Summer of Hate: Charlottesville, USA

By Hawes Spencer

In August 2017, violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, during two days of demonstrations by white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and counterprotesters, including members of antifa and Black Lives Matter. Ostensibly motivated by the city’s plans to remove Confederate statues from two public parks, members of the alt-right descended first on the University of Virginia and then, disastrously, on the city’s downtown. As these violent and ultimately deadly events gripped the attention of the nation, extensive coverage in both mainstream and fringe media promulgated competing narratives.

Summer of Hate is the investigative journalist Hawes Spencer’s unbiased, probing account of August 11 and 12. Telling the story from the perspectives of figures on all sides of the demonstrations, Spencer, who reported from Charlottesville for the New York Times, carefully recreates what happened and why. Focusing on individuals including activists, city councilors, faith leaders, and the police, Spencer creates an objective, panoramic narrative that renders these dramatic events, and the ongoing conflicts underlying them, in all their complexity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Aug 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9780813942070

Book preview

1 CHARLOTTESVILLE

A TRAFFIC STOP

On May 25, 2017, a policeman in Maumee, Ohio, a small city ten miles southwest of Toledo, made a routine traffic stop of a Dodge Challenger for expired license plates.

Do you own this vehicle? asked the officer.

I do, sir, came the reply.

It’s a nice ride, said the officer.

Less than three months later, that ride would carry James Fields Jr. to Charlottesville, Virginia, to demonstrate, and clash, with thousands from every corner of the United States, some who shared his set of alt-right beliefs and others who emphatically rejected them. The Unite the Right rally, as the August 12 event was billed, was the culmination of a series of controversies and demonstrations that put the small southern city, home to Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia, at the center of a storm. It was a storm that had begun brewing years earlier when a city councilor provoked gasps by suggesting that a venerable bronze equestrian statue of Civil War general Robert E. Lee might be removed from a downtown park. It would take a high school student and another politician, Wes Bellamy, the only African American on the city council, to launch that process. And in doing so, they unwittingly propelled a local activist named Jason Kessler onto the national stage. By the time Kessler invited Richard Spencer, the National Policy Institute president who had popularized the term alt-right, and about a dozen like-minded white nationalists to Charlottesville, the town had already hit the map with a KKK rally and a torch rally led by Spencer himself. These spectacles provoked fear and soul-searching in a community that had perhaps hidden its racial past beneath a college-town surface of relative affluence and self-congratulation.

Unite the Right would become the largest gathering of white nationalists in decades, and from the moment it began with a Friday-night torch march along UVA’s hallowed Lawn, it became clear that Charlottesville authorities were not ready for what was happening. If the sight of torches, the smell of pepper spray, and the sound of recycled Nazi slogans like blood and soil made August 11, 2017, a bad day, what would happen on Saturday the twelfth would be much worse.

What was to be an afternoon of speeches extolling the supposed merits of a whiter America turned into a series of street brawls. The police chief declared the event itself an unlawful assembly, prompting cries of free-speech suppression, but James Fields Jr., one of the morning’s earliest arrivals, allegedly turned the day deadly, driving his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of celebratory counterprotesters and killing one woman. As her name, Heather Heyer, along with those of State Troopers H. Jay Cullen and Berke M. M. Bates, whose helicopter crashed after tracking Fields’s car, would forever be associated with Charlottesville, so would another name: Donald J. Trump. His many sides comment later that afternoon would, for many, come to define the man in the Oval Office.

CONSCIOUS SHEEP

When James Alex Fields Jr. lived with his mother, his car was known, according to a neighbor quoted in the Toledo Blade, for blasting polka, the folk dance music popular in the nations of the former Austrian Empire. But the young man would seize on more disturbing aspects of that region’s past.

The man who taught Fields history for two years described him as quiet and smart but unusually attracted to Germany.

He was a German-phile, teacher Derek Weimer told the Associated Press. He loved all the German language and culture, and of course that went much further and darker into Nazism and Adolf Hitler and views on race and white supremacy.

Fields’s former teacher also told the AP that his former student had confided that he’d taken medication to control schizophrenia.

I knew he had some really far-out beliefs, but I never thought it could come to this point, said Weimer.

At the time of his arrest, Fields identified himself on his Facebook page as Conscious Ovis Aries, Latin for Conscious Sheep. His page was filled with fascist and alt-right images including a picture of baby Hitler, Pepe the Frog, and a portrait of a crowned Donald Trump on a throne.

