‘Hard for me to understand’: grappling with the Charlottesville tragedy eight years on
Author and Charlottesville native Deborah Baker revisits the devastating events of 2017 and examines how they speak to a difficult past
Martin Pengelly
Tue 3 Jun 2025 10.29 BST
Deborah Baker’s new book, Charlottesville, is about her home town in Virginia, where in summer 2017 white supremacists marched, violence erupted and a counter-protester was murdered. In dizzying detail, Baker charts and reports the chaos. In interludes, she examines the dark history of a city long linked to racist oppression, from the days of Thomas Jefferson, Robert E Lee and slavery to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and resistance to civil rights reform.