A UVa Historian Talks About Charlottesville’s White-Supremacist Rally a Year Later

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After white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia’s campus with flaming tiki torches last summer, some students and faculty members managed to find one reason for optimism: Maybe, they thought, the nightmare would bring more people into the conversation about racism on campus. Those who had been apathetic would see that racism is not just a problem of the past and might be spurred into action.

“It’s never going to be the same, and that’s a great thing,” Devin Willis said last year. On August 11, just before the start of his sophomore year, he linked arms with other students at an iconic campus statue of Thomas Jefferson as marchers approached, shouting “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil.” They threw their tiki torches at the students, sprayed them with pepper spray, and injured several before leaving. “People are finally coming to understand,” Willis said after the incident, “that to not be racist is not enough.”

After the violent weekend in Charlottesville, during which a counterprotester was killed when a white supremacist drove a car into a crowd, the Black Student Alliance issued a list of demands to Teresa Sullivan, the university’s president. They included the removal of Confederate plaques from campus and the increased enrollment of African-American students.

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Keiara Price, a rising junior who was elected president of the Black Student Alliance this year, attended a forum to discuss those demands. The meeting helped her gauge how far people on campus still were from each other when it came to these issues. The Student Council endorsed the demands, but not before four students spoke out against them. One cited statistics claiming that black students commit more crimes, Price said. Another defended Thomas Jefferson, the university’s slave-owning founder.

“We are no longer in that rose-colored glasses, Obama-is-president kind of world,” Price said. “Now people are comfortable acting out what generations before have taught them.”

Amid the divisions, there were signs of progress. This month, a group of UVa faculty compiled a book of essays, Charlottesville 2017, published by the University of Virginia Press. Claudrena Harold, a professor of African-American and African studies and history, co-edited the volume. Harold teaches a class on the history of African-American students at UVa called “Black Fire.” She spoke to The Chronicle about how the campus has felt different since white supremacists descended upon it — and how it remains very much the same. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. What was this year like for you? A. It’s been a whirlwind of a year, with moments of hope and disappointment.

A: I don’t think the university was at zero with regards to talking about race, talking about the history of white supremacy, or talking about the current manifestations of racial and economic injustice. That work was already being done. I think in this moment that work was magnified.

One of the things that August 11 and 12 did was that it did add some new allies and partners to the struggle for racial and economic justice at UVa and beyond.

I would say that it moved some factions of the university in a more positive direction. At the same time, I think there are those of us who are still disappointed and not quite satisfied. It’s important to talk about the reality of racism and economic injustice. It’s also important to implement policies that generate real substantive change in the everyday lives of people. We also have to talk about issues of economic inequality, issues of affordable housing. We have to talk about the ways in which the university and the expansion of the university also affect the citizens of Charlottesville.

I’m at the point where I want to move from policy to action.

Q. Have the efforts to process what happened and make recommendations been helpful?

A. One of my primary concerns going back to Grounds [a term used at UVa in the place of “campus”] in August was the safety of my students. There were students returning who had real concerns. There were parents of African-American students who contacted me with questions such as, When are the white supremacists coming back? When they come back, what measures does the university have in place to guarantee the safety of my child?

I felt as if I was a part of a community of individuals and institutions addressing these issues. I did not feel isolated. The history department decided, for example, to have a series of conversations and forums related to matters of race and social justice. The forums ranged from conversations about the history of racism on Grounds, black student protest, and anti-semitism to matters of racism related to fraternities and sororities. The idea was to provide a space for intellectual engagement, for healing, and also for students to get answers to questions that they had.

At the first event about 300 people showed up. After the event we had breakout sessions. In those sessions first-year African-American students raised questions about their safety and communicated some of their concerns about walking across Grounds at night. That was extremely important.

In a moment of crisis, you have to think about the role of the scholar. For me it is about providing intellectual spaces for our students to process these issues.

Q. How was your “Black Fire” class this year?

A. “Black Fire” had 256 students last semester. I did some things differently this year. We usually start in the 1950s, and we trace the history of African-Americans at the University of Virginia and the various ways people have dealt with the politics of race from the 1950s to the present.

One of the things that I hadn’t done in previous semesters was talk about the history of eugenics in the university. We looked at university professors’ role in promoting white-supremacist ideas.

At the end of the class every semester we always do a group oral-history project, and the students normally interview an older African-American alum, a retired professor, or sometimes their parents, if they were here. This year we decided to focus exclusively on the events of August 11 and 12. The idea was to create an archive of interviews — it could be students, professors, anyone on campus. What was interesting about that was the students gravitated towards people in the community.

I wanted them to interview each other. If this class is still taught in 20 years the events of August 11 and 12 are going to be part of it. I want the next generation of students to have these interviews as resources and to not just rely on media reports. Some of the students were not sure if their opinions mattered. It brought up this complex issue of whether you could talk about August 11 and 12 if you were not there.

That has also been an issue in our community: Who has the right to speak about these issues? I was trying to get the students to talk about it even if they were not here. How did you feel about it? How did you feel about coming back to the university?

Q. You edited a book that was just published, Charlottesville 2017. Can you tell me about that?

There’s always this question of what does it mean to think about writing amid pain and trauma. What does it mean to respond and reflect when people are still hurting, when you are still hurting.

It’s a weird moment when the media is also pulling you in multiple directions; the university is offering various funding opportunities for us to individually and collectively respond to a crisis.

In this moment there were certain individuals and entities who had conversations about whether they were going apply for this funding. Is it ethical to apply for this funding? Is it ethical to be interviewed? To write this editorial? There were really hard decisions to make throughout this year.

Q. Why were you questioning the ethics of accepting funding to do that kind of work?

A. I never want my academic work to be used as a facade for real substantive change. It is important that we talk about and make calls for economic and racial justice, but it means nothing if these calls are not implemented at a policy level.

That’s the cool thing about this edited volume. As a collective we raised some tough questions. We put certain demands on the university. I think that’s part of our job. It is my hope that this volume is a model for how scholars move forward and attempt to address issues in a moment of deep pain and anguish.

Q. Do your students still feel unsafe?

A. Those questions died down by the end of the first semester. But I have found myself in moments where students are being recruited at the University of Virginia and parents have questions about the racial climate. It is not with the same urgency as late August 2017, but it’s still there. To be honest with you, it’s always been there. I’ve always received questions from parents who have concerns.

My job is to say, Yes, this a reality, this happened. You cannot erase that fact. But at this university these institutions also exist, these traditions also exist. There was a group of African-American alums who came back to the university to help people move in. There’s the office of African-American affairs and there’s the African-American studies department. There are administrators and professors that care deeply about the students’ well-being.

Q. What kinds of questions did your students continue to ask throughout the year?

A. They asked about safety. They raise issues that students have always raised: issues about diversity, enrollment, the number of faculty of color, the university’s support of activists. They raise issues about the status of workers on Grounds. They raised questions about this university’s commitment to equity and justice.

The toughest questions posed by a student are, Will things ever change? How do I remain hopeful? Those are the two questions that silence the room.

Those are deeper questions because Charlottesville, for some of them, magnified a problem that extends beyond central Virginia. They don’t have the comfort of leaving the university and saying, Once I leave the university, I leave the problems August 11 and 12 presented. For some students, the white-supremacist rallies occasioned deep reflection about human nature, the meaning of life, the existence of evil, theodicy. It was much deeper than just an issue of the First and Second Amendments.

These were not students who had no knowledge of the reality of racism and white supremacy in Charlottesville and the larger world. But these events tested their faith in a way no other event had.