In June, the Virginia General Assembly passed a slew of gun control bills, including one that allows cities and counties to prohibit guns on public property. Localities across the state, like Newport News and Alexandria, have since enacted such a ban—and last week, Charlottesville followed suit. Beginning October 1, guns will be prohibited in parks, […]
Rad grads Charlottesville’s 2020 high school graduates imagined they’d be walking across a grand stage right about now, with “Pomp and Circumstance” blaring as an auditorium applauded. That’s gone, of course, but the virus hasn’t stopped our schools from showing love for their seniors. Districts around town have held variations on the traditional graduation ceremony, […]
As mayor of Charlottesville during the violent white supremacist invasion in 2017 that killed Heather Heyer and injured dozens, Mike Signer earned a place in the city’s history, and in the national spotlight. Now, Signer has turned his leadership during the Summer of Hate into a book—one that, like the Charlottesville book written by former […]
A judge has ruled that Charlottesville can’t remove the two Confederate statues that stand downtown, saying Wednesday that doing so would be in violation of a Virginia historical preservation law. On the first day of a three-day trial, Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Richard Moore issued a [...]
Former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe had a rocky start to his book tour at Washington, D.C., bookstore Politics and Prose on August 1, when survivors of the August 12, 2017, Fourth Street car attack showed up to denounce his account of that weekend. But he found plaudits and praise among [...]
It’s been two years since the “Summer of Hate,” and Charlottesville, to the larger world, is still shorthand for white supremacist violence. As we approach the second anniversary of August 11 and 12, 2017, we reached out to a wide range of community leaders and residents to talk about what, if [...]
Whether you were on Fourth Street that afternoon or not, you know the car: the low-slung gray muscle car with the distinctive brake lights that James Fields used to murder Heather Heyer and injure dozens of others on August 12, 2017. From video footage and the shocking photograph that won local [...]
Former Charlottesville mayor Maurice Cox, now Detroit’s director of planning and development, talks about managing growth, recovering from a crisis, and the power of telling the right story. There was a time when Maurice Cox couldn’t escape being recognized in Charlottesville. In August 2012, [...]
Two men convicted of malicious wounding for attacking DeAndre Harris in a downtown parking garage on August 12, 2017, are appealing their convictions, and the Virginia Attorney General’s office will now prosecute their cases. Jacob Goodwin and Alex Ramos were sentenced to eight and six years in [...]
For some, it came as a shock when City Councilor Wes Bellamy announced yesterday that he would not run for re-election, especially considering his public remarks the week before that made it sound otherwise. At his March 20 Virginia Festival of the Book event with former New Orleans mayor Mitch [...]
I had lived in Charlottesville for 10 years almost to the day before I saw the inside of City Council chambers. I’d paid my gas bill in person once or twice. I think I bought a trash sticker in 2012. But I’d never even been upstairs at City Hall before. If you’d asked me at […]
Phoebe Stevens is a pacifist. She says that’s why she wrapped her arms around Jason Kessler at his August 13, 2017, press conference as a crowd of angry protesters closed in on him. But after she knocked him down in the chaos, he accused her of assault and battery—a charge she was convicted of [...]
Tyler Watkins Davis entered an Alford plea February 8, and though it’s technically a guilty plea, it means the man from Middleburg, Florida, is not admitting guilt, but acknowledging that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict him of malicious wounding in the brutal parking garage assault [...]
By Jonathan Haynes City Councilor Wes Bellamy sat down for a revelatory interview at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center January 10 to promote his new book, Monumental: It Was Never About a Statue. The title alludes to the former vice-mayor’s push to remove Confederate [...]
He wore a construction helmet that said “commie killer” as he joined in on a brutal beating in a downtown parking garage, striking the already downed DeAndre Harris with a stick until it broke as Harris struggled to pick himself up off the ground. And though two out-of-town men already found [...]
Attorney General Mark Herring has spent the past few years studying the issue of hate crimes and white supremacist violence across the commonwealth and advocating for new legislation to combat it. On December 5—coincidentally during the state’s murder trial against the neo-Nazi who drove his [...]
Many thought James Fields’ mental health would be used as a defense during his murder trial– but surprisingly, it never came up. Instead, jurors learned about his troubled state of mind during the December 10 sentencing hearing, after he’d been found guilty of murdering Heather Heyer and [...]
It’s in the jury’s hands now. The prosecution and defense have given their closing arguments on the ninth day of James Alex Fields Jr.’s first-degree murder trial. The man charged with killing Heather Heyer and injuring many others when he rammed his car into a crowd at an August 12, 2017, [...]
“That’s what someone’s eyes look like when they’re dead,” is the only thought that went through anti-racist activist Star Peterson’s mind as she saw Heather Heyer flying through the air. Peterson had just been run over by a white supremacist in a Dodge Challenger on Fourth Street on August 12, [...]
Infowars founder Alex Jones has made a career out of broadcasting anti-government and right-wing conspiracy theories on his website and various radio shows. Last year, he put local man Brennan Gilmore in his crosshairs, alleging that the Charlottesville musician is a deep state operative on [...]
His lawyer painted a picture of a black father in his early 50s, the sole caretaker of his child with autism, who doesn’t have a computer or read the news, and who came to the Downtown Mall on August 12, 2017, to panhandle for the extra money he needed to buy his son’s medication. Defense […]
The two young men handed lengthy prison sentences last week for their involvement in the August 12, 2017, brutal parking garage beating of DeAndre Harris sat in stark contrast to one another in Charlottesville Circuit Court. One’s remorse was hard to miss. Jacob Goodwin, the Arkansas man who [...]
An estimated 15,000 protesters. Thousands of signs and flags. Hundreds of cops. All of which made their presence known from Freedom Plaza to Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., all day long on Sunday, August 12—to face down barely more than two dozen white nationalists. Just before noon, [...]