Charlottesville divided by identity crisis
A year after racist rally, city is still locked in a tug of war over its soul
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA.— In the days following the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville last summer, angry residents took over a city council meeting, screaming and weeping into the microphone. They blamed leaders for failing to stop hordes with guns, swastikas and Confederate flags from descending on the city.
“Why did you think that you could walk in here and do business as usual after what happened?” Nikuyah Walker, one of the activists there that day, bluntly asked the sitting mayor.
Today, in a sign of how much has changed since white nationalists rallied here and shocked the nation, Walker is mayor herself, the city’s first Black woman to serve in that role. Since the rally, nearly every official who held power at the time has resigned or retired.
Instead of uniting the right, the rally’s purported goal, it empowered a leftist political coalition that vows to confront generations of racial and economic injustice. But despite the dramatic overhaul of the city’s leadership, wholesale change has been slow to take hold.
The bronze Confederate generals that ignited the rally still sit on horseback in public parks. Activists still demand their removal. A judge still forbids it.
Nearly a year after the rally, which featured beatings, brawls and a car that plowed into a crowd of anti-racism counterprotesters, killing one and injuring more than two dozen others, this picturesque city of 48,000 people is still engaged in a tug of war over its soul.
The most nettlesome divide, it turns out, is not between the far-left and the “alt-right,” whose members battled in the streets on Aug. 12. It’s between those who want Charlottesville to go back to the way it was before the rally, when a Google search brought up “happiest city in America” or “best food in small town America,” and those like Walker who say that the city must make sweeping changes to address deep-seated racial and economic disparities.
Walker has vowed to channel the grief from the city’s tragedy through the development of thousands of new apartments and a seat at the decision-making table for low-income residents, who are disproportionately Black, and an end to “stop and frisk” policing.
“For decades, people wanted to hide behind the illusion of perfection in Charlottesville,” she said at a recent forum.
After the rally, residents raised money for victims. Store windows displayed cards memorializing Heather Heyer, the woman who died after being struck by the car that barrelled into a crowd. The city council, once divided over the fate of the Confederate statues, voted to shroud the figures in tarps.
But the residents quickly divided into those who blamed the violence on outsiders, and those who saw the rally as a revelation of the ugly reality of racism within the city itself.
But Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, said the rally revealed something important about Charlottesville.
Despite its self-image as liberal and racially tolerant, few Black faces can be spotted in the expensive restaurants or luxury condos downtown, she said. And she noted that the organizer of the Unite the Right rally, Jason Kessler, lives in town.
Unlike anyone who had been elected to the council in decades, Walker was born and raised in Charlottesville. Not a seasoned politician, Walker became known for helping lowincome residents navigate the city’s bureaucracy. As a parks and recreation aide who earned $14.40 an hour, she shamed the city into paying its temporary and seasonal workers a living wage. A former resident of a low-income housing development known as Friendship Court, she went door to door, organizing residents to give them a greater voice in the plan to transform the development into mixed-income housing.
Instead of squeezing a few dozen affordable housing units out of developers, she wanted to add thousands. Instead of merely providing “implicit bias” training to police, she wanted to end “stop and frisk.”
Those proposals may have sounded radical before the ral- ly, but to many residents who were soul searching in its aftermath, they made sense.
In January, after Walker was sworn in, four out of five city councillors voted to make her mayor, including Michael Signer, the mayor she had excoriated just five months earlier.
But many in the business community watched Walker’s ascendance with dread. She had vowed to vote against a $75,000 marketing grant to the downtown business association to help bring tourism back. And she seemed more focused on publicizing the city’s sins than its successes.
“It’s a little unsettling for people who are trying to run businesses,” said Jon Bright, owner of the Spectacle Shop, who is also president of the North Downtown Neighborhood Association.
Since the rally, tourism has rebounded. Some say the biggest changes have taken place in people’s hearts, as white residents who had never thought much about racism flocked to meetings that raised awareness of white privilege organized by Showing Up For Racial Justice, an anti-racism group.
These days, Walker, who declined to be interviewed, talks less about healing the town than she does about uplifting its vulnerable members.
But there is only so much she can do. The position of mayor in Charlottesville is a largely ceremonial and part-time role, with few formal powers.
Activists who helped elect Walker, meanwhile, continue to dominate city council meetings, venting their outrage at everything from a community engagement session that they felt was too corporate, to a flyer advertising ornamental trees that they viewed as promoting gentrification.