Aftermath

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From Virginia Humanities, this is Back Story.
Welcome to Back Story, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh. Each week Back Story explores American history from our studios in Charlottesville, Virginia.
A year ago, August 12th, history exploded on our doorstep. Charlottesville was thrust into the headlines around the world when the Unite the Right rally led to widespread disorder, public beatings, and the tragic death of counter protester Heather Heyer.
A year ago we devoted our Back Story episode to an extended conversation between Ed, Joanne, Nathan and myself, about how to make sense of the events which had happened right outside our door, and how our history had informed these events. Charlottesville has had one year to start to come to terms with what happened here.
Today on Back Story, we’ll be broadcasting part of an episode of a new podcast series, A12, created by Niki Hemmer. She’s an assistant professor at the Miller Center, and co-presenter of the podcast, Past Present.
Niki, welcome to Back Story.

Niki Hemmer: I’m delighted to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Balogh: Tell me a little bit about the series. How many episodes?

Niki Hemmer: It’s six episodes, and they start with what I call, and what activists have called, the summer of hate. That entire summer of white nationalist activism in Charlottesville, and the counter organizing that had been happening across the summer. Then it really sprawls out to look at the history behind all of that. The history of the town, the history of the statues. The history of the alt right, and of policing. Then takes us through to the episode folks will hear today, which is what happened in the aftermath in the year since.

Brian Balogh: Well, for now I do want to drill down into August 11th and 12th, and find out actually where you were and what you experienced personally.

Niki Hemmer: Sure. It’s called 8/12 because every eye was turned, August the 12th, the day of this Unite the Right rally, but unexpectedly the alt right activists showed up at the University of Virginia. They lit tiki torches. They chanted, “You will not replace us. Jews will not replace us.” They chanted the old Nazi slogan, “Blood and soil.”
Hundreds of them marched with these lit torches across the grounds of UVA, and surrounded the Thomas Jefferson statue, which at the time was also surrounded by a small group of students who were counter protesting. Violence broke out there that night, which many of the people that I interviewed made the point that it created this ominous sense, this realization that as violent and as awful as everyone thought August 12th was going to be, it was probably going to be much, much worse.
On August 12th I woke up to the sound of helicopters hovering overhead. Already by that early morning there was a lot of tension in the city. About 10:30 or so I got my glasses, because I wear contacts and there was concern that there would be a lot of tear gas in the air. Packed those away. Packed away my iPhone and a bag, and headed downtown to cover what was happening on the ground for Vox, where I’m a columnist.
The first thing that I noticed when I arrived downtown was the prevalence of firearms just everywhere. From sidearms, to long guns, to semiautomatic weapons.

Brian Balogh: You’re not talking about law enforcement.

Niki Hemmer: No, not at all. Law enforcement was there, but not really involved in many ways. I’m talking about Antifa who were there, and groups like the Redneck Revolt, in order to protect the counter protesters. Then members of the alt right and the white nationalists who were there.
Pretty soon after I arrived, actually when I arrived, there already was a huge fight that had broken out. The air was filled with smoke. There were projectiles being tossed back and forth. There was a clash that had broken out between the counter protesters and the white nationalists, and then finally police officers with shields began to push people out of the park. What that really meant was they pushed the white nationalists into the counter protestors and into the streets.
From there kind of a rolling fight broke out along Market Street. I followed that over to the Market Street Garage, where a young man named DeAndre Harris, a 20 year old African-American man, was beaten by a group of white nationalists in that garage. I actually went down onto the mall and began to write up the story about what I had seen, when a young woman burst into the restaurant where I was working, and clearly something was quite wrong. She was crying, but not out of exhaustion, more out of terror. That’s when we learned that the car attack had taken place.
I raced over to the scene of the car attack. It was like being in the middle of a war zone. There was blood everywhere. There were bodies everywhere. It was a frantic and a deeply disturbing scene. Most people who watched the news on August 12th have seen video from what happened downtown. It was just very visceral, very shocking, especially for a town like Charlottesville. The downtown mall is this very cultivated space that’s largely associated with lovely spring days and sitting at restaurants, and here it was lined with police officers, and now the scene of a terror attack.

Brian Balogh: There have been lots of investigations, commissions, reports, and in all of them one of the central questions is, well who’s really responsible for what happened? What’s your answer to that question?

