12:02pm: Alt-right attendees march east on Market Street toward the parking garage, where many of them have parked the large white vans carrying Richard Spencer, David Enoch and former KKK imperial wizard David Duke. They’re followed by members of Black Lives Matter and antifas. When they reach the parking garage, the white nationalists chase Black Lives Matter member Dre Harris and his friends into the garage, and tear down the wooden barricades to use them as weapons. Harris lies on the ground and tries to cover his head as he is beaten.
White nationalists chased Dre Harris, a member of Black Lives Matter, into the Market Street Parking Garage and beat him with pieces of the wooden barricades they tore down. (Credit Image: © Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via ZUMA Press)
12:08pm: “We knew it was going to be a riot, fellas, stand strong!” shouts an alt-righter after the group exits the garage, coughing from pepper spray. An antifa approaches from the left side and hits an older man who is bleeding and clutching the side of his face and also carrying a Confederate flag. As the man falls to the ground, someone yells, “I just saw a Nazi go down!” County police officers, standing in front of the Charlottesville Police Department headquarters, approach to help the man up.
Dre Harris suffered a concussion, an ulnar fracture and received eight staples in his head after the attack. Staff photo
12:11pm: Wounded Black Lives Matter member Dre Harris, whose face and white shirt is smeared with blood, is taken to the porch of NBC29 across from the garage by his friends. “Fuck Charlottesville police!” someone shouts at the group of officers stationed in front of the police department.
12:16pm: Riot gear-clad police enter the garage to escort alt-righters out.
12:17pm: “Where’s the fucking ambulance?!” shouts one of Harris’ friends to the police officers. Harris suffers a concussion, an ulnar fracture, and receives eight staples in his head, according to a GoFundMe page established in his behalf. As of August 14, it has raised more than $106,000.
12:18pm: A group of people, mostly men, heavily armed and wearing camouflage, walk quickly down Water Street. A reporter gets pushed into a wall near the Southern Environmental Law Center window as they rush by. One of them yells, “We gotta go. Go, go, go, go, go!” as they run by. A man yells at them, “Fascists get out of my town!” At this, two of the camo-clad men turn around and point their assault weapons at him. The butt of one of the guns pushes up against C-VILLE Weekly reporter Erin O’Hare’s chest for about two seconds, until they lower their arms and keep running down Water Street, toward the Pavilion.
A woman sitting on the ground outside the law center says she came here to be a nurse with the militia—the aforementioned heavily armed individuals—“to keep the peace on both sides.” She says the militia are working with cops to “keep the peace,” and that “anyone with camo and guns is militia.” Most violence has come from the left, she says, “but there’s violence from both sides. I promise you that.” She says the militia is a “constitutional group,” the Three Percent.
12:40pm: A large group of counterprotesters have again gathered in Justice Park, but to their dismay, so has a line of riot cops. They scream at the police and chant, “This is what democracy looks like!” until the police, as a unit, leave the scene. The group cheers.
12:42pm: Two members of the clergy—Melanie Mullins and Winnie Varghese—plus David Walsh, a Princeton graduate student who researches far-right politics, sit on the low brick wall at the entrance to the Jefferson School. A group of white supremacists carrying flags walks up Fourth Street NW; they cross the street and walk through the Staples parking lot, when they see the threesome sitting on the brick wall. “That’s the power of the collar,” says Varghese, who came to Charlottesville in answer to Elaine Thomas’ nationwide call to clergy. “It’s really moving to me that people came to stand with us. It feels less isolating. These are international movements for freedom. …This is a historic day for this. These guys crossed the street to not have to deal with us.”
1pm: Unite the Right attendees regroup at McIntire Park, where the city had wanted Kessler to hold his event. Eli Mosley, who told the Cavalier Daily he’s “command soldier major of the alt-right,” is heard on the phone saying if he’s not allowed back into Emancipation Park to pick up “our stuff, I will send 200 men with guns to come get them.” A few anti-racists challenge a guy wearing knight’s armor. “Don’t talk to the animals,” says one of his compatriots. Many out-of-state attendees are leaving and heading home. When one is asked where he’s from, he replies, “The internet.” His friend says they’re from Philadelphia, and the circumspect male offers up that he’s six hours from Charlottesville.
