Summer of Hate

Charlottesville, USA

Hawes Spencer

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813942087
• eBook ISBN: 9780813942070
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In August 2017, violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, during two days of demonstrations by white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and counterprotesters, including members of antifa and Black Lives Matter. Ostensibly motivated by the city's plans to remove Confederate statues from two public parks, members of the alt-right descended first on the University of Virginia and then, disastrously, on the city's downtown. As these violent and ultimately deadly events gripped the attention of the nation, extensive coverage in both mainstream and fringe media promulgated competing narratives.

Summer of Hate is the investigative journalist Hawes Spencer's unbiased, probing account of August 11 and 12. Telling the story from the perspectives of figures on all sides of the demonstrations, Spencer, who reported from Charlottesville for the New York Times, carefully recreates what happened and why. Focusing on individuals including activists, city councilors, faith leaders, and the police, Spencer creates an objective, panoramic narrative that renders these dramatic events, and the ongoing conflicts underlying them, in all their complexity.

1 CHARLOTTESVILLE

A TRAFFIC STOP

On May 25, 2017, a policeman in Maumee, Ohio, a small city ten miles southwest of Toledo, made a routine traffic stop of a Dodge Challenger for expired license plates.

“Do you own this vehicle?” asked the officer.

“I do, sir,” came the reply.

“It’s a nice ride,” said the officer.

Less than three months later, that ride would carry James Fields Jr. to Charlottesville, Virginia, to demonstrate, and clash, with thousands from every corner of the United States, some who shared his set of alt-right beliefs and others who emphatically rejected them. The Unite the Right rally, as the August 12 event was billed, was the culmination of a series of controversies and demonstrations that put the small southern city, home to Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia, at the center of a storm. It was a storm that had begun brewing years earlier when a city councilor provoked gasps by suggesting that a venerable bronze equestrian statue of Civil War general Robert E. Lee might be removed from a downtown park. It would take a high school student and another politician, Wes Bellamy, the only African American on the city council, to launch that process. And in doing so, they unwittingly propelled a local activist named Jason Kessler onto the national stage. By the time Kessler invited Richard Spencer, the National Policy Institute president who had popularized the term “alt-right,” and about a dozen like-minded white nationalists to Charlottesville, the town had already hit the map with a KKK rally and a torch rally led by Spencer himself. These spectacles provoked fear and soul-searching in a community that had perhaps hidden its racial past beneath a college-town surface of relative affluence and self-congratulation.

Unite the Right would become the largest gathering of white nationalists in decades, and from the moment it began with a Friday-night torch march along UVA’s hallowed Lawn, it became clear that Charlottesville authorities were not ready for what was happening. If the sight of torches, the smell of pepper spray, and the sound of recycled Nazi slogans like “blood and soil” made August 11, 2017, a bad day, what would happen on Saturday the twelfth would be much worse.

What was to be an afternoon of speeches extolling the supposed merits of a whiter America turned into a series of street brawls. The police chief declared the event itself an unlawful assembly, prompting cries of free-speech suppression, but James Fields Jr., one of the morning’s earliest arrivals, allegedly turned the day deadly, driving his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of celebratory counterprotesters and killing one woman. As her name, Heather Heyer, along with those of State Troopers H. Jay Cullen and Berke M. M. Bates, whose helicopter crashed after tracking Fields’s car, would forever be associated with Charlottesville, so would another name: Donald J. Trump. His “many sides” comment later that afternoon would, for many, come to define the man in the Oval Office.

CONSCIOUS SHEEP

When James Alex Fields Jr. lived with his mother, his car was known, according to a neighbor quoted in the Toledo Blade, for blasting polka, the folk dance music popular in the nations of the former Austrian Empire. But the young man would seize on more disturbing aspects of that region’s past.

The man who taught Fields history for two years described him as quiet and smart but unusually attracted to Germany.

“He was a German-phile,” teacher Derek Weimer told the Associated Press. “He loved all the German language and culture, and of course that went much further and darker into Nazism and Adolf Hitler and views on race and white supremacy.”