Niki Hemmer: I mean, first and foremost, who’s responsible? Who’s responsible are the white nationalists who came with their guns and their intention to do violence and harm to this town. Yet at the same time, that was well known information prior to their arrival here in Charlottesville on August 11th and 12th.
I do think there was a real failure by the city, by the university, by the police, to secure public safety, and to understand that violent white nationalists are violent white nationalists. They might make claims to non-violent free speech, but if you dig a little deeper, and you look at their organizing, you look at their chat boards, you can see the violent intent that they had in mind for Charlottesville on August 11th and August 12th. There was a real inability to imagine that violence, and so there was a real inability to respond to it.

Brian Balogh: You devote the whole series to understanding the history that led to this event. It’s certainly not just about one or two days. Especially episode two in the series, you talk about Charlottesville’s racial history. Yet many people, and friends of mine who live here and don’t live here, still frame this as bad people came to Charlottesville, so there was a racial incident. Yet you know that Charlottesville has a tortured racial history, like much of the United States. Could you just summarize for us what you believe some of the key moments in Charlottesville’s racial history were?

Niki Hemmer: Sure. You know, there are a lot of different ways to tackle this particular question. Because if you think about Charlottesville’s history that it tells itself, you have Thomas Jefferson, this defender of liberty, who founds the University of Virginia.
You have a town that is defeated, conquered, in the Civil War, but after the Civil War, begins to grow in economic strength, and begins to become this kind of flourishing city in the south, thanks in large part to the university. That becomes over time an increasingly liberal space, to the point where you get to 2014 and it’s named the happiest city in America. I think that for many residents of Charlottesville, that’s how they see it, as this kind of oasis in the middle of Virginia. A very tolerant, a very progressive place.
It’s also a city with I believe the highest wealth inequality in the entire State of Virginia. It is a city that isn’t telling the whole truth about its past. I mean for instance, in 1898, John Henry James, an African-American man, was lynched in the City of Charlottesville. In the 1920s, as confederate statues go up in Charlottesville, you have this rising Jim Crow regime. You also have the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, that is both enforcing the segregation laws, and enacting violence in the town. That segregation is going to continue well into the 1960s. It happens at restaurants, but it also happens in schools. Charlottesville shuts down its public school system for almost a year, in an effort to avoid having to desegregate the schools here.
Charlottesville, which in recent years has been called the capital of the resistance against Donald Trump and his administration, was in fact the capital of massive resistance, which is to say that white backlash against the Civil Rights movement. That resistance to the new court rulings and the new laws that were meant to desegregate the south and to promote equality in the law.

Brian Balogh: Well, we’re approaching the anniversary of these events. Where would you say we are?

Niki Hemmer: I would say we’re not as far along as I think maybe the rest of the nation thinks we might be. For decades Charlottesville is going to be seen through the lens of what happened on August 11th and 12th. I understand why some people don’t like that. Some people feel like this has stained the reputation of Charlottesville, that people are worried that there will be Nazis everywhere. I understand that, and I hear that in some of the interviews that I’ve done.
At the same time, I do think it actually presents an opportunity for Charlottesville. You’re the place that this happened, what did you do next? How did you help to make other cities safer? How did you help to deal with issues of inequity and racism in your own backyard? In that way there might not be a ton that you can do to erase the public memory of this, but maybe it’s okay that you can’t erase the public memory. Maybe you can use the public memory of what happened in Charlottesville to model a better way to live, and to model a counter argument to the white supremacist who came to town last summer.

Brian Balogh: Niki, the excerpt of your podcast that we’re going to hear begins with UVA professor Jalane Schmidt. Schmidt, a local activist, had been tagged as a high value target by the alt right, and she hid out in a safe house for eight days after August 11th.

