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Brian Balogh: Back Story is brought to you by Rest in Power: the Trayvon Martin Story. It's a six part original documentary series from Paramount Network, executive produced by Shawn Carter. It gives you the story behind the story you think you know. The series delves deep into the details of the case, and examines how Trayvon's death gave rise to Black Lives Matter. Exploring how the death of a 17 year old boy in Florida ignited a worldwide social justice movement. Paramount Network's Rest in Power: the Trayvon Martin Story, airs Mondays at 10/9 central on the new Paramount Network, and on BET. Major funding for Back Story is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. 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. Transcript by Rev.com 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 Transcript by Rev.com 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 Transcript by Rev.com 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.