Last August, white supremacist groups converged
on Charlottesville, Virginia, for a series
of public rallies that shocked the world.
A horrific scene in Charlottesville, Virginia.
A white nationalist rally that descended into
deadly violence and chaos.
These were men who described themselves
proudly as fascists and national socialists.
But the president blamed both sides
for the violence.
You also had people that were very fine people,
on both sides.
We came back to Charlottesville a year later to ask
local residents how much has changed.
What happens when a place named
one of the happiest cities in America
becomes the site of white supremacist terror?
Susan Bro and Alfred Wilson
started a foundation last year
to honour the memory of 32-year-old
Heather Heyer, Bro's daughter and
Wilson's colleague and friend. Heather was one of the
locals who came out to protest the neo-Nazis.
She was marching through downtown Charlottesville
when, according to officials,
a man who had demonstrated
with the white supremacists
ploughed his car into
a crowd of protesters, killing her.
I never got to say what this painting
was. Somebody put a picture here
and it's been ruined by the sun, but these weren't
for me, these were for Heather.
These are new flowers.
I'm glad my daughter's death
had an impact on people.
I just hope it's for the right reasons
and the right impact.
What would the wrong reasons
or the wrong impact be?
Again, this notion that she was
the leader, she was in charge, she was the
reason for the march or anything like that.
No. That's not the point of this.
She wasn't assassinated. She was murdered,
but she wasn't assassinated.
She was not singled out.
So there's a difference.
I had people at first trying to compare it
to Martin Luther King even. I was like, heck no.
Heather wouldn't
even agree to that. You know.
We go through these cycles that apparently 
this has risen up 25, 30 years ago,
and then it died down and got quiet and it went away. And now it's risen back up again,
and every time people think it's gone away
or that it's slowed down.
But here we are, and I'm looking back and thinking,
wow this is what my mom or my grandparents
actually possibly had to experience and see.
Many of Charlottesville's white residents
said they were shocked to see neo-Nazis in
their streets. Local activists of colour,
like Tanesha Hudson, have a different perspective.
Were you surprised that extremist hate groups
targeted Charlottesville?
Absolutely not.
This is Thomas Jefferson's land.
The south is
the fabric of the Confederacy.
The south is the fabric of slavery.
The south is the fabric of Jim Crow.
And as much as we want to paint this little picture
that Virginia is for lovers,
Virginia is for lovers of white people.
Virginia has never loved people of colour.
People like Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer and
the boys of the south, or the alt-right, neo-Nazi
– whatever you want to call them,
whatever group name they go by –
they continue to want to feel like
they're superior to people of colour.
Because that's the legacy
that's taught at the university.
It's a frat boy thing. "We go to UVA, this
is Thomas Jefferson land",
and we continue to have this
white-washed version of Charlottesville.
We're not a capital of resistance.
We're not the happiest city in the world.
We're a segregated city
and this city lives off the
heritage of the Confederacy.
Charlottesville is still
contesting whether it can actually remove
statues of Confederate generals
from public parks,
a symbolic break with that
white supremacist history.
Locals were outraged
by the city's handling of the August rallies.
An independent review found law enforcement
officers had failed to stop the violent clashes
in the streets, or to separate different 
groups of protesters.
Why did you think that you could walk in here and do business as usual after what happened?
While he originally opposed
removing Confederate statues,
Charlottesville's previous mayor switched
his vote after the violence in August.
It wasn't enough.
An ongoing lawsuit has halted
the city's effort to remove the statues.
Last August, the city covered
them with black tarps as a sign of mourning.
In February, a judge ordered
the shrouds removed.
One of the activists who supports
removing the statues
is Jalane Schmidt,
an assistant professor at the
University of Virginia's
religious studies department.
Let's go over
here.
That's it?
That's it.
One foot...
about one foot by one foot.
I'll put my foot down here for scale here.
So 14,000 people, the outright majority
of the population
here at the time of the civil war,
and this is basically
the only public memento that we have of that.
This land that we're on here used to be a
neighbourhood that was occupied by black and
mixed-race homeowners and business owners.
These properties were seized by eminent domain,
by the city. There was no pay for it and instead
then what was put in place of what used to
be a thriving black and mixed-race neighbourhood
was instead a whites-only park.
So it was definitely a kind of symbol
in public space of who was in charge.
What were some of the arguments that
were being made to keep these statues?
Well, this is history. You can't
undo history. You just keep it there.
Or you're trying to efface history.
But our counter-argument
is that these statues were put in in the 1920s
for the edification of white people, and to
keep black people in line.
Reverend Phil Woodson is an associate pastor at Charlottesville's First United Methodist church.
He says what happened in August challenged
white residents to rethink their assumptions.
Words like fascism, and the alt-right, and this idea of neo-Nazis was still somewhat foreign to me.
But when you talk to vulnerable people, to people of
colour, to people who are disproportionately
affected by our culture and our civic life
that is built on white supremacy and that
perpetuates white supremacy,
it wasn't a surprise to them at all.
What have been some of those steps in your
process of grappling with your own privilege
or even beginning to see your own privilege
in ways that you didn't see it before.
Following that first torch rally, there was then
a community response to that
where we were all out in the park, holding up candles.
It was almost like Harry Potter.
But then hanging from the statue out there was a sign that said: 'Fuck white supremacy'.
And so here I am, I'm going: 'Oh my goodness, such foul language, in this moment what are we going to do?'
And then thinking about it for a minute,
I was like, hold on.
Like, there were literal Klan members
and Nazis here last night
saying: 'Jews will not replace us'.
They were saying: 'white lives matter;
Russia is our friend'.
They were chanting 'blood and soil'.
'Fuck white supremacy' really needs to be the baseline for everyone in that moment.
I have had ancestor who fought for
the Confederacy in the civil war.
I'm not responsible for
the sins of my great, great, great, great
whatever grandfather, but I am responsible
for what how that has affected
me and my family in 
my position in the world today.
Many locals still haven't done much
to address white supremacy,
according to Zyahna Bryant, a high school
student who has petitioned the city to remove
the Confederate statue.
I've seen a lot of people
saying that they felt guilty or that
they didn't know it existed, which is really
interesting to me because it's always been here.
I think that there have been some people who
have been trying to come forward and do something.
But it's... We constantly say that
doing something is better than doing nothing.
But a lot of times when you just want to do
something carelessly, or just recklessly,
you can be causing more racial harm to people
who are already marginalised.
We keep associating white supremacy
with just torches and Nazis,
and while that causes so much racial trauma
and harm to people of colour in this community,
we have been dealing with this for so long.
It's like adding insult to injury, right?
There's so much that has been here for so
long, and I encourage people of this community
to really take a deeper look at what's been
going on, and ways that they can do, that
they can fight white supremacy in their everyday lives.
How concerned are you about the anniversary
of the 'Unite the Right' rally this year?
Am I concerned? A little. Am I worried? No.
The more they continue to come here,
the more we're going to counter-protest.
The more they continue to pose
a threat to this community,
the more we're going to stand up.
You can come all you want
but we're not going to back down.