Jalane Schmidt: I was not prepared for the post traumatic stress disorder. I don’t think any of us were. We were so focused on the counter demonstration planning itself that we were not thinking about the fallout.
The political fallout was that there was just rancor and a complete breach of trust between large sectors, not even just the activists, between large sectors of the public, and law enforcement, and city leaders. We told you these people meant us ill. It’s like, this was not about free speech. It was always about violence. We provided ample evidence all summer long. The aftermath politically was a disaster, socially too I would say.
There were a lot of us, especially activists, that just, I have new sympathy for military veterans. It’s like, I get it why you hang out at the VFW. It’s like, how do you relate to what we call civilian normies? It’s like, we spent all summer, 68 hours a week, planning for this. People were in the streets. People got killed. We’re traumatized, and I’m supposed to go to a backyard barbecue with my colleagues? Nah. That hurts. I mean it actually hurts, going and talking about chit chatty things like, “Oh, I went to Target today. [murmur]” No, I can’t. I’m just like, I’m all about Nazis, and my friends that are in the hospital, or in physical therapy, or in legal processes, and stuff. It was just socially it was very alienating too.
Mentally and psychologically it was devastating. A lot of us, myself included, would just wake up in the middle of the night screaming, nightmares. Just every morning when I woke up, the first thing I would just kind of bolt upright and it was just Nazis, that was the first thing I thought of in the morning. It was at the six month mark, in February, when that finally changed. When finally the Nazis were the fourth or fifth thing I would think about in the morning. It’s like, okay, got to take the kids to school. I’ve got to do this. I’m going to have a meeting at nine o’clock about this. Then it’s like, oh yeah, and there are Nazis.
It’s only been in the past several months that I’ve started to feel almost normal, but there is no normal because it’s like, those of us, especially that were activists, there is a before August the 12th and an after. We are forever marked by that. That is in our lives, what happened, coming up to that. We’re forever changed, you know, by that, by August the 12th.

Niki Hemmer: So many people shared stories like this with me over the past few months. Those protecting the University of Virginia on the 11th. Those protesting downtown on the 12th. Those who witnessed the car attack and its aftermath. Trauma unites us all.
For some activists, that trauma has been compounded by how long they’ve battled racism and injustice in Charlottesville. Claudrena Harold, a history professor at UVA, works with black student activists as advisor to the Black Student Alliance.

Claudrena H.: These were students who had been organizing and marching around the murder of Michael Brown. These are the children of Ferguson. These are the children who have been shaped by Trayvon Martin and Troy Davis. They have a certain kind of fire.

Niki Hemmer: Since 2014, those students have been regularly protesting police brutality, racist policies, and inequitable treatment. That left them both determined and exhausted. In 2015, three white alcohol beverage control officers arrested a black student named Martese Johnson. In the process of the arrest, Johnson was badly injured. They charged Johnson with public intoxication and obstruction of justice, charges that were later dropped. Harold knew Johnson, he had been one of her students, and at his arraignment she herself hit a wall of sadness and fatigue.

Claudrena H.: You get to a point where you wake up and you realize this was some of the students, that they hadn’t been to sleep in two days or three days. The body just shuts down on you. I remember when he was arraigned, and I remember his arraignment, and I remember going there, and going to the courthouse. I think it was like eight o’clock in the morning, and all these black students were there in black.
I just kind of lost it, because there was a part of me that was incredibly proud of them for being there for their colleague, being there for their comrade. At the same time thinking, this is not what students should be doing. I remember just like going over to the side of the courthouse and just crying. Then I got in my car and I drove to Farmville, because I had to give a talk about the Civil Rights movement. That was the reality.

Niki Hemmer: As a historian, Harold sees parallels between the tiredness and trauma her students experience and that of Civil Rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s.

Claudrena H.: How did these Civil Rights activists do this? How did King do this from December 1st 1955, when the Montgomery Bus Boycott begins and they said, “We want you to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association.” He’s hesitant, and he goes in his room and he looks at his one-year-old daughter, because he understands the cost. How do you udo that from December 1955 to April 1968? It’s non-stop.

Niki Hemmer: Though we seldom talk about it, the trauma of the Civil Rights movement has been part of the story from the start. Anne Moody, a young black woman, began working with the movement in her early 20’s. She fought Jim Crow through sit-ins and voter registration drives. As a result, she endured regular threats on her life, including winding up on a Klan hit list.
In 1968, Moody published her memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, but she didn’t write a story of triumph, even though at the time the book was published Jim Crow was being dismantled across the south. Instead, anger, disillusionment, and yes, trauma, roll off the page. She wrote, “It had gotten to the point that my weight was going down to nothing. My nerves were torn to shreds, and I was losing my hair. In order to sleep at night, I finally had to resort to sleeping pills. I couldn’t even think anymore. It was like my brains had gone to sleep on me, or frozen.” She left the movement, full of uncertainty whether anything would ever change.

Brian Balogh: Hey Back Story listeners, I’m here with Niki Hemmer, who’s a friend of the show and co-host of the podcast Past Present. Niki’s been working on something very exciting, and frankly very important. Tell us about it niki.