One classmate told a television station that Fields once showed up at school with a Hitler-style mustache. Fields’s roommate on a 2015 trip to Europe told the Associated Press that Fields, while there, denigrated France and conveyed that the only reason he took the trip was to visit the motherland, that is, Germany. Two others on that postgraduation tour told ABC News that when the group arrived at the Dachau concentration camp, Fields said, This is where the magic happened.

Later that summer, Fields enlisted in the U.S. Army, but he didn’t make it past boot camp.

There were other signs of trouble. When Fields was a teen living with his mother in suburban Cincinnati, she called 911 multiple times alleging problems with him, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. Confined to a wheelchair, the mother feared her own son, claiming that he hit her, spat on her, and threatened to beat her up. The Washington Post uncovered a call log suggesting that Fields was detained after an incident in which he allegedly stood behind his mother with a twelve-inch knife.

Fields never knew his father, who was killed by a drunk driver in a bizarre crash a few months before the boy was born in 1997. The Enquirer reported that the two survivors from the single-vehicle crash hitched a ride back to a bar and left the elder Fields to die alone and unreported. An uncle said that when James Jr. turned eighteen, he received the proceeds of a trust from his father’s estate.

Fields’s mother, Samantha Bloom, knew terror before losing her son’s father. When she was sixteen, Bloom witnessed her father kill her mother and then himself with a shotgun, the Enquirer reported. She apparently learned of the allegations about what her son did in Charlottesville from reporters who filmed an interview in her garage as she returned home from dinner August 12. Bloom told reporters that Fields—who lived in a separate apartment in the city and earned $10.50 an hour as a security guard—had asked her to watch his cat while he attended Unite the Right.

I didn’t know it was white supremacists, Bloom said. I thought it had something to do with Trump.

She can be seen expressing shock at the allegations.

Running his car into a crowd of people? she asks. Did it hurt anybody?

You haven’t been notified at all about this? asks a reporter.

Having learned some more details about the event, Bloom said she was surprised her son attended an event with white supremacists because he had an African American friend.

I try to stay out of his political views, she told the Blade. But she knew he was headed to a rally. I told him to be careful, she said. If they’re going to rally, to make sure he’s doing it peacefully.

NOT PEACEFULLY

The Justice Department announced on the day of the crash that it was launching a federal civil rights investigation with the assistance of the FBI and the United States attorney for the Western District of Virginia.

Appearing on ABC’s Good Morning America, Attorney General Jeff Sessions later called the vehicular attack domestic terrorism.

Fields was held on state charges: suspicion of second-degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding, and failure to stop in an accident that resulted in death. Within days, additional state charges were levied: two more counts of malicious wounding and three counts of aggravated malicious wounding. By the time of his preliminary hearing four months later, the murder charge had been upgraded from second- to first-degree, the category that involves premeditation.

VANGUARD CONNECTIONS?

Although Fields was wearing the khaki pants and white polo shirt that typify Vanguard America and was even photographed holding one of its shields, the alt-right group said such shields were freely shared, and it denied any prior connection. At a preliminary hearing in December, Charlottesville Police detective Steve Young testified that searches of Fields’s phone, car, and social media turned up no membership or even coordination with Vanguard America or with any other alt-right groups. Even the three people he walked with from Emancipation Park to McIntire Park after the rally was broken up were a chance meeting, Young said.

Photographs taken Saturday morning show a shieldless Fields having already arrived at Emancipation Park prior to Vanguard America’s group march into the park, which occurred at 9:23 a.m. One minute later, according to time stamps, Fields can be seen walking with the group back out of the southeastern entrance as Vanguard relocated to the reserved southwestern portion of the park.

Detective Young said that his investigation found that Fields traveled alone to Charlottesville to see one particular speaker. Young wasn’t asked who that speaker was. In his formal response to a civil lawsuit, Fields downplayed his connection to Vanguard America and his own culpability.

Someone he did not know handed him a shield, his lawyer, Denise Lunsford, wrote in the filing. He denies he planned violent actions or knew violent actions were being planned.

Lunsford and Fields appeared to be laying the groundwork for an accidental or self-defense explanation of the incident. In their answer to the suit, they deny Fields committed a car attack, a terrorist attack, or any attack at all.

A GOVERNOR COMES TO TOWN

In addition to Trump’s remarks, much of the media coverage in the aftermath of August 12 derived from a press conference convened by Virginia’s chief executive, Governor Terry McAuliffe, at the Albemarle County Office Building three blocks from Emancipation Park. Carried live by some cable news networks, the remarks included the governor saying Nazis . . . Go home and City Manager Maurice Jones revealing that the number of the day’s fatalities had grown to three, an apparent confirmation of the deaths of the two state troopers in the crashed helicopter.

