Charlottesville: 4 Years Later
My Personal Account & Reflections on the Alt-Right Attack as a Black University of Virginia alumnus
4 years ago, on Friday, August 11th, I would start moving my belongings back into each of our college houses, preparing for my last school year at the University of Virginia. I then would head over to a small remote campsite right outside of Charlottesville for my Christian fellowship’s annual leadership retreat weekend, to prep for welcoming incoming 1st year (our term for freshman) students. That weekend also served as the last taste of summer vacation for our small group leaders before we had to go back to class. I had no clue that shortly after we left our beloved college town, which had become our home away from home these past 4 years, white supremacist neo-Nazis would invade it.
Cell reception was spotty at the camp so I would not receive the texts and calls from my family that Saturday the 12th wondering if my sister, who was also at the retreat, and I were aware of the violence happening downtown. I did not know they had learned from the news that a counter-protester named Heather Heyer had been killed when an alt-right member drove his car into the crowd of counter-protestors, mimicking the terrorists who drove their vehicles into crowds in Nice, France, and Berlin the year before. My sister was eventually able to receive a text and relayed to me and my friends that someone had been killed at the “Unite the Right” rally. At that time we didn’t know who had been killed or how, but I don’t think any of us even were even remotely close to predicting the level of brutality. I did not know that in those 36 hours we were gone, everyone at our retreat escaped the domestic terrorist attack happening back in our town. We would get word of the attack late Saturday afternoon and on Sunday drive back to a new reality.
My blood went cold Sunday morning when my phone finally grasped onto some internet access & I saw the photos. We had heard Saturday that the Unite the Right rally had turned into an attack but we still hadn’t learned the details. When I opened my news app I immediately saw an image of a car driving into a crowd, and my heart sank.
Later that afternoon and throughout the week I would see more and more disturbing images from that weekend. I became especially anxious when I saw the photos of the angry mob flooding the Rotunda building at the head of the Lawn. I worked at the Rotunda and some of my friends lived in the coveted Lawn rooms surrounding the open grass. Those rooms were in the prime location on Grounds (what we call campus) and the application process to live in one is ultra-competitive. It is supposed to be a huge honor. If you are selected it means you are one of the top outstanding students in your class. The rooms were meant for future leaders. Now they made their occupants seem vulnerable.
At the campsite Sunday morning our fellowship attended the last sermon of the retreat weekend. The Sunday sermon of retreat weekend is traditionally a light, hopeful, and optimistic sendoff into the new school year. This year that hope was tinged with sobriety and earnestness. We ended the weekend with prayers for safety, healing, courage, and strength as we prepared to leave the cozy bubble that had sheltered us.
Reality came in little sharp pricks, bit by bit making our community numb with pain. We returned to town, spotting news station crews. My sister and I ended up stopped at a light behind a car with a Confederate flag posted on its back window.
We saw our President’s public response. When he stated that he “condemned the violence on many sides,” it confirmed what we already knew: we were on our own.
In less than a week, freshmen would be moving in. I couldn’t imagine their parents’ fear, already compounded with the anxiety of sending their child off on their own into the adult world. I remember worrying about those kids the most, praying that they and their families would find peace. That class just graduated this past spring, and I think all of us who were in the classes above them that year are just as proud as I am of them for making it through these past 4 challenging years.
Our student body would start classes by the next Tuesday, trying to act normal, but it was obvious to see all of us carrying the extra weight of grief like an extra textbook in our backpacks. We tried to ignore how it was weighing us down, and maybe even got acclimated to it, but, despite efforts, we couldn’t get rid of it. When these things happen to your home it can feel like a personal assault. On the outside, you cope with the assault in whatever way you can, and then try to proceed with your life as normal. But the trauma lingers, and you eventually accept that you will never be able to go back to how it was. Even if your physical safety is restored, you’ll never again be oblivious to what it feels like when that safety is violated.
I would return to my workplace the first week of classes, knowing that the building had been swarmed with people whose ideologies convey that they think our country is better off with Black people like me in shackles like my ancestors, or maybe even dead. They perpetuate cruel anti-semitism, and have an unfounded belief in “the superiority of the white race.”
