CHARLOTTESVILLE — There are no visible scars on Charlottesville. It remains a beautiful, leafy town of 50,000 residents with a thriving core, great restaurants, a bustling nightlife, and the cultural and intellectual amenities of being home to the state’s signature university and a major hospital.
But if the outward appearance is unchanged, those who live here know how injured the city is and how strained the recovery has been. On Aug. 12, the city will mark one year since racial hatred bared its fangs here, menacing a community and a country. There will be prayer services and music and tributes to the injured and the dead. It is being billed as a day to remember and to heal after a tumultuous and often painful year.
Charlottesville has spent the better part of the past 12 months remembering and recovering. It also has been taking stock and placing blame. There has been plenty of that to go around. Blame for law enforcement that didn’t protect its citizens. Blame for the city council and the local and state government that planned ineffectively. Blame for the university that didn’t communicate the danger to its community. Blame for President Trump for not speaking out unequivocally to condemn the marchers who had spewed their racist views.
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The violence of last August shattered the conceptions some here had of their home. There was a desire to look at the white supremacists as invaders and outsiders, even though two of the organizers, Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer, were U-Va. graduates and Kessler lives in the city. The city had to more closely examine what it represented.
“We lost our naivete,” said Kathy Galvin, 62, a city councilwoman who has lived in Charlottesville since 1983. “It is easy to kind of take comfort in all the accolades we got up until that point. ‘Most innovative city, the happiest city.’ But there were many of us who knew that we had entrenched pockets of poverty that were also aligned by race and were legacies of Jim Crow.”
While the process has been difficult, it has also been illuminating, Galvin said.
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