The Charlottesville “Unite the Right” Rally

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What happened during the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally? How did this rally mark a cultural shift?

In 2017, the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally marked a cultural shift because it was the largest public gathering of white supremacists in decades. Many believe this was partly inspired by the election of Donald Trump and was a prelude to the 2021 Capitol attack.

Continue reading to learn what happened before, during, and after the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, and what it means for the resurgence of racial bias.

From Implicit Bias to Explicit Racism

In the right circumstances, implicit biases can bubble up to conscious awareness and become explicit racism. This was the case in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, when hundreds of white nationalists and neo-Nazis descended on the campus of the University of Virginia (UVA) before a “Unite the Right” rally. That march and its aftermath marked a fundamental change in the national conversation about race. 

In this article, we’ll examine the violent Charlottesville march in more detail, the impact it had on UVA students, and what role universities should play in combating racial bias on campus. 

The Unite the Right Rally

The Charlottesville Unite the Right rally was the culmination of growing racial and political tensions across the country. To fully understand the way those events impacted how we think about implicit and explicit bias, we need to understand what happened before, during, and after the rally itself. 

Before the Rally

The Charlottesville Unite the Right rally itself was originally meant to protest the proposed removal of a statue of Civil War General Robert E. Lee from a park in downtown Charlottesville. The statue’s proposed removal was part of a city-wide effort to ensure the city’s public memorials depicted the real history of Charlottesville—including its role as a major slave-exporting state. For city officials, removing Confederate symbols was a way of recognizing that legacy and the unimaginable harm it inflicted on generations of black families. (Shortform note: The fate of the Robert E. Lee statue was contested in court for a full five years until April 2021, when the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the city could remove the statue as well as a nearby statue of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.)

The city’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces faced enormous backlash from the moment it considered removing the Lee statue. White Virginians argued that the statue represented Southern pride and cultural identity and that Confederate heroes were a symbol of the glory of the Old South. That attitude is an example of the “lost cause theory,” which describes the way many white Southerners draw on the myth of the “glorious lost cause” of the Confederacy as a source of identity and pride. As a result, they take any criticism of Robert E. Lee as a personal affront. 

However, the problem with the Lee statue isn’t just that it glorifies the racist values of the Old South. The statue itself wasn’t erected until 1924, nearly 60 years after the Civil War, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was an active and powerful force in the region. Erecting the statue was an act of intimidation that literally cemented the KKK’s dangerous ideology in Charlottesville under the guise of a war memorial. 

Confederate Monuments Are Symbols of the “Lost Cause”

Removing Confederate monuments is a growing trend—in 2020, a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) found that over 160 Confederate symbols were removed from public property, including 71 in Virginia alone (in this case, “symbols” includes physical monuments and graphic images as well as public buildings, parks, and roads named after Confederate figures). However, the same report found that over 2,100 Confederate symbols are still on display across the country, most of which are clustered in the Southern states. The SPLC began tracking displays of Confederate symbols after a white supremacist killed nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. However, many white Southerners argue that removing these symbols is a way of erasing Southern history. This is a central tenet of the “lost cause” of the Confederacy, which began in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and became part of the public consciousness through films like Gone With the Wind that glorify Southern antebellum life—slavery included. Many argue that this image of the chivalrous Old South is false, and that it has replaced the brutal historical reality of slavery in the minds of many Southerners.Modern believers in the “lost cause” resist the push to remove Confederate monuments because they believe that the Civil War was more about states’ rights than slavery, that most slaves were kept in humane conditions, and that enslaved people were endlessly loyal to their enslavers. Therefore, they categorically deny that Confederate symbols are symbols of racism

During the Rally

To protest removing Confederate statues, various far-right groups descended on Charlottesville as part of the “Unite the Right” rally. The night before the official rally, a group of hundreds of neo-Nazis marched through the University of Virginia’s campus carrying tiki torches and chanting racist and anti-Semitic epithets. Violence erupted when the mob encountered a group of UVA student protestors: The marchers beat students and university administrators with their torches and sprayed mace into the crowd until police arrived on the scene. (Shortform note: In Caste, author Isabel Wilkerson recounts the same events, but with an important bit of added context: The march through UVA’s campus was a reenactment of the 1933 torchlight parade that celebrated Hitler becoming the new chancellor of Germany. The demonstration also invoked images of the Ku Klux Klan, who also marched by torchlight in the 1920s and ‘30s.)

The violence on campus was merely a prologue to the rally itself. On the morning of the rally, before the official rally began, groups of neo-Nazis surrounded a synagogue, shouting “Heil Hitler” as Jewish worshippers held Shabbat service inside. Later, in downtown Charlottesville, hundreds of heavily armed far-right protesters clashed with several thousand counterprotesters. The tension between the groups quickly escalated from shouting to all-out brawling. That violence turned deadly when a self-professed neo-Nazi plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring dozens and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

After the Rally

In November 2017, three months after the deadly rally, Dr. Eberhardt visited the University of Virginia to interview students, administrators, and local government officials about their experiences. Across these interviews, two common themes emerged: 

Theme #1: Conflicting Identities

We all have multiple aspects of our identities. When those identities aren’t in conflict, we may not even think about them (for example, you may not give much thought to being both a parent and an employee until work conflicts with family time). 

The people of Charlottesville felt this tension of multiplicity acutely in the aftermath of the rally. For example, Eberhardt learned that white students who grew up in the area had to reconcile their liberal politics with their Southern heritage and the racism in their own families and communities. Young white men in particular felt a seismic shift—many of the violent marchers had looked like them, and as a result, classmates and even security officers now looked at them with the mix of fear and suspicion that black men often face everywhere they go. 

For students of color, this identity tension arose between how they saw themselves (as carefree college students) and how others might see them (as a hated minority). Where they may have felt mildly uncomfortable in a room full of white classmates before, many students felt acutely unsafe in the rally’s aftermath and were constantly on the alert for potential violence, making it impossible to focus on learning. Additionally, students and faculty members with children had to juggle their identities as activists devoted to protesting injustice with their identities as parents who need to protect their children from a dangerous situation. 

The Charlottesville “Unite the Right” Rally

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Hannah Aster

Hannah graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English and double minors in Professional Writing and Creative Writing. She grew up reading fantasy books and has always carried a passion for fiction. However, Hannah transitioned to non-fiction writing when she started her travel website in 2018 and now enjoys sharing travel guides and trying to inspire others to see the world.

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