Chandler Potter, from central New Jersey, wears a Confederate cap and offers a reporter a bottle of water. He says when he tried to leave downtown, he was attacked by “about 20 people” when he tried to get to his vehicle. Rally organizers, he says, “should have had a contingency plan.” The turn of events shows “a great amount of fear,” says Potter. “They did not want us here.” Despite the rally not taking place, “It was a great victory,” he says.
Alt-righters face off against counterprotesters at McIntire Park. Photo by Eze Amos
1pm: President Donald Trump weighs in on Twitter: “We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!”
1:17pm: “When the sun goes down I’m going to beat the shit out of one of these guys,” says an anti-racist in the middle of a group of counterprotesters and white nationalists gathered at the surface lot across from the Water Street parking garage. State police in riot gear form a line behind them. Another wave of state police waits on First Street.
1:20pm: Artist Sarah Jones sits on the floor near the door of Pearl Island/VU Noodles at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, surrounded by paint and brushes. She’s been working on a mural for about a month now, and the image is a composite of images of the three cultures of the three chefs cooking in the space: Puerto Rican, Haitian and Vietnamese.
1:25pm: As three vehicles carrying white nationalists attempt to exit the elevated parking lot on Water Street, counterprotesters surround the SUV in the back of the line, throwing water bottles at the windows and kicking it. The driver almost runs into the car in front of him while trying to escape protesters, who run after them down the street.
1:33pm: Neo-Nazis with the National Socialist Movement march down Water Street. “Go home!” yells a driver from a passing car. “We are home!” a neo-Nazi responds. “No you’re not!” the driver counters.
1:37pm: Anti-racists walk down Water Street from the same direction the NSM men came from minutes earlier. “No Trump! No KKK! No Fascist U.S.A.!” they chant.
Richard Spencer tells a group of alt-righters at McIntire Park that he is outraged by assaults from antifas. Photo by Eze Amos
1:38pm: At McIntire Park, Eli Mosley warns the hundred or so who are gathered there that a state of emergency has been declared, which means they “can’t have weapons” and should leave the park in the next 10 to 20 minutes.
But first, attendees hear headliner Richard Spencer describe his ordeal of police dousing him with a chemical agent—twice. “I have never in my life been so outraged by my government,” he says. He decries the lack of police protection at Emancipation Park. “As I was coming in, these antifa communists assaulted us,” he says. Local police wouldn’t let him get to the platform to speak, which was behind the barrier, he says. “We have a permit.” When recounting his confrontation with the state police, Spencer says, “They looked like stormtroopers. They were in effect pushing us out of Lee Park toward the communists.” Adds Spencer, “I was standing my ground. Then I was maced in the face and in the chest by police.” No one helped him, he says, and police “forced us into a gauntlet.” He’s received death threats, he says, adding “They were endangering us.”
With parting shots at Mayor Mike Signer, who is Jewish, and Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy, who is black, Spencer promises, “We are going to be back here.”
1:38pm: “Black Lives Matter!” shouts a large group of counterprotesters carrying signs, banners and homemade drums walking down Water Street. The group turns north onto Fourth Street.
People who witnessed the Dodge Challenger driven by James Alex Fields Jr. plow into the group of peaceful protesters help the victims. Photo by Eze Amos
Credit Image: © Michael Nigro/Pacific Press via ZUMA Wire
Photo by Eze Amos
1:40pm: James Alex Fields Jr., 20, an Ohio man and alleged Nazi romanticizer, drives a Dodge Challenger into about two dozen demonstrators on Fourth Street, killing Heather Heyer, 32, and injuring 19 others. He backs up over at least one person and speeds away. The crowd is in hysterics, and several bloodied people wait in the street for medical attention. “Somebody call a fucking ambulance,” a man screams while running away from the scene. Lost shoes and belongings are scattered everywhere.
On his last day of work at the Daily Progress, photographer Ryan Kelly, 30, captures an image of the Dodge Challenger as it plows into the crowd. The picture goes viral, with the Washington Post dubbing it, “The photo from Charlottesville that will define this moment in American history.” Kelly, who had been with the paper four years, tells the Columbia Journalism Review that if the car had come 20 seconds earlier, he would have been in the middle of the street with his back to it and not on the sidewalk, where he was when it sped by.
1:50pm: Protesters hold a large “Against White Supremacy” sign up to give some of the victims and people helping them privacy.
1:51pm: Clergy members link arms on Water Street in front of the accident to keep people from walking through.
1:52pm: David Duke and Mike Enoch share a few words with their supporters at McIntire Park. Enoch rails against “white genocide” and the police “getting jerky.” He says, “We love white people. That’s why we’re here.”
