Charlottesville: An American Story

by Deborah Baker

Overview

In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city’s historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far right cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a throng of counterprotesters, killing a young woman and injuring dozens.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker has written a riveting and panoptic account of what unfolded that weekend, focusing less on the rally’s far right leaders than on the story of the city itself. University, local, and state officials, including law enforcement, were unable or unwilling to grasp the gathering threat. Clergy, activists, and organizers from all walks of life saw more clearly what was coming and, at great personal risk, worked to warn and defend their city.

To understand why their warnings fell on deaf ears, Baker does a deep dive into American history. In her research she discovers an uncannily similar event that took place decades before when an emissary of the poet and fascist Ezra Pound arrived in Charlottesville intending to start a race war. In Charlottesville, Baker shows how a city more associated with Thomas Jefferson than civil unrest became a flashpoint in a continuing struggle over our nation’s founding myths.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644453414
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	06/03/2025
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	560,313
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Deborah Baker is the author of The Last Englishmen; Making a Farm; In Extremis, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography; A Blue Hand; and The Convert, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in India and New York.

Editorial Reviews

[Baker] shows how coordinated resistance against white supremacists both can work and will be required again in the coming years. A vivid account that capably illuminates the evils half-hidden under a flickering torch.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“In Charlottesville, the brilliant biographer Deborah Baker turns her deep understanding of character and her researcher’s eye to her hometown and the horrible events that unfolded there as fascism marched—and murdered—in August 2017. Baker offers us a new way of understanding the threat of the far right by surrounding it, in this heart-stopping and heartbreaking narrative, with a rich and complex story of how the everyday people of a small city fought for justice long before the tiki torches blazed. Charlottesville is essential history, reportage, and maybe how-to for all who care for that struggle.”—Jeff Sharlet, NYT bestselling author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“No work of nonfiction I have read over the past decade has moved me as much as Charlottesville. Seldom has one place and time come to stand so hauntingly for a country on the precipice of catastrophe. With the precision of a master pointillist painter, Deborah Baker puts human faces on the buried truths that imperil American democracy while also amplifying the unheeded voices of the kind of unsung citizens who may yet save it. A must-read feat of spellbinding storytelling that packs the power of prophetic truth.”—Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America

“No one has explained the struggle for contemporary America's soul as masterfully as Deborah Baker does in Charlottesville. Whether she's depicting the battles of ordinary citizens against provocateurs in the street or the pentimento effect of the past in the present, Baker puts her readers right there, on the spot. A family tragedy, a ghost story and a political thriller all at once, this book is a gripping and terrifying portrait of our time.”—Deborah Cohen, author of Last Call at the Hotel Imperial

Praise for Deborah Baker

“[Baker] keeps the big events always in view, dramatizing and humanizing the workings of history…in a way a novelist would—by making it a story of individuals.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Baker writes beautifully, and she’s done ample research….She crafts memorable portraits of dynamic, flawed men and women.”—San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher

★ 2025-02-15
In-depth history of the murderous white supremacist march on the Virginia city in 2017.

“There is a direct path from the Unite the Right rally of August 12, 2017, to the Stop the Steal insurrection of January 6, 2021,” writes native daughter Baker, who returned to her hometown after many years to explore that connection. The proximate cause of the rally, marked by polo-and-khaki-clad, mostly young men chanting against Jews, immigrants, and other perceived enemies, was the planned removal of a statue honoring Robert E. Lee—who, Baker sagely notes, never visited the city. The rally brought that white supremacist crowd, full of neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis, into the progressive home of the University of Virginia and a town with a Jewish mayor and large Black population. At the helm of the alt-right marchers was the supremely ambitious Richard Spencer, with a network of ex-military militia recruited from far afield—just like that Jan. 6 crowd. Charlottesville had long been a locus of racial enmity: As Baker notes, the Lee statue was a deliberate provocation. So, too, was the march, courtesy of the ACLU’s contesting against a city-imposed ban on it. The result led to the book’s concluding event: a young man “who kept a framed photograph of Hitler and a copy ofMein Kampf by his bedside” drove into a crowd, killed a woman named Heather Heyer, and injured many others. Populating her account with the likes of violence-bent if often inept men whom she dubs Swastika Pin, Tampa Realtor, Red Shirt, and the like—their real identities later exposed through careful investigation—Baker demonstrates the despicable falsity of Donald Trump’s saying that there “were very fine people, on both sides”—and shows how coordinated resistance against white supremacists both can work and will be required again in the coming years.

A vivid account that capably illuminates the evils half-hidden under a flickering torch.

Kirkus Reviews