207: Charlottesville: Our Town, Our Country

BackStory

History, Education

4.7 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 18 August 2017

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Brian, Ed, Joanne, and Nathan share their personal reactions to last week’s violence in Charlottesville, when white supremacists and Neo-Nazis showed up in town, some of them heavily armed. Violent clashes left one counter protester dead, and 34 injured. The BackStory hosts also discuss the meaning of Confederate statutes, and why they’re suddenly so polarizing. They conclude the conversation with why we’re seeing this resurgence in white nationalist activism in 2017.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National
0:04.4	Dowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert
0:08.5	Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis foundations.
0:12.6	From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory.
0:30.0	Welcome to backstory. I'm Joanne Freeman. I'm Ed Ayers. I'm Nathan Connolly, and I'm Brian Balla.
0:39.0	We're devoting this week's show to a discussion of the far right rally last weekend in Charlottesville.
0:45.0	This is ugly scene unfolded just moments ago from what we understand clergy members have just arrived at a
0:50.8	emancipation park. A 32-year-old Charlottesville woman was killed, and at least 19 other counter protestors were injured during
1:05.8	clashes with white supremacists on Saturday. Several hundred far right activists also held a torch-lit rally on the
1:12.5	campus of the University of Virginia Friday night. The message and the symbolism were unmistakable.
1:18.2	White lives men! White lives men! White lives men! White lives men!
1:23.9	The far right rallies and violence in Charlottesville last weekend through headlines around the world.
1:29.8	But for those of you who don't know it, we are based here in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Virginia
1:35.3	Foundation for the Humanities. What happened here happened in our backyard. I was there, and this is what I saw.
1:45.8	Nots of white men carrying semi-automatic weapons, carrying baseball bats, carrying shields.
1:55.8	And frankly, more frightening than the guns, although they were frightening, was the fascist iconography,
2:03.8	the Ku Klux Klan iconography, and the crowd had just been dispersed by the police.
2:11.8	They had declared a state of emergency because of fights that had broken out.
2:16.8	And so these Nots of men, some of them five, some of them 15 or 20, were standing on the hill tops.
2:23.8	It looked almost like the beginning of a film about the original Ku Klux Klan.
2:31.8	I guess I never imagined that I would be seeing this kind of a spousal of hate out in the open, in the very places where I've hung out for a big part of my life.
2:47.8	Yeah, and if you go to Charlottesville today, the signs of the weekend are all too clear to see.
	...

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