Charlottesville: An American Story

In this captivating account, Pulitzer finalist Baker (The Last Englishman) brings a historian’s insight to bear on a minute-by-minute report of the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., when white supremacists rioted against a city council vote to relocate a statue of Robert E. Lee. Baker begins by profiling Zyahna Bryant, a Black high school student whose school paper set in motion the series of events that led to the vote to remove the statue. Baker follows Bryant as she organizes protests and stands up to the neo-Confederate Army of Northern Virginia Mechanized Cavalry, so named “for their fondness for high end pickups.” The group undertook a harassment campaign against Bryant that Baker points out merged old-school Southern racial intimidation with a new online style of attack forged during 2014’s Gamergate. Later, Baker narrates the harrowing events of August 12 in exacting detail. As it progresses, her account becomes, fittingly, a description of battle: anti-fascists create a “corridor” in the crowd; advancing columns of Nationalist Front militia outflank members of the far-left Industrial Workers of the World with “furled flags and locked arms.” Throughout, Baker offers historical context, from an analysis of the “Lost Cause” myth to a particularly fascinating tangent on John Kasper, a Greenwich Village bohemian turned vociferous segregationist who traveled to Charlottesville in the 1960s to oppose school integration, armed with speeches “all provided to him” by his mentor Ezra Pound. This brings history and current events into illuminating dialogue. (June)