Until Saturday, August 12th, Debra Godfrey liked to sit on her front porch in the afternoons. She’d smoke a Newport and watch what little traffic there was pass by. Godfrey, who is fifty-one, lives in Belmont, a quiet neighborhood on the southeast side of Charlottesville, Virginia. Kids would play together after they got off the school bus a couple of houses down. Neighbors would walk past with their dogs, waving hello, as they headed to a nearby park.

These days, Godfrey mostly stays inside in the afternoons. The neighborhood is still quiet, she said. “But it’s more quiet. People are more alert.” August 12th was the day of an alt-right rally called “Unite the Right,” which devolved into violence as thousands of white supremacists and counter-protesters swarmed through the city’s downtown streets. The unrest made international headlines and left a thirty-two-year-old counter-protester named Heather Heyer dead, with dozens more injured.

For Godfrey, who is black, the day’s chaos hasn’t ended, and it hits close to home—the rally’s organizer, Jason Kessler, a thirty-three-year-old self-proclaimed “white advocate,” lives three houses up the street. “I’d see him go by, walk down the street, he would wave to me, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ ” Godfrey said. “I got a bad feeling, like, no, he’s not somebody I really want to associate myself with.”

The day after the violence, Kessler tried to give a press conference downtown, but a booing crowd of locals drowned him out. As police ushered him to safety, one man took a swing at him. Now, Godfrey said, “I’m looking for anybody, the first sight they see of him going to that house, I wonder if something’s going to happen.”

According to friends who are in contact with him, Kessler has been in hiding since the rally. A Charlottesville police officer, who did not want to be named, said that Kessler has received “tons and tons of death threats, on an hourly basis.” Neighbors say that he’s returned home a couple of times to retrieve some belongings, once with police protection. His neighbors are angry. “He endangered this whole neighborhood,” Billy Sacre, who lives next door to Kessler, with his mother and sister, said. Sacre, who is white, said he stayed up all night on Saturday after the rally, looking out the window; his four-year-old niece was inside sleeping, he said. Another neighbor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that he has hidden weapons around his house, just in case something happens.

Ever since the Unite the Right rally, Godfrey and other neighbors said, vehicle traffic has increased tenfold on the block. “True, he’s in hiding, but you never know what’s going to happen,” Godfrey said. “I see more cars coming down the street than I’ve ever seen before.” It’s hard to tell, she said, whether people are just trying to glimpse the town’s most famous white nationalist or if they have a more frightening agenda. “I’m seeing all these big trucks, all these strange little white guys. I’m like, O.K., [what the] hell’s going on?”

The single-story building where Kessler lives sits at the top of a hill and is separated into three apartments: two units on the ground floor and one in the basement. The building is managed by Community Services Housing, a nonprofit that uses government vouchers to house people with disabilities. Kessler lives in one of the ground-floor units; his entrance is on the side of the building. A physically disabled elderly woman lives in the front unit, where the house’s address is posted. Late on August 12th, as the city reeled from the day’s mayhem, health-care staff moved the woman to a separate facility across town, as a precaution, a health aide who did not wish to be named explained. Kessler’s address is publicly available.

Tashid Lawson has been thinking about getting a gun. Lawson, who is forty-nine, lives in a six-hundred-square-foot house behind the building where Kessler rents his apartment. A twenty-foot patch of dirt and grass is the only thing that separates his home from Kessler’s. Sitting on his front stoop, Lawson points to Kessler’s door, and imagines his neighbor coming home from a bar with a group of white supremacists. “Just think, three o’clock in the morning, they show up, and Jason’s, like, ‘There’s a nigger right there,’ ” Lawson, who is black, said. “They could just come in, kick my doors in, and all I’ve got is knives.”

Lawson, who moved in five weeks ago, said that Kessler has been polite to him in person. “I can’t figure him out,” Lawson said. “Because, when I get here, he’s all neighborly: ‘Welcome to the neighborhood’ and all that.” In his neighborhood, Kessler has shown none of the white-supremacist persona he projects in his public speeches and rallies, Lawson said. “He wasn’t rude or anything like that,” Lawson said. “That’s when I didn’t even know who he was.”

In fact, each of the eight neighbors who spoke with me said that Kessler was always cordial and pleasant in person, and that he was kind to his dog, Petey. Several of his immediate neighbors also said that a young black man with a foreign accent they could not place was living with Kessler for an extended period of time. (Kessler did not return a request for comment.)

On Friday, a white childhood friend of Kessler came to pick up a weight bench that he’d loaned him. Wearing a folding Buck knife on his belt, the friend loaded the weight bench into his truck by himself. Lawson came outside, pumping his arms as if he were about to step into a boxing ring. He asked the man (who declined to be named for this story) whether he believed in the things Kessler did. “I’m just here picking up my weight bench,” the friend said. “Oh, O.K.,” Lawson said. He checked his mailbox and returned to his house.

Fifty years ago, the residents of Belmont were nearly all working-class white people. “There were no blacks even allowed on this side of town,” Godfrey, who lived with her family in another primarily white neighborhood just beyond Belmont, known as Hogwaller, said. Beginning in the early nineteen-eighties, more black people moved into Belmont; over the past decade, as middle- and upper-class white people have moved in, most of the black families have moved out. With gentrification in full swing, high-end restaurants, bars, and a fitness studio line Belmont’s hub, and home prices have risen dramatically.

But Kessler’s block sits on the south side of the neighborhood, near the city’s edge, and has largely remained working class and racially diverse. In a city that, according to the latest U.S. Census data, is seventy-per-cent white and nineteen-per-cent black, Kessler’s is one of the few blocks where roughly half the residents are black and half are white. Across the street from his apartment, where he would record white-nationalist videos and post them to the Internet, a Black Lives Matter sign sits in a window. On the property next to Kessler’s, a yard sign welcomes refugees in three languages. In many ways, the neighborhood is the antithesis of what Kessler advocates for. “Our entire country would be better off if the South had won the Civil War,” he declared in June, to a small crowd gathered for an alt-right rally at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C.

Godfrey said that she’s never experienced any racism in her neighborhood, nor much explicit racism in the city as a whole, since she moved here as a young child, in 1973—no Ku Klux Klan crosses, no racial slurs scrawled in graffiti, no threatening notes or messages. But that doesn’t mean people in Charlottesville aren’t racist, she said. “Believe me, racism still exists in this town,” she said. Racial disparities can provide a lens. In the first six months of this year, police stopped a hundred people, frisking the majority; seventy-four of those stopped were black and only twenty-six were white. And, from January 1st to October 13th of last year, blacks made up seventy-six percent of stop-and-frisks.