Frank Dukes, who served on the city’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces, told Sojourners that Charlottesville is in some ways “kind of the cradle of white supremacy,” noting the city’s association with not only Thomas Jefferson but also James Madison, two founders who were party to the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise, which diminished the humanity of black people and gave the slave-holding Southern states an electoral advantage in Congress up to 1861.

Is reconciliation possible?

Antiracist activists in Charlottesville have committed to addressing the city’s history of white supremacy, not just the events that led up to Unite the Right. In early July, about 100 local residents joined the Charlottesville Pilgrimage. They carried soil gathered from the location where a black man named John Henry James was lynched in 1898 to the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala. Along the way, they stopped in Greensboro, N.C., where a coalition of neo-Nazis and Klansmen fatally shot five antiracist activists in a black housing project in 1979. The Rev. Nelson Johnson and his wife, Joyce, survivors of the massacre, hosted the Charlottesville delegation in the sanctuary of Faith Community Church, where Johnson recently retired as senior pastor.

As the onetime leader of the now-defunct Communist Workers Party and pastor committed to social justice, Nelson Johnson has cultivated a kind of dialectic of struggle and reconciliation rooted in liberation theology. The Johnsons and other survivors helped establish the only truth and reconciliation commission on U.S. soil, which held hearings and released a report in 2006.

'I feel that rage sometimes is a driving force for people that continue the movement to keep it going.'

Nelson Johnson told the Charlottesville delegation, which included Mayor Nikuyah Walker, how as a seminary student he went to visit a Klan leader eight years after the massacre to lobby against the white supremacist group’s return to the Greensboro. He emphasized the idea of trying to find the humanity in one’s enemy. The encounter might not change that one person’s heart, but it would be transformative, Johnson argued.

“So you don’t have to pin this on one person who may be in this context of the iteration of his incarnation [and] can’t change,” Johnson said. “But we don’t know how the universe works and whether you get another chance. But what we know is we do what we can do without allowing our own belief to be robbed by a robber whose intent is to get you to fight him on his own level. And that point you become who he is ….”

Rev. Johnson Speaks to Charlottesville Delegation

As Johnson’s sermon built to a mighty crescendo, the Charlottesville residents erupted in rapturous applause.

“I know what we got in us,” Johnson continued. “I know we’ll fight. Somebody asked me: ‘If somebody attacked your wife and you were there, what would you do?’ I said, ‘I’d do everything I can to protect her, up to and including if I had to ….’” He left the final thought unspoken, and then continued, “But it’s not my desire to do that. It’s not my desire. Get that in your heart, and everything else kind of gets worked out.”

Tanesha Hudson was one of the Charlottesville residents in the audience. She thanked Johnson.

“I like you because not once have you told people to not be angry,” Hudson said. “Because I can still hear the rage inside you. And I feel that rage sometimes is a driving force for people that continue the movement to keep it going.”

The question remained whether the truth and reconciliation model could work for Charlottesville, and, indeed, for the whole country.