August Twelfth: Heather Heyer and the Street at the Center of America

On August twelfth, twenty seventeen, a young woman named Heather Heyer was killed on this street in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a car driven by a neo-Nazi plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters at one forty-five in the afternoon.

The Unite the Right rally that weekend had drawn white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and members of the alt-right from across the country, ostensibly to protest the city's planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The organizers had permits. The evening before, on August eleventh, hundreds marched through the University of Virginia campus carrying tiki torches, chanting racist and antisemitic slogans, surrounding a small group of counter-protesters at the base of a Jefferson statue. The following morning the city's streets filled with both sides.

James Alex Fields Jr., a twenty-year-old from Maumee, Ohio, drove his car at high speed into a crowd of counter-protesters on Fourth Street near the Downtown Mall, killing Heyer, who was thirty-two years old, and injuring dozens of others. He had traveled to Virginia specifically to join the rally.

The attack drew immediate national attention. President Donald Trump's initial response, in which he referred to very fine people on both sides, became one of the most contested phrases of his presidency.

Fields was convicted of first-degree murder and twenty-eight other charges. He was sentenced to life in prison plus four hundred nineteen years on state charges, and a second life sentence on federal hate crime charges.

Heather Heyer's mother, Susan Bro, said at the memorial: If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention. The words appear on a mural near the spot where her daughter fell.