For the second time this election cycle Charlottesville has found itself mentioned on the presidential debate stage.
Vice President Kamala Harris called out the city Tuesday night in her highly anticipated contest with former President Donald Trump, referencing controversial comments he made after the deadly Unite the Right rally-turned-riot in 2017, which saw White supremacists descend on Charlottesville and come to blows with counterprotesters.
“Let’s remember Charlottesville, where there was a mob of people carrying tiki torches, spewing antisemitic hate, and what did the president then at the time say? There were fine people on each side,” Harris said on the ABC News debate stage in Philadelphia.
President Joe Biden has frequently referenced Charlottesville since 2017, saying Unite the Right, and Trump’s response to it, is what motivated his run for the presidency in 2019. Biden repeated that line in his June debate with Trump, a historically poor performance that prefaced Biden’s departure from the race and endorsement of Harris as his successor.
While Biden’s reelection bid has ended, Charlottesville’s role in the national spotlight has not. Tuesday was a reminder for residents that for most of the country and the world, the city remains defined by its darkest days.
“I travel a lot. When you say Charlottesville, it’s the first thing people think of,” Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told The Daily Progress. “I don’t like it. I’d prefer they think of the good things that are done here and at the University of Virginia. But that’s not reality.”
“Charlottesville is shorthand for a lot of unpleasant things that unfortunately now define our society,” he added.
Unite the Right was organized in response to the city’s decision to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from Lee Park, now Market Street Park.
The night before the planned rally, Aug. 11, 2017, protesters gathered early and marched across UVa Grounds wielding lit torches and chanting "Jews will not replace us." The march came to an end after marchers surrounded a small group of counterprotesters, many of them students, at the base of a statue of university founder Thomas Jefferson. Protesters assaulted the students and an unlawful assembly was declared.
The following day, when the rally was actually planned, White supremacists wearing Nazi and Confederate paraphernalia clashed again with counterprotesters, this time in the streets of downtown Charlottesville. One counterprotester, Heather Heyer, was killed after an avowed neo-Nazi, James Fields, drove his car through a crowd; multiple others were injured.
Images of the violence shocked the nation, as did comments then-President Trump made when asked about the incident.
“You had some very bad people in the group, but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. On both sides,” Trump said at an Aug. 15, 2017, press conference in the aftermath of the violence.
Trump’s critics say the former president was equivocating, comparing anti-racist counterprotesters to White supremacists.
“What American president would ever say Nazis coming out of fields, carrying torches, singing the same antisemitic bile, carrying swastikas, were fine people?” Biden asked at the June debate.
Both then and Tuesday night, Trump claimed the story about his Charlottesville comments had been “debunked.”
In defending that claim, Trump’s supporters point to another statement Trump made at that same press conference: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the White nationalists, because they should be condemned totally — but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and White nationalists, OK?”
Trump has not identified any of the "many people in that group." If there were "very fine people" among the protesters they would have been knowingly standing alongside Confederate and Nazi imagery and high-profile White supremacists, including provocateur Richard Spencer and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.
Interpretations of Trump’s comments are divided among party lines, even locally.
John Lowry, chairman of the Albemarle County Republican Committee, told The Daily Progress, “this notion of Trump endorsing White supremacists has been debunked,” pointing to Trump’s 2017 line that White nationalists “should be condemned totally.”
Bruce Kirtley, chairman of the Albemarle County Democratic Committee, doesn’t buy it.
"This guy Trump has an innate problem with the truth," Kirtley told The Daily Progress.
He compared Trump’s 2017 comments to his recent comments on abortion; in both cases, critics say Trump has taken unclear and even contradictory positions.
“He knows he’s got to walk a thin line, so he’s inclined to tell you what you want to hear when you want to hear it,” Kirtley said. “You can’t have it both ways.”
Both Lowry and Kirtley agree, however, that in the national memory, Charlottesville remains shorthand for extremism and violence.
When Lowry ran for Albemarle County Board of Supervisors in 2017, he said that Charlottesville would be forever remembered for that violent August weekend.
For Kirtley, the association is “just a fact of life.”
“You say Charlottesville, and everybody knows what you’re talking about, which is unfortunate in and of itself,” Kirtley said. “It’s something you can’t run away from.”
When Lloyd Snook became mayor in 2022, he was invited to speak at a conference in Austria about Charlottesville and antisemitism.
“That was my first indication that this was something that was more than just what we experienced here. That there were people who saw Charlottesville as a symbol of other things,” Snook told The Daily Progress. “I hope that if we can, as time passes, that the potency of Charlottesville as shorthand for the alt right, Nazis and so on will fade.”
How the rest of the country views the city is out of Snook’s control. As a result, he said he tries to focus on the work he does as a city councilor to improve Charlottesville bit by bit. But there is some frustration, for him and others, that despite sustained efforts to better the city and the quality of life of its people, its national image remains unchanged.
“I think the best thing we can do is keep doing what we can do to make a better name for Charlottesville and eventually that will have to fade," Snook said. "It’ll never go away completely. It’s a historical fact.”
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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