A year ago, Charlottesville was shaken by racist violence. Lois Beckett returns to a divided city and finds that, for some, historical divisions and white supremacism remain a part of daily life

Charlottesville, a year on: 'We can’t fix the whole nation. Hopefully we can fix ourselves'

Five months after white supremacists staged a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the city elected its first black female mayor. Nikuyah Walker, 38, had run as an independent in a heavily Democratic city. Her campaign slogan: “Unmasking the illusion.”

Walker, 38, is not interested in restoring a sense of tranquility to a city shaken by racist violence, including a car attack on a crowd of counter-protesters that left one young woman dead.

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Charlottesville is a wealthy college town. The downtown area is glossy and prosperous, its historic buildings filled with trendy restaurants and yoga studios. But the city is also defined by stark racial and economic disparities. Most black residents who grew up in Charlottesville, Walker said, had at least one relative who had been incarcerated.

“There have been many calls to return to normal since last year,” Walker said. “And I often have to say: ‘The normal for black, Hispanic, or low-income white people in this city isn’t a normal that they want to return to.’”

In the days after neo-Nazis and white nationalists marched with torches through Charlottesville, chanting “Jews will not replace us”, local residents came together to denounce hatred and trumpet their commitment to love and diversity. They did so even as Donald Trump repeatedly drew equivalences between far-right marchers and the people who had showed up to protest against them, saying “there’s blame on both sides” and “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A statue of Gen Thomas J ‘Stonewall’ Jackson stands in Charlottesville. Photograph: Pat Jarrett/The Guardian

A year later, local activists say, Charlottesville is a divided city, with some residents seeing the neo-Nazis as outsiders who invaded the town and demeaned its good reputation, and others who see white supremacism as part of the city’s daily reality, one that will require a much deeper fight to dislodge.

“There are a lot of white folks in Charlottesville who I believe are more comfortable with quiet white supremacists than with loud anti-racists,” said Brittany Caine-Conley, the lead organizer for Congregate, a group founded last year to bring together faith leaders to stand against hate.

“Civility is a word we talk about a lot here,” she said. “Confronting white supremacy is uncomfortable. It’s messy. It’s disruptive. It’s loud.”

The work of local anti-racist groups this past year, she said, has been to “challenge people to choose justice over civility.”

‘They’ve gotten their power back’

Zyahna Bryant, 17, was a high school freshman when she wrote a petition asking the city to take down the statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee from her city’s park.

“I am offended every time I pass it,” the black teenager, who has lived in Charlottesville all her life, wrote in 2016. The statue was a tribute to someone who had fought to maintain slavery. “I am reminded over and over again of the pain of my ancestors and all of the fighting that they had to go through for us to be where we are now.”

The local debate over removing the statue, which started in early spring 2016, eventually led to city council votes in favor of removing it and a nearby statue of Stonewall Jackson. It also attracted the attention of white supremacist activists – first at the local level, and then nationally.

Despite the city council’s votes, an ongoing lawsuit by defenders of the statues still blocks their removal. The statues were shrouded in black tarps as a sign of mourning after last summer’s violence, but in February, a judge ordered the tarps removed.

White residents who support keeping the statues in place often point to the need to respect history, including the history of America’s mistakes. Some bristle at the way white supremacist groups used the debate over the statues as an opportunity to come to town and wreak havoc.

“I don’t want them speaking for me,” said one 48-year-old white woman who grew up in Charlottesville, and who had not wanted the statues removed. “They had their reasonings, and they didn’t come here last year for the statues. They think I’m on their side, and I’m not.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Susan Bro, mother of Heather Heyer, looks at the memorial and writings at the site where her daughter was killed in Charlottesville. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

The woman spoke for more than an hour about her reactions to the events of 12 August, but asked to to be quoted anonymously, since she is a single mother and feared commenting on a politically volatile subject might put her employment at risk. She said last August’s demonstrations had left her shocked and angry.

“I cried, because honestly I felt violated. It was horrible. You walk in these streets and you feel safe,” she said.

She thought that protesters should not have shown up to confront the neo-Nazis, but instead “stayed home”. She was furious that it appeared that groups on all sides had come armed and ready to fight.

“We should have just let them come to town, say what they wanted to say, and walk away,” she said. There was no need to publicly confront their message. “I am a white American, and I do not see a difference in color, and had I seen them talking, I am smart enough to know I don’t want to be a part of that group.”