Niki Hemmer: Sure Brian. It’s a podcast series called A12, referring to the date when members of the alt right descended on Charlottesville. It deals with the events of the day, the history leading up to it, and how the city has grappled with the aftermath.

Brian Balogh: We’re airing part of A12 on our August 3rd show. Everybody can find both A12 and Past Present through your favorite pod catcher, including Google Play, Spotify and iTunes.

Niki Hemmer: Thanks so much Brian.

Brian Balogh: You bet.

Niki Hemmer: In Charlottesville, the trauma of terrorism and activism linger, but those are not the only traumas people in Charlottesville have endured as a result of the summer of hate.
Brennan Gilmore used to work in the foreign service, serving in combat zones. He took a leave of absence to work for Democratic candidate Tom Perriello, who ran a primary campaign for governor in 2017. Perriello lost, and Gilmore decided to relocate to Charlottesville, where he had gone to college. On August 12th, he recorded the car plowing into protestors. Soon after, he found himself at the heart of a right wing conspiracy theory.

Brennan Gilmore: We were in the middle of dinner and my sister had text messaged, and she said, “Have you talked to mom or dad?” I was like, “No, why?” She said, “They’re posting their address on like the dark web.” She called it. Then she had a link to this website where they were doxxing me with an article that said, “Brennan Gilmore is a CIA operative who orchestrated the violence in Charlottesville.”
That began a week of absurd hellaciousness, where that one article on this obscure alt right site went from there to Gateway Pundit, to Alex Jones, to InfoWars. By Wednesday and Thursday there was Fox News talking about paid protestors of George Soros in Charlottesville. By Friday, Louie Gohmert, sitting congressman, was talking about how the events in Charlottesville were staged by Democrats to make the midterms in 2018 about race. The thread that tied a lot of those conspiracy theories together was me.

Niki Hemmer: Gilmore is no stranger to trauma. As part of the foreign services, he worked in some of the most brutal war zones in the world, so he thought he was prepared for the aftermath. He wasn’t.

Brennan Gilmore: I think everybody that was on that street has a certain degree of post traumatic stress from it. I think that’s absolutely normal. In the military community, they don’t talk about PTSD, they just talk about PTS. It’s not a disorder, it’s a natural, neurological reaction to seeing that type of violence. Compounded by specific targeting towards me and my family, that I didn’t have any frame of reference for, or emotional toolkit to deal with. That was sort of uncharted territory, trying to deal with becoming the target of these conspiracy theorists.
Seeing it go from the world of the virtual and the internet to intersecting with my personal life. There was a letter that showed up at my parents’ house, when I opened it, there was powder that came out. It was like four pages of why I was going to burn in hell.

Niki Hemmer: Gilmore decided to act. He went to a friend who’s a lawyer at the Georgetown Law Clinic for Civil Rights.

Brennan Gilmore: They came back and said, “Yeah, we think actually there’s a really important case here.” We started putting together, over the fall, the outlines of the case against Alex Jones and InfoWars, and total now is 11 different defendants of different websites who have created and spread those conspiracy theories.
I remember sitting in the offices up at Georgetown, and the supervisory attorney saying like, “Are you ready for this?” I mean I was like, “Nope.” You know, like it’s going to be years. Your profile will be more exposed. There will be additional people coming after you from this, but by that point I just had like a deep conviction that I needed to use what happened to me to right the system in whatever small way I can.
You know, we’re all in this very, very bizarre time in our country’s history. Charlottesville of course, one of the most acute symptoms of that, and that we use what happened here for good. I don’t want the next person who sees a terrorist attack, captures it on camera, not to share it with people so that they know what happened, because they’re worried that they’re going to get pilloried, and their credibility undermined, and their character impugned for doing what they’re doing.
I don’t want us as a country not to sit around after something like Charlottesville and figure out how the hell we fix it, instead of questioning whether it ever happened to begin with. We have to have some civic protections on that type of discussion. This is part of a much bigger institutional discussion about truth and journalism, and fake news, and what do we do in an age where these types of conspiracy theorists are emboldened by political leaders who have strong and broad followings. Hopefully this case will set a precedent. Hopefully it will be one small step in trying to right this ship in this epistemic crisis we’re in.

Niki Hemmer: Activists have filed multiple lawsuits since August 12th, hoping the courts can do more in the aftermath than they did in the build up to the summer of hate. These lawsuits play a vital role in protecting Charlottesville and other cities from the type of violence that occurred on August 11th and 12th, but they come at a price, and not just a financial one.

