black Women Matter protest in Charlottesville and told attendees they would make “good fucking speed bumps.” When protesters confronted her, the driver cried and called the police.
If you were a student at the University of Virginia (UVA) during summer 2020—as I was—you almost certainly heard this tale. It was repeated hundreds of times, over group chats and Instagram posts and viral tweets. The rumors were given a sheen of legitimacy by local news reporting and were acknowledged by the university administration.
The allegations first attracted attention after Zyahna Bryant, a 19-year-old UVA student and social justice activist, made them on Twitter during the demonstration. Her account would be retweeted more than 1,000 times. “The woman in this truck approached protesters in #Charlottesville, and told us that we would make ‘good speedbumps,’” Bryant wrote. “She then called the police and started crying saying we were attacking her.”
Bryant also posted a series of videos—not of the alleged “speed bump” comment itself, but of its aftermath. In the videos, an SUV reverses down a street while Bryant and several other protesters follow. “It’s a Karen, it’s a Karen,” Bryant taunts.
Charlottesville Beyond Policing, the group that organized the protest, gave more details in a Medium post shortly afterward. The woman “drove around the public works truck blocking the street that demonstrators were convened on, and felt compelled to say, not just once, but twice, that protesters would ‘make good speed bumps,’” the post reported. “The second time she repeated it loudly to a Black protester and added ‘good fucking speed bumps.’”
Soon after Bryant’s tweets, the allegation was picked up by local journalists.
“While the group gathered on East High Street, a white woman drove around the public works truck blocking the road, and twice told the protesters they would ‘make good speed bumps,’” C-VILLE Weekly reported. “The threat is especially chilling and violent given that Heather Heyer was murdered by a driver just a few blocks from where the protest took place.” Heather Heyer was a 32-year-old woman who was killed during the 2017 Unite the Right rally when a white supremacist deliberately drove his car into a throng of protesters.
Videos captured by protest attendees show that a small crowd, including Bryant, soon gathered to confront the woman, who had since retreated to her car and appeared to call the police.
“Fuck you, I almost died in a fucking car accident…fucking cry bitch,” one protester shouts in footage of the incident.
“No one captured [the woman’s] words on camera. However, WUVA can confirm she refused to leave the scene even though protesters were asking her to, and at no point were protesters blocking her car,” the student-run website WUVA reported. It added that she “refused to leave until Charlottesville Police officers arrived at the scene in an unmarked minivan.”
Bryant sent her first battery of tweets within minutes of
