The Charlottesville rally 5 years later: 'It's what you're still trying to forget'

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/12/ [login to see] /the-charlottesville-rally-5-years-later-its-what-youre-still-trying-to-forget
In a downtown park, grass grows over the spot where there once stood a massive bronze statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, astride his horse Traveller.

The space feels different now, says Don Gathers, co-founder of the local Black Lives Matter group.

"It's much more serene," he says.

Gathers is in the park to reflect on five years since a violent and deadly white nationalist rally ravaged his hometown.

"It's not what you can remember. It's what you're still trying to forget," says Gathers. "All the hatefulness and the evilness that transpired here."

Organizers targeted Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally after the city voted to take down the Lee statue, part of the town's reckoning with a fraught racial history.

On the night of Aug. 11, 2017, Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen and other white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia campus bearing torches and terrorizing students with chants of "Blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us."