Fields’s former teacher also told the AP that his former student had confided that he’d taken medication to control schizophrenia.

“I knew he had some really far-out beliefs, but I never thought it could come to this point,” said Weimer.

At the time of his arrest, Fields identified himself on his Facebook page as “Conscious Ovis Aries,” Latin for Conscious Sheep. His page was filled with fascist and alt-right images including a picture of baby Hitler, Pepe the Frog, and a portrait of a crowned Donald Trump on a throne.

One classmate told a television station that Fields once showed up at school with a Hitler-style mustache. Fields’s roommate on a 2015 trip to Europe told the Associated Press that Fields, while there, denigrated France and conveyed that the only reason he took the trip was to visit “the motherland,” that is, Germany. Two others on that postgraduation tour told ABC News that when the group arrived at the Dachau concentration camp, Fields said, “This is where the magic happened.”

Later that summer, Fields enlisted in the U.S. Army, but he didn’t make it past boot camp.

There were other signs of trouble. When Fields was a teen living with his mother in suburban Cincinnati, she called 911 multiple times alleging problems with him, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. Confined to a wheelchair, the mother feared her own son, claiming that he hit her, spat on her, and threatened to “beat her up.” The Washington Post uncovered a call log suggesting that Fields was detained after an incident in which he allegedly stood behind his mother with a twelve-inch knife.

Fields never knew his father, who was killed by a drunk driver in a bizarre crash a few months before the boy was born in 1997. The Enquirer reported that the two survivors from the single-vehicle crash hitched a ride back to a bar and left the elder Fields to die alone and unreported. An uncle said that when James Jr. turned eighteen, he received the proceeds of a trust from his father’s estate.

Fields’s mother, Samantha Bloom, knew terror before losing her son’s father. When she was sixteen, Bloom witnessed her father kill her mother and then himself with a shotgun, the Enquirer reported. She apparently learned of the allegations about what her son did in Charlottesville from reporters who filmed an interview in her garage as she returned home from dinner August 12. Bloom told reporters that Fields—who lived in a separate apartment in the city and earned $10.50 an hour as a security guard—had asked her to watch his cat while he attended Unite the Right.

“I didn’t know it was white supremacists,” Bloom said. “I thought it had something to do with Trump.”

She can be seen expressing shock at the allegations.

“Running his car into a crowd of people?” she asks. “Did it hurt anybody?”

“You haven’t been notified at all about this?” asks a reporter.

Having learned some more details about the event, Bloom said she was surprised her son attended an event with white supremacists because he had an African American friend.

“I try to stay out of his political views,” she told the Blade. But she knew he was headed to a rally. “I told him to be careful,” she said. “If they’re going to rally, to make sure he’s doing it peacefully.”

NOT PEACEFULLY

The Justice Department announced on the day of the crash that it was launching a federal civil rights investigation with the assistance of the FBI and the United States attorney for the Western District of Virginia.

Appearing on ABC’s Good Morning America, Attorney General Jeff Sessions later called the vehicular attack “domestic terrorism.”

Fields was held on state charges: suspicion of second-degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding, and failure to stop in an accident that resulted in death. Within days, additional state charges were levied: two more counts of malicious wounding and three counts of aggravated malicious wounding. By the time of his preliminary hearing four months later, the murder charge had been upgraded from second- to first-degree, the category that involves premeditation.

VANGUARD CONNECTIONS?

Although Fields was wearing the khaki pants and white polo shirt that typify Vanguard America and was even photographed holding one of its shields, the alt-right group said such shields were freely shared, and it denied any prior connection. At a preliminary hearing in December, Charlottesville Police detective Steve Young testified that searches of Fields’s phone, car, and social media turned up no membership or even coordination with Vanguard America or with any other alt-right groups. Even the three people he walked with from Emancipation Park to McIntire Park after the rally was broken up were a chance meeting, Young said.

Photographs taken Saturday morning show a shieldless Fields having already arrived at Emancipation Park prior to Vanguard America’s group march into the park, which occurred at 9:23 a.m. One minute later, according to time stamps, Fields can be seen walking with the group back out of the southeastern entrance as Vanguard relocated to the reserved southwestern portion of the park.