Brennan Gilmore: It’s become my life in a lot of ways. I think people that were there in the middle of that kind of relive it every day. It’s hardly a day that goes by, from the case, from media that want to hear about the case or talk about this, that I don’t replay those images and those scenes. I don’t wake up and spend my days thinking about fishing, although I still do a lot of that too, but I spend a lot of time thinking about what happened here. What happened here is the worst of what we are capable of as a species. If you spend your time thinking about only the dark things, it starts to color everything you look at. I am worried about that. Changed my life.

Niki Hemmer: It will be years before Gilmore’s lawsuit is settled, and it’s just one of the many trials happening here. Activists who protected the town on August 12th have been arrested, including DeAndre Harris. That day I witnessed a mob of white nationalists cornering him in a parking lot and beating him with wooden sticks. What I hadn’t anticipated was that Harris would be arrested. Police have since dropped the charges against him, but not against other activists, their cases remain a rallying cry for activists in the community. Just as the trials of white supremacists keep the trauma of August 12th fresh here. Battles over how the courts, the city and the police handled August 11th and 12th continue to divide Charlottesville.
In the days following the attack, the city hired former US Attorney Tim Heaphy, a Charlottesville resident, to investigate the city’s response, and its failures. Heaphy faced a tremendously difficult task. The state government refused to cooperate in any substantial way, making it difficult to assess how the state police acted. Plenty of activists looked with suspicion on an investigation they saw as the city investigating itself. Then there was just the sheer amount of work involved.

Tim Heaphy: We had a large team of people. A lot of lawyers and a lot of support staff, professionals within the firm that just dove in. We did about 150 interviews. We gathered about half a million documents. We had hours and hours and hours of video footage that was either open source available or had been submitted to us. We created a website and a tip line for people anywhere, primarily people here in the community, to volunteer information. We felt like that was important both substantively to get the information, but also to give people sort of a sense of, that there’s a place that I can tell my story. We though it would be cathartic for the community to have a place where they could raise their hand and say, “This is what I saw.”

Niki Hemmer: What Heaphy saw, and what anyone paying attention to Charlottesville in the last year would see, is that Charlottesville is a bitterly divided community. The anger and frustration, the distrust and trauma, radiate in every encounter between activists and city officials. Heaphy had hoped his report would provide the city with the tools to move forward. Instead, he finds himself frustrated by the stuck-ness of the town.

Tim Heaphy: These events pulled the lid off of a lot of simmering frustration with the ability of police to even handedly enforce the law, and their sort of capacity to protect the equal rights of everyone. We have not, I don’t think, found our way forward there. This laid bare a lot of that frustration, and I still don’t know that we have figured out how to take that frustration and convert it into some kind of constructive dialogue that leads to positive change. We’re still in the phase of anger and criticism, and not yet to the phase of constructive discussion and a way forward that’s positive.

Niki Hemmer: Over at the university, law school dean Risa Goluboff heads up the dean’s working group, which is UVA’s own investigation into its response and how to move forward. It’s a high pressure position. The university made a lot of mistakes. They chose not to act on early intelligence of the torch lit rally on August 11th, and in the aftermath, president Teresa Sullivan scolded students for not doing more to pass along that intelligence. Though it had clearly been made available to the university. University police failed to intervene when students and staff were attacked. When it came to safety and security, the university failed.
Goluboff’s working group tackled those issues of safety first, then looked at the bigger picture. Both how to ensure the university was living up to its values, and also how to corral its intellectual resources to help understand what happened on August 11th and 12th. More so than the city, the university has made measurable changes as a result, though Goluboff was clear that her work wasn’t done.

Risa Goluboff: You know, when I think about what we did over the course of the year, there was the safety and security report. There were policies we changed. There are new personnel in place, in part as a result of our work. There’s more attention I think to our culture, and questions of diversity and belonging. Then there’s some real financial change that occurred as a result of it.
I think back and I think, it’s not enough. We didn’t do enough, and it’s not everything. Boy, wouldn’t it be lovely if we’d been able to do more, but I also think it’s something. I think we are stronger, and I think we are more honest, and we’ve engaged in real self-examination, and had hard conversations. I think those were crucial.

Niki Hemmer: She also pointed to the extensive work done outside the official university response. Work, I should note, that I had a hand in as part of a panel on the history and goals of the alt right.