Charlottesville mayor Mike Signer said he was pleased that President Trump had reached out to him and the governor. It’s unclear whether Signer yet knew of Trump’s equivocating statements about both sides, but Signer did take the opportunity to criticize the president.

It’s a very powerful office, said Signer. I do hope that he looks at himself in the mirror and thinks very deeply about who he consorted with in his campaign. I hope that he turns a page and works to bring some unity. And I hope he works to quell the forces of division and this outright visual terror and actual terror that we saw here in our city.

McAuliffe also paused to speak with reporters before leaving.

It is time for this nation to come together and to stop the hateful rhetoric, the governor said. We gotta bring people together. It is a disgrace these Nazis would come into our state to hurt our people.

A British-accented journalist then asked, Governor, will you condemn antifa as well?

McAuliffe did not respond.

The same question was asked four days later outside the Paramount Theater, where—after Heather Heyer’s funeral—McAuliffe denounced hateful rhetoric. Fox News reporter Doug McKelway asked: Governor, you’ve put down the violence on the right. Why not the left?

Again, McAuliffe did not reply.

THE CYBERATTACK

Around the time the governor was telling white supremacists to go home, the city’s website was going offline, the result of a cyberattack carried out by a group calling itself New World Hackers, a counterpart of the better-known Anonymous hacktivist collective.

At the time we saw the police were not so helpful, they left the people to die which forced us to target the Charlottesville website to give them a message, an unnamed member of the New World Hackers reportedly told Hackread.com. We are delivering our own version of justice to the KKK, and government, in whichever way we please.

The city’s website remained down or slow for at least a day, even reportedly interrupting email communications between officials, according to the city-commissioned inquest known as the Heaphy report, which noted that hackers were able to break the system by sending phishing emails to two Charlottesville Police captains.

MAKING CHARLOTTESVILLE THE CENTER

Appearing shirtless to show the skin rashes caused by getting hit by chemical irritants, Richard Spencer posted a defiant video on Periscope the evening of August 12 in which he blasted City Councilor Wes Bellamy as a house you-know-what and gloated over the legal support the rally had received from the ACLU.

You think that we’re going to back down to this kind of behavior to you and your little provincial town? he taunted. No. We are going to make Charlottesville the center of the universe.

BACK ON FOURTH STREET

There was talk of holding a vigil at UVA after the rally, but fears that it would be disrupted by white nationalists caused organizers to cancel it. People, eventually hundreds of them, met instead Sunday evening at the scene of Heyer’s death. Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell was handing out flowers.

It’s a little bit scary, she confessed, because we saw what was unleashed yesterday.

Marcus Martin, the man seen in red sneakers in the iconic photo of the crash being hurled into the air by the Challenger’s impact, arrived in a wheelchair. He, his fiancée, Marissa Blair, and others were wearing purple T-shirts with Heyer’s final Facebook comment: If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

And Blair, a close friend of Heyer’s, said the pain was just beginning.

When we started walking up the street, my heart started beating really fast, and I started shaking; and I felt like I wanted to cry, Blair told an interviewer. But I can’t even cry because I feel so numb.

Nearby, a young man named Andy Jenkins scrawled a message in purple chalk: Charlottesville stands taller than hate.

City Councilor Wes Bellamy chalked a message on the pavement to Heather Heyer.

Thank you for being a freedom fighter. And I love you.

And then he was asked how he felt.

Sucks, replied Bellamy.

DEATH OF HEATHER HEYER

She died of a heart attack right away at the scene. They revived her briefly, not consciously, just got her heart beating again, and then her heart just stopped, so I don’t feel like she suffered.

With those words, uttered by Susan Bro one week after her daughter died, Heather Heyer’s mother unwittingly unleashed a conspiracy theory: that her daughter’s death resulted from something other than the 2010 Dodge Challenger driven by James Alex Fields Jr.

Abetting this theory are videos of Heyer earlier in the day in which she’s shown holding a box of Newport cigarettes, dabbing her brow with a cloth just a second or two before the car roared down Fourth Street, and—there’s no delicate way of saying this—looking considerably heavier than the mourning photographs indicated.

However, as the Central District Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond confirmed to the media in October, the cause of Heyer’s death was blunt force injury to the chest. But the manner of death was left pending.

As her mother said, it may have happened quickly. The Charlottesville fire chief, Andrew Baxter, told the investigators for the city-commissioned Heaphy report that Heyer had already died when his department arrived but that firefighters continued to attempt resuscitation given the raw emotions of the crowd.

Susan Bro addressed the cause-of-death controversy herself in an early-February Facebook post: So, yet again, I am explaining why the white supremacists and neo-Nazis and Alt-right persist in the conspiracy theory that Heather died from a heart attack, she wrote. They use the story to try to absolve James [Fields] from guilt.