Detective Young said that his investigation found that Fields traveled alone to Charlottesville to see one particular speaker. Young wasn’t asked who that speaker was. In his formal response to a civil lawsuit, Fields downplayed his connection to Vanguard America and his own culpability.

“Someone he did not know handed him a shield,” his lawyer, Denise Lunsford, wrote in the filing. “He denies he planned violent actions or knew violent actions were being planned.”

Lunsford and Fields appeared to be laying the groundwork for an accidental or self-defense explanation of the incident. In their answer to the suit, they deny Fields committed a “car attack,” a “terrorist attack,” or any attack at all.

A GOVERNOR COMES TO TOWN

In addition to Trump’s remarks, much of the media coverage in the aftermath of August 12 derived from a press conference convened by Virginia’s chief executive, Governor Terry McAuliffe, at the Albemarle County Office Building three blocks from Emancipation Park. Carried live by some cable news networks, the remarks included the governor saying “Nazis . . . Go home” and City Manager Maurice Jones revealing that the number of the day’s fatalities had grown to three, an apparent confirmation of the deaths of the two state troopers in the crashed helicopter.

Charlottesville mayor Mike Signer said he was pleased that President Trump had reached out to him and the governor. It’s unclear whether Signer yet knew of Trump’s equivocating statements about “both sides,” but Signer did take the opportunity to criticize the president.

“It’s a very powerful office,” said Signer. “I do hope that he looks at himself in the mirror and thinks very deeply about who he consorted with in his campaign. I hope that he turns a page and works to bring some unity. And I hope he works to quell the forces of division and this outright visual terror and actual terror that we saw here in our city.”

McAuliffe also paused to speak with reporters before leaving.

“It is time for this nation to come together and to stop the hateful rhetoric,” the governor said. “We gotta bring people together. It is a disgrace these Nazis would come into our state to hurt our people.”

A British-accented journalist then asked, “Governor, will you condemn antifa as well?”

McAuliffe did not respond.

The same question was asked four days later outside the Paramount Theater, where—after Heather Heyer’s funeral—McAuliffe denounced hateful rhetoric. Fox News reporter Doug McKelway asked: “Governor, you’ve put down the violence on the right. Why not the left?”

Again, McAuliffe did not reply.

THE CYBERATTACK

Around the time the governor was telling white supremacists to “go home,” the city’s website was going offline, the result of a cyberattack carried out by a group calling itself New World Hackers, a counterpart of the better-known “Anonymous” hacktivist collective.

“At the time we saw the police were not so helpful, they left the people to die which forced us to target the Charlottesville website to give them a message,” an unnamed member of the New World Hackers reportedly told Hackread.com. “We are delivering our own version of justice to the KKK, and government, in whichever way we please.”

The city’s website remained down or slow for at least a day, even reportedly interrupting email communications between officials, according to the city-commissioned inquest known as the Heaphy report, which noted that hackers were able to break the system by sending phishing emails to two Charlottesville Police captains.

MAKING CHARLOTTESVILLE THE CENTER

Appearing shirtless to show the skin rashes caused by getting hit by chemical irritants, Richard Spencer posted a defiant video on Periscope the evening of August 12 in which he bl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Charlottesville
• 2. What Happened on Fourth Street
• 3. The University That Felt Invaded
• 4. The Seeds of Resentment
• 5. The Move to Remove Statues
• 6. The Problems of Throwing Punches
• 7. Michael Signer and a “Capital of the Resistance”
• 8. Richard Spencer and Forays into Charlottesville
• 9. The KKK Rally and Police Chief Al Thomas
• 10. A President Who Wouldn’t Comfort
• 11. The ACLU and the Limits of Free Speech
• 12. The Long Shadow of Slavery
• 13. The Militias and Their Weapons
• 14. The Indelibility of Images
• 15. The Failure to Keep the Peace
• 16. Naming and Shaming
• 17. Aftermath and Healing
• Epilogue