Deborah Baker Discusses Charlottesville

BPL Presents welcomes Deborah Baker, whose new book Charlottesville has been hailed as a “vivid account that … illuminates the evils half-hidden under a flickering torch” (Kirkus).

In August 2017, over a thousand members of the far-right descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city’s historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a throng of counterprotesters, killing a young woman and injuring dozens.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker has written a riveting and panoptic account of what unfolded that weekend, focusing less on the rally’s far-right leaders than on the story of the city itself. University, local, and state officials, including law enforcement, were unable or unwilling to grasp the gathering threat. Clergy, activists, and organizers from all walks of life saw more clearly what was coming and, at great personal risk, worked to warn and defend their city.

To understand why their warnings fell on deaf ears, Baker does a deep dive into American history. In her research she discovers an uncannily similar event that took place decades before when an emissary of the poet and fascist Ezra Pound arrived in Charlottesville intending to start a race war. In Charlottesville, Baker shows how a city more associated with Thomas Jefferson than civil unrest became a flashpoint in a continuing struggle over our nation’s founding myths.

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Deborah Baker is the author of The Last Englishmen; Making a Farm; In Extremis, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography; A Blue Hand; and The Convert, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, and she is a former Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn and Charlottesville. Photographer credit: Julienne Schaer