Posted on Aug 12, 2022
The Charlottesville rally 5 years later: 'It's what you're still trying to forget'
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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."
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."
The Charlottesville rally 5 years later: 'It's what you're still trying to forget'
Posted from npr.org
Charlottesville
Racism
Nationalism
Black Lives Matter
Violence
Posted 2 y ago
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I had surgery down at University Charlottesville Medical Center seven years ago PO1 William "Chip" Nagel. Before surgery I walked the grounds of the University and thought about how beautiful was down there. Hard to believe two years later what happened in the very same places.
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