“I was born in the 70s. Of course we heard about the 60s and the 50s, when all of the lynchings were going on and all that stuff,” she said. “We got away from that, as I got older. You didn’t hear about the KKK.”

Now, she said, “all of a sudden, in the last few years, they’ve gotten their power back.”

Many Democrats blame Donald Trump for emboldening white nationalist groups with his racist and xenophobic rhetoric. But the woman, who said she had originally been a Trump supporter, saw the roots of these groups’ influence going back before Trump’s presidential campaign.

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The woman said she heard often from other white Americans who “feel like they’re under attack”.

Many Americans, both white and black, felt like “they’re not being heard”, she said. When groups like the Ku Klux Klan or Black Lives Matter come to town, she said, “they’re being heard, they’re being seen on TV”.

“I think that’s one of the things that’s most upsetting for me, is people just want to be heard, and if their government would start listening to the people who want to be heard, then these groups wouldn’t have the power that they have.”

Asked about the local black activists arguing that Charlottesville needed to do more to address systemic racism, including racism in the criminal justice system, the woman said she was not certain how much of a problem that truly was.

“We have a problem with racism in this country, but the racism is from person to person,” she said. In places she had worked, “you were given the opportunity by what you did, by your skills, it wasn’t if you were white or black or Chinese”.

‘The middle has moved’

Before she became Charlottesville’s first black mayor, Walker, who had seen growing up how difficult the city could be for black residents, had worked in different social service jobs, including doing HIV prevention work.

Walker’s unexpected victory, as an independent challenging Charlottesville’s comfortable image of itself, may be one of the clearest signs that a critical mass of the city wants to do more to tackle systemic racism.

Jalane Schmidt, a local activist and associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, said she had also seen an uptick in everyday civic engagement over the past year, with more people showing up to city meetings on issues like housing. With residents outraged at the police and local government’s failures to properly intervene in the violence last August, city council meetings have also seen a surge in attendance.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charlottesville’s mayor, Nikuyah Walker. Photograph: Pat Jarrett/The Guardian

“The middle has moved in Charlottesville,” Schmidt said. “There were a lot of white people who were surprised, and embarrassed and ashamed they were surprised.”

Some local businesses have found ways to oppose white supremacist groups – and to support the local activists organizing against them. Champion Brewing Company, a brewery and bar in downtown Charlottesville, made an early decision in spring 2017 that white supremacist activists would not be welcome at the bar, and that bartenders could refuse them service.

During the Unite the Right rally, the bar made itself into a quiet retreat for people who wanted to get away, with crafts and music. Some of the people who witnessed the car attack on a group of protesters, which left 32-year-old Heather Heyer dead and nearly two dozen people injured, came there afterwards. “I had never seen ... some of the strongest people that I know so completely devastated,” said Sean Chandler, a manager at the bar.

“It definitely still hurts,” he said. “This blight on our society as a whole, was opened up and exposed for what it is, here, on our streets,” he said. “We can’t fix the whole nation, but hopefully we can fix ourselves.’”

When Charlottesville began publicly debating in 2016 whether to remove the city’s public monuments to Confederate generals, activists were often criticized for wasting their time on the issue. They were asked: “‘Why are you focused on them? They’re just symbolic,’” said Schmidt, the University of Virginia professor. But, Schmidt said, “as we see, some people are willing to die for symbols. And some people are willing to kill for them, as well.”

In July, Schmidt was one of the organizers of a delegation of nearly 100 city residents on a what they called a pilgrimage to the newly opened Legacy Museum, a memorial to lynching victims in Montgomery, Alabama. They brought soil from the site outside Charlottesville where John Henry James, a black man, was lynched in 1898, a reminder that racist terrorism in Charlottesville had not started with the events of August 2017.

This spring, 56 people came on the city’s cultural outreach visit to its sister city in Ghana, which included a strong focus on the history of the transatlantic slave trade in west Africa. Typically, only 10 or 12 residents join the trip, said Dave Norris, who previously served as Charlottesville’s mayor.

Norris, a prominent supporter of Walker, the new mayor, and her policy agenda, said that many residents wanted to do more but had not figured out what to do with what to do with their new awareness of the Charlottesville’s longtime racial injustices.

“I think a lot of people are struggling to figure that part out,” he said. “We’re still in this awkward phase.”

“I worry sometimes that we’re missing an opportunity, that we’re not focusing enough on strategic action,” he said. “Talking is good, but talking is not enough, and Charlottesville is notoriously good at talking.”