Today's Today

August 12, 2017

CHARLOTTESVILLE — Ryan Kelly had been working all day when he heard a car rev its engine and saw a flash of metal speed by. He didn’t know what was happening; he didn’t think. He did what photojournalists do: pointed his camera and shot.

What he captured on Aug. 12, 2017, was an image that would command the world’s attention, win journalism’s highest honor and symbolize the worst moment of this university town’s worst day: a gathering of white nationalists and the killing of a young woman who came to protest them.

WaPo:

White supremacists made Charlottesville a symbol of racism. Black residents say it still is.

Her whole life, Dorenda Johnson has endured racism in Charlottesville. Growing up in a city built with the help of enslaved people, she attended integrated schools but often found herself assigned to segregated classes. She spent years working as an administrative assistant in a University of Virginia hospital wing that — until last year — was named after a notorious white supremacist.

So she was hardly surprised in 2017 when hundreds of white nationalists and neo-Nazis descended on the college town for a “Unite the Right” rally — an event that transformed Charlottesville into a national symbol of racism. But the 61-year-old hoped the violence that left a counterprotester dead and dozens injured would finally jolt local leaders into a commitment to address the city’s racial inequities.

For Johnson, now a member of the city’s new Police Civilian Review Board, that day has not arrived.

“I said after ‘Unite the Right,’ ‘Well, now, hopefully your eyes will be finally open.’ Not! I am very disappointed and plain old sick and tired of being sick and tired,” said Johnson, who lives with her two grown sons in the city’s predominantly Black neighborhood of Orangedale-Prospect. “I would really like my sons to leave the city. I don’t want them to get stuck in a rut here. There is very little that they can do to better themselves here.”

In interviews with The Washington Post, numerous other Black residents and activists echoed her frustration. They said they are still pressing for change even as racial justice protests grip the rest of the country after George Floyd’s death in the custody of Minneapolis police May 25.

It matters little, they repeatedly said, that much of the city’s leadership is Black, including the mayor, police chief and city manager/chief executive officer. They say gentrification continues pushing minorities and other low-income residents out into neighboring counties. About 20 percent of Charlottesville’s 47,000 residents identified themselves as Black, Black/Hispanic or other races in the most recent census data.

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In recent weeks, “volunteer statue guards” have arrived at night armed with guns to ward off protesters eager to deface the statues of Lee and fellow Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, according to C-Ville, a weekly newspaper in the city. (Last month, the Lee statue was splattered with red paint.) And burning tiki torches were recently discovered outside the homes of two local anti-racism activists. Similar flaming torches were carried by white supremacists three years ago in their march on the University of Virginia campus to the statue of Thomas Jefferson.

“These guys are not going away,” said one of the activists, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for reasons of safety. “I keep finding alt-right stickers on my mailbox and all around my neighborhood. Did I feel like my life was threatened? After 2017, it’s hard to dismiss something like that.”

There's a feeling of "wanting to get back to normal", but we have to keep in mind that "normal" wasn't a very good circumstance for way too many people.

We have to try to get back to wanting something better - wanting to move towards that more perfect union.

We have an awful lot of work to do.