In her insightful chronicle, ‘Charlottesville: An American Story,’ Deborah Baker diligently maps out the prelude to the infamous 2017 Unite the Right assembly and its ensuing political ramifications. The home for this event, Charlottesville, could always be considered an uncommon locale for such a disturbance. Nestled in the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia, the city always showcased an aura of elegance, etiquette, and reasonableness.
Before the remarkable upheaval in 2017, Charlottesville was not just renowned as the residence of President Thomas Jefferson and his complex history, but also host to a Jewish mayor, a significant Black community, and one of the nation’s premier public universities. Today, the place stands identified not just for Jefferson’s Monticello and ‘Academical Village’ but as a haunting reminder of 2017’s Unite the Right rally, a symbol so potent that Deborah Baker didn’t need to provide additional context in her book’s title.
Baker’s meticulously revisited and personalized account of this distressing event in her birthplace forms a worthy addition to an expanding repository of detailed nonfiction, focused on capturing and analyzing the upsurge of racially and hate-fueled violence in the United States during the years of 2015 (with the Charleston Church tragedy) and 2020 (marked by George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis).
The Charlottesville incident, bookmarked by grotesque images of Nazi sympathisers holding torches and a lethal vehicle driving into a crowd, perfectly symbolizes the mid-point of this timeline—a unavoidable metaphor for the right-wing tilt of U.S. politics during the Trump era. Though Baker moved to New York post her graduation from the University of Virginia in 1981, she felt an irresistible pull to investigate the stark regressive incident which occurred in the outwardly forward-looking city of her upbringing.
Right from the start, Baker candidly expresses her confusion and disbelief that the henchmen who congregated in Charlottesville could possibly signify a lasting aspect of American politics. It’s a sentiment that resonates with many Americans, who form perhaps close to half of the population.
Despite her bafflement, Baker demonstrates acute understanding of the ‘direct path’ connecting the Charlottesville event with the insurgent assault on the U.S. Capitol that occurred on January 6, 2021, as well as the plausible re-emergence of Trumpism in the 2024 elections. She remains unequivocally certain there were no ‘very fine people on both sides,’ contradicting President Trump’s statement made just three days after the incident, when one person drove his car in full acceleration into a crowd, which resulted in the tragic death of Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old woman, and injuries to at least three dozen others.