She reiterated the medical examiner’s finding, which was entered into evidence at the preliminary hearing for Fields in December. And though she acknowledged that she herself had used the term heart attack, she said it was the impact that caused the damage.

If you look at the videos of her being carried out on a stretcher, you can see the red mark across her abdomen, Bro wrote. There were additional injuries to her body, but I will let them come out in the trial next November.

Bro says her daughter’s friends told her Heather had been hit by the car, and video from her friend Marissa Blair clearly shows Heyer on Fourth Street at the time of the impact. Moreover, one photo in the sequence by Ryan Kelly appears to show the top of Heyer’s head as the Challenger closes in on the crowd. The subsequent image, the one with bodies flying, shows Heyer starting to contort at the moment of impact.

There are some who still will not believe, because they prefer to believe a lie than the truth, Bro ended her post. But I wanted to explain to those who may have been unsure as to how the rumor started.

A GOVERNOR IN CHURCHES

Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam joined Governor McAuliffe and Attorney General Mark Herring in attending services at two predominantly African American churches on Sunday, August 13.

I am here this morning, as your lieutenant governor, and also as a doctor, to start the healing process, Northam told congregants at the historically black Mt. Zion Baptist Church.

As a doctor and as a pediatrician, I’ve looked into the eyes of a lot of babies. And when you look into a baby’s eyes, you don’t see the hatred and the bigotry that we saw come to Charlottesville yesterday. And we have to ask, ‘Where does it come from?’

At First Baptist Church on West Main Street, the governor remarked that the helicopter crash was personal for him because pilot Jay Cullen had served as his pilot for more than three years and Berke Bates—part of our family—had served in his executive protection unit, the First Family’s bodyguards.

As Northam reiterated the racists, go home theme, the First Baptist congregation erupted in applause.

WHITER CHURCH HORRIFIED TOO

A few miles away, on Park Street, there is another church called First Baptist, but it’s predominantly white or a little bit more vanilla than most of the city of Charlottesville, as Pastor Rob Pochek conceded that same morning.

We grieve, Reverend Pochek began the ceremony. Hate begets hate, and violence begets violence; and we stand opposed to that. The hate that came to town this weekend was not only largely from outside of Charlottesville but in fact was straight from the pit of hell. The white supremacy espoused from the likes of David Duke and Richard Spencer is a lie straight from the pit of hell that cannot coexist with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The congregation erupted into applause, and he slammed the phrase, Jews will not replace us.

We are gathered here today to worship the lord Jesus Christ, who when he took on human flesh did so in the form of a Jewish man, a Middle Eastern rabbi whose skin was far darker than our own.

Just as an elder had urged across town at the other First Baptist, I want you to greet one another today, and I want you to say, ‘I love you.’ Pochek said.

Parishioner John Maderia of Goochland County celebrated the message.

We need more love, said Maderia. We need to love each other’s uniqueness and different backgrounds.

SACRED SCROLLS

Perhaps no house of worship would have felt more visceral fear on August 11 and 12 than Congregation Beth Israel, the city’s only synagogue, which is located between Emancipation and Justice Parks. Its members took the precaution of moving its trove of Torah scrolls off-site in advance of the rally. However, one scroll dated to the late 1700s and reportedly salvaged from a Nazi-demolished synagogue in what is now the Czech Republic was initially deemed too fragile to move. A Torah that somehow survived the Holocaust was, as one congregant put it, again threatened by Nazis. There were, however, no physical attacks on the Charlottesville synagogue. It has installed additional security and hired a guard since the violence in 2017.

HEATHER HEYER PARK?

As Charlottesville cleaned up from the carnage, there were many spontaneous expressions of grief and remembrance. On Monday, August 14, a man named Buddy Hensley showed up at Emancipation Park with a homemade sign renaming the space as Heather Heyer Park.

I just came in and decided people need to remember a life was lost.

Nancy Carpenter was already there with her sign honoring the thirty-two-year-old Heyer: She was one of our own, said Carpenter. It should be someone who really epitomizes what you say your values are as a person and as a city.

While the Robert E. Lee statue made the park a point of pilgrimage for white nationalists, Carpenter wanted a fresh start.

This space was filled with hate; let’s fill it with something different, she said.

While online petitions to memorialize Heyer were already garnering hundreds of signatures, Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, told the Guardian that her daughter wouldn’t want a statue.

The street, one of two that carry automobiles over the pedestrian mall, was reopened to traffic with Bro’s blessing on September 9.