I usually worked the morning shift at the Rotunda. I loved being able to open the heavy main entrance doors to the vast green lawn when the church bells rang as the clock struck 9. It was usually still quiet at that time of day. Now that small peaceful moment of my day was intruded with the images I saw from that weekend. I would sometimes look out onto the lawn and imagine torches and angry screaming men.
The University’s security, of course, was heightened. At work, I got to know more security guards during my day shifts instead of only the night guard I was used to greeting whenever I took a closing shift. There were signs on building entrances specifically warning the public that firearms were not allowed. We already had strict security at events to prevent potential gun violence, but now we were on guard for more than just tangible weapons. Now, we now looked over our shoulders and jumped at the potential return of the bitter hatred that infiltrated our community that weekend.
To personally emphasize the detrimental impact of the alt-right attack, the public should know that by the time the rally happened, my graduating class had unfortunately already experienced multiple traumatic events during our 3 prior years at UVA. Events that made not just put us in the national headlines, but international ones as well. Like many Gen Z and Millenial students, we had become, for lack of a better word, “accustomed” to tragedy striking our school. Within the first month of our first year, a classmate named Hannah Graham went missing and was found murdered 5 weeks later, leading to the arrest of a man who had also killed a Virginia Tech student named Morgan Harrington in 2009. Harrington went missing during a Metallica concert at UVA’s basketball arena. Already deeply shaken by this disgusting act of violence towards women, less than two months later Rolling Stone would publish an article about an alleged gang rape that happened at one of the fraternity houses. While security and education about sexual violence increased this still added more anxiety among students. Those allegations ended up being rescinded, but we wouldn’t know that until almost the end of the school year. And even if it hadn’t happened at our school, we, unfortunately, could be certain that it had happened at others.
The next semester, a Black upperclassman named Martese Johnson was tackled, assaulted, and arrested by police over allegations of a fake I.D. on the strip of restaurants and bars that sat right across the street from Grounds. Our Black Student Alliance had meetings to lament with each other, organize how we would address the assault, and join Martese at his court hearing. The next year, over winter break, a classmate named Otto Warmbier was arrested in North Korea over allegations of theft, leading to a head injury that would put him in a coma. Less than two months before the Unite the Right Rally, he would be returned to his parents in a vegetative state before soon dying. My best friend, who was in the commerce school with him, was completely wrecked by his arrest and then again by his death.
And to be perfectly clear, I personally never felt that our class experienced these disturbing events solely because we attended UVA. Throughout all of the trauma I still loved being a Wahoo, and never once regretted nor questioned my decision to go there. I don’t put blame on the University because, in my worst-case scenarios, I could not have predicted that any, let alone all of these events would happen during my college career. These events were caused by decades of action and inaction in our society and government that all happened to attack our school and student body within a short period of time.
Just like our class and the other classes endured through those traumatic events, we got through the school year following the alt-right attack. We still accept that there will never be true “healing” or justice. We just try to learn and live in the “post-August 11th-weekend” world. I know that many of us still feel triggered and anxious when we remember that the rally really did happen. I don’t think there will ever be a day when I won’t tense up when I’m downtown crossing 4th street, now renamed Heather Heyer Way. And then this year I felt sick as I lined up some photos from that weekend with photos from the Capitol attack on January 6th. Some of the images were so similar I had to actually double-check which image was from which event. On January 6th I was able to watch the events unravel on Youtube and social media in real-time this time, less than a 2-hour drive from where I was. I watched in disbelief as I saw people with confederate flags storming the Capitol building, and again terrorizing the area many of my friends from UVA called home. I sent out texts to them, experiencing a sliver of what my parents and grandparents must have felt while watching the news on August 12th.
This is why I ask, please please please do not forget what happened in Charlottesville on August 11th & 12th, 2017. Learn from it. Learn about why these white nationalists felt they needed to come to our town and protest. Learn about the ideologies that fueled the rally, and the leaders that inspired it. Learn about the demographic of people who were targeted in this rally and why. Learn about the true history of Confederate monuments. If you do your research, you will, unfortunately, learn that events like the “Unite the Right” rally are nothing new in our country. August 2017 was just a younger generation using the methods of the generations before them, relaying the same dangerous messages, but now on a wider platform thanks to 24/7 news access and social media. But, there is a way out of this cycle. Learning from history is the only way we can prevent it from repeating itself.