City works to recover after rally’s violence
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Residents of Charlottesville, Va., tried to recover Sunday after a rally of white nationalists in a city park spun out of control the day before, resulting in melees in the streets and the death of a 32-year-old woman when a car rammed into a group of counterprotesters.
Authorities on Saturday charged James Alex Fields Jr., 20, of Ohio, accusing him of intentionally driving his car into the crowd.
Across the country, protesters decrying hatred and racial discrimination converged Sunday, including two groups in Little Rock, saying they felt compelled to counteract the white supremacist rally.
At Emancipation Park, where the Unite the Right rally was held Saturday around a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, city
workers picked up trash. On Water Street, the place where, authorities say, Fields took the life of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, a memorial of flowers lay in the middle of the road.
And at City Hall, a planned news conference by Jason Kessler, the white nationalist who organized Saturday’s rally, came to an abrupt end when a man wearing a plaid shirt punched him.
“Jason Kessler has been bringing hate to our town for months and has been endangering the lives of people of color and endangering other lives in my community,” the man, Jeff Winder, said in an interview later. “Free speech does not protect hate speech.”
Minutes before Kessler was scheduled to address the media Sunday, the brick mall behind City Hall was packed with at least two dozen television cameras. Two uniformed officers, one armed with a sniper rifle, could be seen on the roof of a nearby building.
When Kessler appeared, the crowd that had assembled called him a “murderer” and a “terrorist,” drowning out his words with cries of “shame, shame.”
The news conference ended when Winder punched Kessler. Although police detained Winder briefly, he was not arrested.
Kessler was among those who have criticized police and other law enforcement officials for their handling of Saturday’s event. In a statement, he complained that authorities had “exacerbated the violence” by failing to separate his supporters from counterprotesters, leading to the violence.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe defended the police, noting that many of the demonstrators were armed and saying the officers had done “great work” in a “very delicate situation.” He said Heyer’s death, which he called “car terrorism,” could not have been prevented.
“You can’t stop some crazy guy who came here from Ohio and used his car as a weapon,” McAuliffe said. “He is a terrorist.”
Charlottesville Mayor Michael Signer and political leaders of all political stripes vowed to combat hate groups and urged President Donald Trump to denounce the organizations that had promoted the protest against the removal of the Lee statue. Some of those groups specifically cited Trump’s election after a campaign of racially charged rhetoric as validation of their beliefs.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced late Saturday that federal authorities would pursue a civil-rights investigation into the circumstances surrounding the crash. The violence and deaths in Charlottesville “strike at the heart of American law and justice,” Sessions wrote. “When such actions arise from racial bigotry and hatred, they betray our core values and cannot be tolerated.”
Hours before the crash, Fields was photographed carrying the emblem of one of the hate groups that organized the rally.
In a photo taken by the New York Daily News, Fields was shown standing with a half-dozen other men, all wearing the Vanguard America uniform of khakis and white polo shirts. The men held white shields with Vanguard America’s black-and-white logo of two crossed axes. The statue of Lee was in the background.
The Daily News said the photo was taken about 10:30 a.m. Saturday, just hours before, authorities say, Fields crashed his car into the crowd at 1:42 p.m. The Anti-Defamation League says Vanguard America believes the U.S. is an exclusively white nation, and uses propaganda to recruit young white men online and on college campuses.
In a Twitter post, the group said it had handed out the shields “to anyone in attendance who wanted them” and denied that Fields was a member. “All our members are safe an [sic] accounted for, with no arrests or charges.”
In blog posts after the violence, the Daily Stormer, a leading white nationalist website that promoted the Charlottesville event, pledged to hold more events “soon.”
“We are going to start doing this nonstop,” the post said. “We are going to go bigger than Charlottesville. We are going to go huge.”
ARKANSAS RALLIES
Almost 40 demonstrators with neon poster-board signs and large umbrellas gathered outside U.S. Rep. French Hill’s office on North University Avenue in Little Rock on Sunday.
The rally was organized by Indivisible Central Arkansas, a group that opposes Trump’s agenda and has organized demonstrations and congressional town halls since his inauguration.
Magdaline Hatzikazakis attended with her daughter after watching the news unfold in Charlottesville on Saturday. The sheer number of white nationalists, who were photographed in the Nazi salute position, jolted her.
“It’s horrifying we still have so many people like that,” she said. “Our diversity is our strength.”
On Sunday evening, dozens of people gathered on the steps of the state Capitol in Little Rock. The event was organized by the Arkansas Youth for Progressive Change, said Camille Richoux, the vice chairman of the organization.
Speaking to the group of people on the steps, Maria Meneses, the organization’s chairman, said the event was intended to congregate against hate in Arkansas.
“We need to be lucid and acknowledge that white supremacists are domestic terrorists, and it will not go away unless we start talking about it,” she said, garnering applause from the crowd.
Elected state leaders were also in attendance.
“This is about every community, it just happened to be Charlottesville yesterday and last night,” said Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock.
Other demonstrations across the country were pushing for the removal of Confederate monuments, the issue that initially prompted white nationalists to gather in anger over the weekend. Still other gatherings aimed to denounce fascism and a presidential administration that organizers feel has let white supremacists feel empowered.
“People need to wake up, recognize that and resist it as fearlessly as it needs to be done,” said Carl Dix, a leader of the Refuse Fascism group organizing demonstrations in New York, San Francisco and other cities. “This can’t be allowed to fester and to grow because we’ve seen what happened in the past when that was allowed.”
VIOLENT CLASH
Saturday’s chaos broke out as neo-Nazis, skinheads, Ku Klux Klan members and other white supremacist groups arrived for the rally. Counterprotesters were also on hand, and the two sides clashed, with people throwing punches, hurling water bottles and unleashing chemical sprays. Some were prepared for a fight, with body armor and helmets. Videos that ricocheted around the world on social media showed people beating each other with sticks and shields.
McAuliffe declared a state of emergency, police in riot gear ordered people out of the streets, and helicopters circled overhead, including one that later crashed. Both troopers onboard, Lt. H. Jay Cullen, 48, and Berke M.M. Bates, one day shy of his 41st birthday, were killed.
Officials have not provided a crowd estimate, but it appeared to number well over 1,000.
Later, as counterprotesters were marching through a part of downtown a few blocks from the statue, the Dodge Challenger tore through the crowd.
The impact hurled people into the air and knocked some out of their shoes.
“It was a wave of people flying at me,” said Sam Becker, 24, speaking in the emergency room where he was being treated for leg and hand injuries.
Those left standing scattered, screaming and running for safety. Video caught the car reversing, hitting more people, its windshield splintered from the collision and its bumper dragging on the pavement. Medics carried the injured, bloodied and crying, away as a police tank rolled down the street.
McAuliffe and Signer, both Democrats, lumped the blame squarely on the rancor that has seeped into American politics and the white supremacists who arrived in the city, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and home to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation.
Fields’ mother, Samantha Bloom, said in an interview late Saturday that she knew that her son, who had recently moved to Ohio from his hometown in Kentucky, was attending a rally in Virginia but didn’t know it was a white supremacist rally.
“I thought it had something to do with Trump. Trump’s not a white supremacist,” Bloom said.
Trump criticized the violence in a tweet Saturday, followed by a news conference and a call for “a swift restoration of law and order.”