Nearly six years after violent throngs of white nationalists descended on Charlottesville, spreading terror at a torch-lit march on UVA Grounds on Aug. 11, 2017 and at the Unite the Right rally in downtown Charlottesville the next day, two recently published books explore new angles around the lead-up to those events and their aftermath.

24 Hours in Charlottesville: An Oral History of the Stand Against White Supremacy by UVA alum and former NBC29 reporter Nora Neus collects the oral histories of approximately 100 people who issued warnings about likely violence long before that weekend, and who stood up to hate.

“The first interview I have is from the morning of August 13, and some of those original tapes made up the original oral history, but then a lot of it is actually conducted after the fact, about five years later, which I think gives an ability for people to see the events more clearly,” says Neus, who was working for CNN in the summer of 2017. 

She says the biggest takeaway from her book was the fact that so many people had attempted to warn government and university officials.

“We knew this would happen. We knew that the white nationalists, white supremacists wanted to create violence and wanted to carry out violence in our community, and the warnings were not heeded,” she told Charlottesville Right Now.

A second book, Making #Charlottesville: Media from Civil Rights to Unite the Right by media historian and UVA Professor Aniko Bodroghkozy, puts the media coverage, particularly local media coverage, in context with events and media coverage from the civil rights era.
“What the alt-right wanted to do in Charlottesville was basically build their movement, their white supremacist movement, take it off from where they’d been organizing, which was in social media spaces, and make it a real-life movement in the streets,” Bodroghkozy said. “They knew Charlottesville had a well-developed activist base, a lot of the people that Nora interviews in her book, and they came here not really wanting to protest about taking down statues, but wanting a confrontation, wanting violence.”
While Neus’ book points out the ways that government and university officials failed to heed warnings from citizens about the impending violence, Bodroghkozy takes sharp aim at media coverage in the months prior.
” I look at local media coverage in the lead-up to the Unite the Right, particularly print coverage. And there’s a real problem in the way that local reporters were basically doing this ‘both sides’ and normalizing Jason Kessler, who was the lead organizer of the Unite the Right, just referring to him as a local blogger.”

Listen to the full interview with Nora Neus and Aniko Bodroghkozy here.