Says Duke, “I believe today in Charlottesville is the first step in making a realization of what Trump alluded to in his campaign. This is the first step in taking America back.” Duke, too, promises to be back in Charlottesville.
1:54pm: Interior doors to the Jefferson School are locked with wire. Someone walks in through the Common Ground door and says, “Bad things are happening.”
2:02pm: Heena Reiter leads an Envisioning Peace event at Common Ground. She asks everyone in a circle to say their name and declare what they say “yes” to. People say: respect, unity, peace, peace, peace, kindness, acceptance, love, harmony, to the power of peace, to preserving and carrying on after today, compassion for the “other,” justice and hope.
2:33pm: A group of about a dozen people forms a prayer circle at the intersection of Water Street and Second Street SE.
4:10pm: “We are here today to be witnesses. There are people who will not believe that this is our reality in 2017. So it was important that peaceful people [show up],” says Emmetri Beane of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia in the Jefferson School parking lot.
4:51pm: A Virginia State Police helicopter crashes in the woods near Old Farm Road in the Bellair neighborhood. Lieutenant H. Jay Cullen, 48, of Midlothian, and Trooper-Pilot Berke M.M. Bates, who would have turned 41 August 13, of Quinton, die at the scene.
Lieutenant H. Jay Cullen and trooper-pilot Berke M.M. Bates died at the scene of the Virginia State Police helicopter crash near Old Farm Road. Courtesy Virginia State Police
HONORING HEROES
Just before 5pm Saturday, August 12, a Virginia State Police helicopter that had been part of the day’s surveillance crashed in the woods near Old Farm Road in the Bellair neighborhood. Both men on board, Lieutenant H. Jay Cullen and trooper-pilot Berke M.M. Bates, died at the scene. No details about the cause of the crash have been released.
Lieutenant H. Jay Cullen
The 48-year-old Virginia State Police officer of 23 years joined the aviation unit in 1999 and was promoted to be its commander last February.
He was an avid mountain biker living in Midlothian with a wife and two sons.
Governor Terry McAuliffe says he was very close to Cullen, who flew the governor and his family across the commonwealth for more than three and a half years.
“This is a devastating loss for their families, the Virginia State Police and the entire commonwealth,” McAuliffe said at a press conference. “These heroes were a part of our family and we are simply heartbroken.”
Trooper-pilot Berke M.M. Bates
Bates, who transferred to the Virginia State Police aviation unit in July, died the day before his 41st birthday. In his 13 years of service with the department, he was a former member of the state police Bureau of Criminal Investigation and part of Governor McAuliffe’s executive protection team for the past three years.
Bates, who lived in Quinton, played and coached hockey for the Richmond Generals, and is survived by his wife and twin son and daughter.
“The job he always wanted all his life was to fly for a state police group. He was selected for it about a month ago,” his father, Robert Bates, told the Daily News. “I just want everyone to know how great of a cop he was.”
Around 5pm: President Donald Trump says he’s been closely following events in Charlottesville. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” he says. “On many sides.”
5:01pm: The Art in Action event, co-sponsored by Black Lives Matter Charlottesville and Champion Brewing Company and held at the brewery, is shut down for security reasons.
5:05pm: Speaking to a small gathering of people at the McGuffey Park People’s Action for Racial Justice event, hosted by Together Cville and the Center for Peace and Justice, Bob McGowan says, “It will take a long time to process the events we’ve experienced.” He says, “Our work going forward” is to “exorcise the demons of white supremacy that are in our lives…we need to live with each other in peace, dignity and respect.”
5:13pm: Nathan Moore, of Together Cville, says he’s been to many protests, but “this is the first where someone died.” Purple and yellow mums and some faux lilies, purchased that day from Don’s Florist on Ridge Street, are passed around in memory of the person who lost her life in the car accident [Heather Heyer’s name has not yet been released]. Antifa from againstfascism.org pass out flowers and invite people in the park to lay them together in a circle.
A woman named Barbie kneels in the grass, lights 20 white pillar votive candles purchased that afternoon from the Dollar Tree and places them in a circle around the mound of flowers.
5:29pm: “Remember what you saw. Remember what you felt when you looked those people in the eye,” says Montae Taylor, president of Old Dominion University’s chapter of the NAACP.
5:52pm: The Downtown Mall feels eerily quiet as businesses have closed, and alt-righters and counterprotesters have left.