Risa Goluboff: One of the most heartening aspects of the response was the way in which members of the history department put on a series of talks all year long. The Black Law Students Association held allyship meetings. All across the university students, faculty and staff were themselves not waiting for someone from above to do something, but were saying, “What is it that we can do? What does someone in my position do in response to this kind of evil? And how can we make our university community better? How can we put our learning to work? How can we strengthen ties between the university and the community? How can we try to create a more just society and a more just university?”
There was just an enormous grassroots response, and a need to respond on an emotional level, on an intellectual level, on a community based level, that was very heartening.

Niki Hemmer: There were other heartening signs as well. A group of international law students and student leaders had arrived on campus on August 12th, just as the violence downtown began to escalate. For these students, as well as for their families and friends, the images splashed across national and international media provoked sharp fears.

Risa Goluboff: We got a call from the parent of one of them, an African-American incoming student. The parent said to me, “I don’t know why my child should come to UVA. I don’t know why I shouldn’t just put my child back on a plane and have her come home and go to a different law school.” I told her that I understood her concerns, obviously, and that I couldn’t possibly guarantee any individual person’s safety, but we had a long conversation about why I thought her daughter chose UVA. That we are the same school her daughter chose. That we in fact I think after this, which I think has been the case, would be even more of the diverse, and inclusive, and humane place that we were before.
I hung up the phone and I called our dean of students, who called one of the students who was actually in town, another African-American student who was a second year student. That student didn’t know this incoming student at all, but she went to her apartment, picked her up and kind of brought her into the fold, and into our community. That student has stayed. She’s a student leader. She’s flourished and thrived. Actually everyone stayed, which was not something we took for granted. On Saturday, August 12th our community rallied in ways that I think expressed our values in opposition to the values of the white supremacists.

Niki Hemmer: Goluboff had to wrestle with her own fears as well. She’s Jewish. Her two children are in middle school, and last summer they were going to a camp downtown. She called it their summer of independence. The first time they would walk around downtown, get lunch together, and take the bus home.

Risa Goluboff: We returned from being away, the day after, and that week we sent them to camp downtown, as we would. Their camp counselor thought this might not be a great idea, and she decided to escort them to the bus. They got home and they said, “You know, there are some scary looking people out on the mall.” It hadn’t really occurred to us that there were still people around. It should have. I don’t think it was our best parenting moment.
Our son often wears t-shirts with Hebrew writing on them, and he’s very proud, and we had a conversation after that. Well, can we continue to allow them to go out for lunch by themselves, take the bus home by themselves? If yes, can we continue to allow him to wear his Hebrew lettering t-shirts as he does that? We ultimately decided yes, that we felt this new vulnerability, but it’s a vulnerability many people live with all the time. That was new to us, but is clearly not new to parents of African-American children, especially boys, especially teenage boys. It was a new one for us, but we also decided if we live under that fear, and we restrict what we do, they’ve won, and we can’t do that, and we don’t want our children to live in fear, and so we said, “No, you continue to do your thing.”
We had been in Germany the year before, and had marveled when the rabbi of the synagogue we went to told us that he doesn’t wear clothing that would identify him as a jew out in public. We felt bad for him, and we marveled that that could be possible in this day and age. We marveled that there was a police officer outside the synagogue whenever there was anyone inside, and here we were in our hometown 2017, asking ourselves the same question about our children and their Jewish identifying clothing in our town. Now there’s a security officer outside the synagogue whenever there’s anyone inside. That’s a new reality, and I hope it’s not one that lasts forever. I hope it’s one that doesn’t last very long, but there’s an anniversary coming up, and we don’t really know what to expect from it.

Niki Hemmer: That idea of both individual and community trauma is something I heard from another Charlottesville resident, Joyce Camden. Camden works as a licensed therapist, focusing on PTSD and trauma. This past year she’s been working overtime to handle the influx of people seeking help since August 12th.

Joyce Camden: I do a lot of work with people dealing with post traumatic stress disorder, which is a very natural neurological reaction to exposure to either a single traumatic event or a series, as well as people that have had upbringings of trauma with sexual, emotional, physical abuse backgrounds. What can happen is the brain can easily be triggered to a state of survival and threat. People that get caught up in PTSD symptoms very often get in this neurological loop and association with things which was developed for our survival, but can unfortunately have people suffering from trauma years and decades past the actual event.

Niki Hemmer: The effects of that trauma, whether formally diagnosed or not, present in a variety of ways. Flashbacks and nightmares, trouble breathing and sleeping. Distrust of others and low self-esteem. A person with post traumatic stress might seem to be doing very well, but inside they struggle with a brain hot wired to find threat.

