City rocked by protests
Three deaths linked to dueling demonstrations concerning removal of Confederate monument
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — A car plowed into a crowd of people peacefully protesting a white nationalist rally Saturday in a Virginia college town, killing one person, hurting at least two dozen more and ratcheting up tension in an increasingly violent confrontation.
A helicopter crash that killed the pilot and a passenger later in the afternoon outside Charlottesville also was linked to the rally by Virginia State Police, though officials did not say how the crash was connected.
The chaos boiled over at what authorities believe to be the largest gathering of white nationalists in a decade.
Matt Korbon, a 22-year-old University of Virginia student, said several hundred counterprotesters were marching when “suddenly there was just this tire screeching sound.” A gray car smashed into another car, then backed up, barreling through “a sea of people.”
The impact hurled people into the air. Those left standing scattered, screaming and running in different directions.
The driver, James Alex Fields Jr., 20, was later arrested.
The turbulence began Friday night, when the white nationalists carried torches through the university campus in what they advertised as a “pro-white” demonstration.
It quickly spiraled into violence Saturday morning. Hundreds of people threw punches, hurled water bottles and unleashed chemical sprays. At least eight were injured, and one was arrested.
President Donald Trump tweeted Saturday “we ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for.” He then wrote “There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!”
But some of the white nationalists cited Trump’s victory as validation for their beliefs, and Trump’s critics pointed to the president’s racially tinged rhetoric as exploiting the nation’s festering racial tension.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson noted Trump for years publicly questioned President Barack Obama’s citizenship.
“We are in a very dangerous place right now,” he said.
Right-wing blogger Jason Kessler called for what he termed a “pro-white” rally in Charlottesville. White nationalists and their opponents promoted the event for weeks.
Oren Segal, who directs the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said multiple white power groups gathered in Charlottesville, including members of neo-Nazi organizations, racist skinhead groups and Ku Klux Klan factions.
“We anticipated this event being the largest white supremacist gathering in over a decade,” Segal said. “Unfortunately, it appears to have become the most violent as well.”
The white nationalist organizations Vanguard America and Identity Evropa, the Southern nationalist League of the South, the National Socialist Movement, the Traditionalist Workers Party and the Fraternal Order of Alt Knights were on hand, he said, as well as several groups with smaller presences.
On the other side, anti-fascist demonstrators also gathered in Charlottesville, but they generally aren’t organized like white nationalist factions, said Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Many others were merely locals caught in the fray.
Colleen Cook, 26, stood on a curb shouting at the rally attendees to go home.
Cook, a teacher who attended the University of Virginia, said she sent her son, who is black, out of town for the weekend.
“This isn’t how he should have to grow up,” she said.
Cliff Erickson leaned against a fence and took in the scene. He said he thinks removing the statue amounts to erasing history, and the “counter-protesters are crazier than the alt-right.”
“Both sides are hoping for a confrontation,” he said.
It’s the latest confrontation in Charlottesville since the city, located about 100 miles outside of Washington, D.C., voted earlier this year to remove a statue of Lee.
In May, a torch-wielding group, which included prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer, gathered around the statue for a nighttime protest, and in July, about 50 members of a North Carolina-based KKK group traveled there for a rally, where they were met by hundreds of counter-protesters.
Kessler said this week the rally not only was about the removal of Confederate symbols but also free speech and “advocating for white people.”
“This is about an anti-white climate within the Western world and the need for white people to have advocacy like other groups do,” he said in an interview.
Between rally attendees and counterprotesters, authorities were expecting as many as 6,000 people, Charlottesville police said this week.
Charlottesville Mayor Michael Signer said he was disgusted the white nationalists had come to his town and blamed Trump for inflaming racial prejudices.
“I’m not going to make any bones about it. I place the blame for a lot of what you’re seeing in American today right at the doorstep of the White House and the people around the president,” he said.
Charlottesville, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is a liberal-leaning city home to the flagship University of Virginia and Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson.
The statue’s removal is part of a broader city effort to change the way Charlottesville’s history of race is told in public spaces. The city also renamed Lee Park, where the statue stands, and Jackson Park, named for Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, which are now called Emancipation Park and Justice Park, respectively.
For now, the Lee statue remains. A group called the Monument Fund filed a lawsuit arguing the removal of the statue would violate a state law governing war memorials. A judge agreed to temporarily block the city from removing the statue for six months.