6pm: Governor Terry McAuliffe, City Manager Maurice Jones, Mayor Mike Signer and Charlottesville Police Chief Al Thomas hold a press conference at the county office building. McAuliffe tells the “white supremacists and Nazis who came into Charlottesville today: Go home. You are not wanted in this great commonwealth.”
Signer says the hatred, intolerance and bigotry, including the torchlight march on the Lawn, are brought by outsiders whose ideas “belong on the trash heap of history.” Says Jones, “Hate came to our town today in a way that we had feared but we had never really let ourselves imagine would.” And Thomas says, “Outsiders do not tell our story.”
7:23pm: A Shebeen server, dressed entirely in black, walks outside, sobbing. She gasps for air, sits down on the smoker parked near the restaurant’s entrance and turns her head to the sky, still crying. Mascara runs down her face as tears drip from her brown eyes. She tells a C-VILLE reporter that her friend died today, and she had to find that out on Facebook. Hands shaking, she’s barely able to light a cigarette with a hot pink BIC lighter. She succeeds, then tries to call her mother. A Black Lives Matter 757 activist hands her a flier for a vigil at UVA’s Rotunda later in the evening. When she finally gets through to her mother, she howls between sobs, “Mom. Heather’s dead. Heather’s gone. She’s gone. She’s gone.”
8:15pm: Charlottesville City Council grants Chief Thomas expanded powers, which include the authority to enact a curfew.
9:12pm: President Trump sends out another tweet: “Condolences to the family of the young woman killed today, and best regards to all of those injured, in Charlottesville, Virginia. So sad!”
Late Saturday night: The FBI and the Department of Justice open a civil rights investigation into the deadly car crash that killed Heather Heyer.
Sunday, August 14
Around 1am: A local who asks that his name not be used is walking home in the Belmont area when a truck stops behind him. “A person pushed me to the ground and then stomped my face into the pavement,” he says. “These guys were in the back ready to pounce.” He says when he notifies police, an officer says there had been reports of other attacks from a similar vehicle. “I’m a little sore,” the man says. “It’s been awhile since I’ve had a beat down.”
10:03am: UVA students begin painting a green-and-white sign on Beta Bridge that will read: “Hate has no place here. We choose love.”
10:21am: In advance of the regular 10:30am worship service at First Baptist Church on West Main Street, deacon Kathy Matthew leads everyone who’s already there in prayer. Camera shutters click as the group stands in a circle, holding hands. Someone murmurs, “God is good. God. Is. Good.”
10:31am: Politicians arrive at the church, and they’re ushered into a reserved pew a few rows from the front. The group includes Mayor Signer and his wife, Emily Blout; Virginia Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam; Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring; Delegate David Toscano; Governor McAuliffe and Vice-Mayor Bellamy.
Photo by Eze Amos
10:37am: “Turn to your neighbor and tell them, ‘I love you,’” Elder J. Boyd instructs everyone at First Baptist. “What you saw yesterday was not Charlottesville. There are good people here in Charlottesville…we work together.” He says that when people say “Virginia is for lovers,” it’s not about intimate love, but about brotherly love and compassion.
10:44am: Angelee Godbold leads the congregation in “Glory to His Name.” McAuliffe bounces and claps his hands along with the music. Camera shutters click between the notes.
10:57am: Elder Boyd stands at the altar and expresses, for the second time, his pleasure with McAuliffe’s statement “against bigotry and hatred,” and echoes the governor’s words: “Go home!” Then, Boyd turns his attention to other matters, including donations of baby supplies, visits to shut-ins and Bible study.
11:01am: Deacon Don Gathers greets first-time visitors to First Baptist and asks the media, who are sitting in pews toward the back and standing up in the balconies, to remember that this is the church’s weekly worship service and to respect the house. He invites them to return in the future.
“We’ve got to come about healing. There will be scars left in this community for many years,” says Gathers, adding that the only way to heal together is in unity, in Christ.
11:04am: The First Baptist congregation applauds as Northam comes to the altar to speak. He says his message to white supremacists and Nazis is, “You’re not welcome here in Charlottesville. Go home!” As a physician, he’s held a lot of babies, and “when you look into a baby’s eyes, you don’t see the hatred, the bigotry that we saw here yesterday…They learn it from somewhere.”