Joyce Camden: If we survive being attacked by a bear in the woods, we remember the bear in detail, so that if we go out in the woods again, we know the smell, the sound, the potential of it. We even in bed at night think about, what if there are two bears? We also can get caught in that mindset of the next bad thing that could happen, the worst case scenario. That’s another trigger that people can get caught in. A lot of neurological education about what’s happening in the brain, and skills to override that. Then again, transforming the narrative to include their strengths and their beauty, and begin the process of loving themselves through trauma.

Niki Hemmer: So much of the story of August 11th and 12th is about stories, the ones that get told and the ones that get forgotten. Camden encourages people with trauma injuries to tell a new story, a truer story, one of strength and resilience. Camden also helped me understand why I lost my memories, as well as why Brennan Gilmore’s memories are scrambled, and why Jalane Schmidt seeks out the comfort of other activists and survivors. Because not everyone processes trauma in the same way.

Joyce Camden: We have four, and I use the term natural reactions because they’re not by choice. These are automatic things that our brain can get triggered to. It’s fight, flight, freeze, or tend to befriend. We learned a lot about tend to befriend at 9/11, and that’s the reaction where there’s like a community trauma, and people go into the helping mode of assisting. If that’s the brain’s reaction, those people are less likely to have lingering PTSD symptoms, in part because the brain is fully functioning.
Fight and flight look very similar, and parts of the brain really do shut down. The speech area looks like somebody that’s had a stroke. The left hemisphere, which is the thinking and the sequential area of the brain, that shuts down, which is why often people don’t recall the ordering of the events. The amygdala, which is our alarm system, is lit up like a Christmas tree.
The freeze mode is when the brain more or less shuts down, it’s overload. That reaction is when people really generally don’t have recall of what happened. What I really emphasize is, it’s automatic. This is not a choice, this is just our brain survival mode reacting.

Niki Hemmer: A lot of folks in Charlottesville are still in survival mode. Those injured on August 11th and 12th, and the families and friends of those killed, have more than memories to wrestle with. There are unpaid medical bills, ongoing criminal and civil trials, and a deep inequity still searing the city. Still, things have begun to change. Jalane Schmidt sees it in the 2017 election of Nikuyah Walker, an African-American woman, an independent candidate, who won a city council seat against long odds, then became mayor.

Jalane Schmidt: The middle moved in town definitely further left. Nikuyah Walker got elected mayor, you know what I mean? That was a big middle finger to the Democratic party establishment in town, and the city council too, that an independent got voted in. The activists that were active that summer were the same people working on her campaign. They knocked on doors, they did everything.
What I saw was with the move left, general the middle is moved kind of thing, was that there was much more discussion of white supremacy as a systemic problem. It’s not just these Nazis in our street, or those monuments in our park, it’s policing, it’s gentrification, it’s unequal wealth distribution, white and black. It’s the fallout from massive resistance, and Vinegar Hill being demolished in the 60s. All that. I saw a much more open discussion of these things, and willingness on a broader part of the public.

Niki Hemmer: That pivot to broader questions has been one of the most remarkable consequences of August 11th and 12th. Yes, this is a city torn apart. This is a city traumatized, but it is also a city that has forced questions of equity, and belonging, and diversity, and progress. Unwilling to let things return to how they were before. As divisive and raucous as those questions have been, they seem far preferable to the genteel politeness that reigned in the years and decades before.
From that view, the fracturing of the city of Charlottesville might not be the worst thing. It might just be the start of a new story.

Brian Balogh: We’ve been listening to an excerpt from Niki Hemmer’s A12, a six part podcast that looks back at the events of August 11th and 12th from Charlottesville a year ago.
That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at BackStoryRadio.org, or send an email to BackStory@Virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.
This episode of Back Story was produced by David Stenhouse, Nina Earnest, Ramona Martinez, Allison Byrne, and Matt [Derek 00:45:33]. Jamal Millner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Monica Blair is our researcher. Additional help came from Angeli Bishosh, Sam Blumstein, Hannah Cho, Emma Greg, and Gabriel Hunter Chang. Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketsa, Podington Bear, and [Jizar 00:45:57].
Thanks as always to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore. Back Story is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost’s Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins University. Additional support is provided by The Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 9: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities, and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Back Story was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.

Speaker 10: Panoply.