NATIONAL RESPONSES

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion, tweeted former president Barack Obama on the evening of the twelfth. The quotation by the late South African president Nelson Mandela quickly became the most popular tweet in history and eventually tallied over 4.6 million likes.

Hundreds of communities across the nation held rallies for Charlottesville—so many that Vox Media published an interactive guide to finding one of the more than 682 Solidarity with Charlottesville events.

Just as Trump’s election led to the Women’s March, this white supremacist terror is sparking a nationwide outpouring based on the idea that we can build a democracy of shared religions and shared races, Ben Wikler, Washington director of MoveOn.org, told Vox. This attack is a reminder of the nation’s darkest heritage; the outpouring of solidarity following is a reminder of its best.

Unlike the Lawn vigil that occurred at UVA the Wednesday after August 11 and 12, however, some mourners demonstrated the behaviors that they claimed to abhor. For instance, on Sunday evening, a photojournalist for WTVR Channel 6 in Richmond had his skull bloodied while attempting to film a march ostensibly in memory of Heather Heyer.

In the journalist’s camera-phone video, a group marches on a street chanting, We’re here, we’re gay, we fight the KKK.

Suddenly flags obscure the view.

Stop filming, bro, shouts a demonstrator.

I can film whatever I want, the reporter replies.

His phone was then knocked out of his hands, and he suffered a wound that required a reported four staples to close.

In its account of the incident, the local antifa Facebook page blamed the injured journalist for having trolled a grieving crowd.

COMEDY TAKES A PAUSE

What happened over the weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, was just disgusting, said a tearful Jimmy Fallon of NBC’s Tonight Show as he skipped his usual comedic monologue the following Monday to deliver a serious statement. I was watching the news like everyone else, and you’re seeing Nazi flags and torches and white supremacists, and I was sick to my stomach.

Three days later, on a special summertime edition of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, 1992 graduate Tina Fey appeared in a UVA sweatshirt to deliver an at-times serious rebuke to white nationalism via sheet-caking, buying and devouring baked goods from minority bakeries instead of yelling at racists. (Nine months after skit, after revealing that she got pushback from fans, Fey said she was wrong to recommend simply shunning the alt-right.)

PART OF THE PANTHEON

Two weeks after August 12, the Reverend Jesse Jackson came to Charlottesville to give a sermon at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Unitarian Universalist church. There, on Sunday, August 27, the civil rights leader who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and later became a two-time presidential contender, expressed hope for a new monument in Charlottesville to honor the thirty-two-year-old victim of the car attack.

Where Lee’s statue was should be Heather Heyer’s statue—a healer, a builder who represents the Union commitment to one nation under God, said Jackson. She’s in the lineage of those who paid the ultimate price for a more perfect union.

Jackson said Heyer’s name and story should be learned by succeeding generations along with those who died during the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s.

Not unlike the babies burned up in church in that Birmingham church on Sunday morning, said Jackson, also mentioning murdered teen Emmett Till and the three civil rights workers slain in Mississippi.

Heather will live as long as we remember her, and we must never forget her, he said. Her innocent death touched all of us in deep and profound ways.

2 WHAT HAPPENED ON FOURTH STREET

A CELEBRATORY MOOD

Two hours after Emancipation Park was cleared, Unite the Right ralliers had largely moved to McIntire Park or back to their cars, so downtown Charlottesville now belonged to the counterprotesters. And by all accounts, there were two crowds of counterprotesters that converged by happenstance. One had been south of the train tracks watching a group of militia hounded by rock-throwing kids near a subsidized-housing project called Friendship Court. The other was walking east on Water Street with Industrial Workers of the World and Antifascist Action flags and Black Lives Matter signs aloft. There were people in rainbow-colored clown wigs, and someone was beating a drum.

They were marching east on Water Street in a celebratory mood, said Charlottesville detective Steven Young. They were celebrating victory.

Photographer Ryan Kelly, who had long planned to make this his last day as a photojournalist for Charlottesville’s newspaper, the Daily Progress, later told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, It was calm and as peaceful as I had felt all day.

There were chants: We shut it down, Nazi scum, your time has come, and Black lives matter. As the first line of the combined crowd began walking up Fourth Street toward the downtown pedestrian mall, they could be heard chanting, We’re here, we’re gay, we fight the KKK, and Whose streets? Our streets.

And then it all came to a crashing halt.

THE DOWNTOWN MALL

To understand the part of Charlottesville where the impact took place, it’s helpful to know that the Downtown Mall was built in 1976, extended in the 1980s and again in the 1990s. The original plan was not to allow any traffic to cross the bricked-over pedestrian blocks.