11:12am: The congregation applauds as McAuliffe approaches the altar. He asks for a moment of silence for the three people who died on Saturday, and says that the helicopter crash was “personal,” because Jay Cullen was his pilot for three years and Berke Bates was part of his protection unit.
The “white supremacists and neo-Nazis…they came here to hurt, no question about it,” McAuliffe says. He suggests they not only “go home,” but “get out of the United States. Your ‘patriotism’ is a disgrace to the men and women who wear the cloth of this country.”
Says the visibly moved governor, “We don’t like you, we don’t want you. Never come back.”
McAuliffe admits, “I’m more fired up than I’ve ever been! We stand on the shoulders of so many Americans…who fought against hate and bigotry.” He mentions Barbara Johns, the high school student who led her classmates in a strike to protest inferior conditions in April 1951 at Robert Russa Moton High School in Prince Edward County.
Governor Terry McAuliffe and Delegate David Toscano at First Baptist Church. Photo by Eze Amos
11:21am: McAuliffe, Toscano, Northam, Herring, Bellamy and the Signers leave. Most media leave with them—back pews and second-story balconies are suddenly nearly empty. This sends murmurs through the congregation. Later in the day, deacon Don Gathers notes that they left right before the offering.
11:42am: Tracie Daniels, a pastor and principal of Jackson-Via Elementary School, comes to the altar to preach. She reads from Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”
“We’re stronger than we look,” she begins her sermon, and she invokes Martin Luther King Jr.
1:03pm: A plein air artist stands under a silver umbrella in a gravel lot on Garrett Street, working on a painting of the pink warehouse.
2pm: Jason Kessler begins speaking into a cluster of microphones in front of a broad semicircle of cameras, journalists and hundreds of onlookers and protesters in front of City Hall. His voice is completely drowned out by angry voices that call him a murderer, among other things. He has a wide radius of space of about 15 feet around where he is standing.
2:02pm: Radio IQ reporter Sandy Hausman approaches Kessler to hold her mic directly in front of his mouth in order to get broadcast-quality audio.
2:05pm: Reporter Hawes Spencer follows Hausman’s example and begins to inch closer with his voice recorder.
2:05pm: Chants of “Shame on you!” begin and continue for a full minute.
2:06pm: A black-clad male protester with both middle fingers raised at Kessler trails behind Spencer. Half a dozen people follow suit, encircling Kessler.
Activist Jeff Winder takes a swing at Kessler, who turns and runs through the shrubbery toward the street. Winder later tells the New York Times, “Jason Kessler has been bringing hate to our town for months and has been endangering the lives of people of color and endangering other lives in my community.”
A woman catches up with the fleeing Kessler and tackles him into the bushes. Another protester pulls at his jacket. Police descend on the scene and hustle Kessler into the station. A line of uniformed state troopers forms to block anyone from moving toward the parking lot in front of the City Hall Annex. They are reinforced by riot-clad officers.
Around the corner, on the side street to the police parking garages, members of a state police SWAT team carrying M4 assault rifles line up and block access from the Downtown Mall. An armored vehicle is parked in the street behind them.
Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler’s press conference was thwarted by an angry mob of people. Photo by Eze Amos
Jason Kessler is tackled in the bushes by an angry citizen. Photo by Eze Amos
Jason Kessler must be escorted by police to escape the hundreds of people surging toward him. Photo by Eze Amos
2:08pm: Chants turn to “Nazis go home!” A man dressed in Chad fashion—a white polo shirt and black pants, with an undercut hairstyle—slinks along the side of City Hall with a camera bag and says, “You will not replace us.” A neon yellow sign in the crowd reads, “Heather’s blood is on your hands.”
2:21pm: One of the snipers standing on top of the Downtown Transit Center gives the other sniper a pat on the back.
2:28pm: Organizers visiting from Chicago with the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, offer a bullhorn to those who wish to speak outside the post office on Sixth Street. One man growls his message to Nazis: “Go. Home.” He mentions Heather Heyer, Jay Cullen and Berke Bates, and says, “This has gone too far” as he holds back tears.
2:33pm: Carl Dix, civil rights leader and co-initiator of RefuseFascism.org, takes the bullhorn. He says the Nazi/white supremacist attitude comes from the Trump/Pence administration. He mentions the Holocaust and says, “Don’t tell me that can’t happen in this country. It is up to us to end this nightmare for this country and our planet.” He urges everyone to vote in local and state elections.
2:55pm: “If it were black folks with tiki torches…the police would have beat them down to the ground,” a woman says through the bullhorn. “Yes, baby! Say it, baby!” someone yells.
“I just want this shit to stop,” says another woman, mentioning Freddie Gray and other victims of police brutality.
2:56pm: Robert K. Litzenberger, 47, of Charlottesville, is arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault for spitting on Kessler as he fled the press conference.
2:57pm: A woman using a bullhorn tells Charlottesville cops standing around a police car on Sixth Street,“If you want to be for us, you have to be for us.”
3:12pm: A man walks through the crowd blasting N.W.A’s “Fuck Tha Police.”
3:44pm: Two young men push a baby carriage full of bottles of water around. They offer water to the crowd, to police, to the press.
3:45pm: A woman encourages everyone to go out and vote and put six black men and women on Charlottesville City Council. The next speaker says, with a hint of despair, “Charlottesville will never have six black men and women on City Council.”
4:01pm: At the Fourth Street memorial site for Heather Heyer, a woman writes, “You are my HERO Heather. Thank you for being the FIRE FOR CHANGE! C’ville strong!” in chalk at the memorial.
4:05pm: Someone has added the word “hate” underneath the stop sign at the memorial. On the wayfinding sign on the side of the brick building, “Hate has no place here” is written in colorful paper block letters that cover some graffiti. Chalk messages on the ground include “Today we are all Heather” and “Charlottesville will stay outraged for you.” Marigolds formed in the shape of a heart occupy the middle of the memorial, and a pink butterfly balloon floats in the wind.
4:21pm: A group of about 30 people form a semi-circle and hold hands at the memorial.
4:26pm: About a dozen people, many wearing Serve C’ville T-shirts, pass out water and granola bars to the crowd.
4:34pm: A collective of six clergy members from various denominations kneel in front of the memorial and offer prayers for Heyer, Cullen, Bates and their families and friends.
4:36pm: A man with two small children in a stroller walks by the vigil. One of the children babbles and the dad hushes him, saying, “We have to be respectful right now.” A moment later, a group of young people walk away from the vigil and one sarcastically says, “Yeah, we’re gonna pray the Nazis away.”
4:55pm: A New York Times photojournalist asks local musician Keith Morris for a cigarette. Morris hands him an American Spirit as the reporter says he came to Charlottesville “to see the face of fascism” for himself.
4:56pm: A smell of incense wafts through the crowd at the memorial. It’s traced to two men sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk in meditation. One sports a fox tail and ears. A sign tells people to add a pinch of cedar to the coal to “release what energy needs releasing.”
5:20pm: A woman holding a “Free hugs” sign on the Downtown Mall says she can’t even remember how many people she’s hugged today. “Dozens. Dozens.”
TAKING A STAND
Support for the city following Saturday’s deadly Unite the Right rally has poured in from all over the world, including hundreds of Solidarity with Charlottesville events that were held nationwide on Sunday and Monday.
Many of the vigils honored the life of Heather Heyer, the local woman who was killed by a man who drove his car into peaceful counterprotesters Saturday afternoon. Other gatherings were put together to speak out against hate groups and push for the removal of Confederate monuments.
During a Monday evening “emergency protest” in Durham, North Carolina, a crowd tied a rope around the neck of a 15-foot uniformed Confederate soldier statue that has stood in front of the old Durham County Courthouse since 1924, and pulled it off its pedestal. In Portland, Maine, 400 citizens gathered Sunday in Monument Square to protest white supremacy, neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and President Donald Trump, while hundreds in Los Angeles rallied on the steps of City Hall to denounce white nationalism before taking to the streets and chanting “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist U.S.A.” Protesters have also marched to Trump Tower in New York, demanding the president more strongly condemn what happened in Charlottesville August 12.
Closer to home, people gathered Sunday evening on Fourth Street, where a memorial for Heyer continues to grow, and sang “Amazing Grace” and prayed near piles of flowers that have been laid in the area where she was killed.—Susan Sorensen
5:36pm: “This Land is Your Land,” by Woody Guthrie, plays over the sound system at Rapture.
5:57pm: The mobile jazz cart man hands out purple and pink carnations to people eating dinner and walking on the mall.
6pm: The vigil for Heather Heyer continues into the night as hundreds of people gather around the memorial on Fourth Street to sing hymns, hug one another and remember the 32-year-old woman who was killed. “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention” read purple shirts worn by Heyer’s friends.
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