#10 – 24 Hours in Charlottesville by Nora Neus – Best Reads of 2023

It’s that season again. The Heartlands Best Reads list has been going since 2017 and it’s time for a countdown of the Top Ten of this year. This is an idiosyncratic assessment with the top qualification for consideration being that I had to read it this year. Newer books get some credit for being new, but more old classics made the list this year than normal, partly because they really were classics and partly because the 2023 crop was, well…underwhelming.

That said, here’s #10. Look for the subsequent entries in days to come.

Ann Beattie’s latest collection of short stories, Onlookers, got all the love from Dwight Garner and the New York Times this year, but for my money the most enlightening Charlottesville book of 2023 was Nora Neus’ primary source treasure on the 2017 Unite the Right Rally, 24 Hours in Charlottesville: An Oral History of The Stand Against White Supremacy.

That makes it sound like the Charlottesville book is a thing, and perhaps it is since the small Virginia city produced a breakout author recently in Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, whose short story collection, My Monticello, was one of my 2021 Best Reads. (And yes, if you want mainstream validation, it also ended up as one of the “paper of record”’s Notable Books of that Year.)

Neus’ book was not even the only book on August 2017 to come out this year. The Charlottesville Clergy Collective (CCC), which played such a prominent role in the counter-protests, (and of which I am a current member), also produced a retrospective that included first-person witnesses, Standing Up to Hate: The Charlottesville Clergy Collective and the Lessons from August 12, 2017.

Neus manages the uncomfortable but effective technique of placing the reader right in the moment. She drops us down on Friday, August 11, the day before, which became infamous in its own right as the night of the Tiki Torch (“Jews will not replace us”) rally at the University of Virginia. There is some introduction to the city in the voices Neus gives us, such as Rev. Dr. Brenda Brown-Grooms’ observation that “Charlottesville is a very beautiful, ugly city” (5), echoing the description former mayor, Nikuyah Walker, gave in poetic form. But Neus doesn’t let you escape the claustrophobic feeling of the weekend when hate came to town.

We hear from local activists, like Emily Gorcenski, (“I think that’s the moment that Charlottesville became home. It became home when it became a place that I was willing to fight for,”(12)) and national figures who were on site, like Dr. Cornel West, (“This is the time for action. This is not a moment for sunshine soldiers.” (96)). We hear from city officials, reporters, clergy, healthcare workers, and students.

What you will not find are the alt-right figures whose decision to stage a massive rally at the site of a Confederate statue slated for removal led to the violent confrontation in which one woman, Heather Heyer, was killed and two state troopers died while patrolling the city by helicopter. Neus intentionally decided not to interview white nationalists and neo-Nazis for her oral history. “They, unfortunately, already have a platform,” she notes. (xviii)

Instead, Neus says this story is “the story of activists explicitly sounding the alarm on a specific, credible threat and the failure of city leadership and law enforcement to protect their citizens.” (xvii) That throughline is certainly present in the compelling narrative that follows. In the morning hours of August 12, as she takes us into the tension and violence of the narrow streets around what was then called Emancipation Park, we feel as frustrated as many of the activists there about the security failures, bureaucratic bungles, and communication lapses that left city police as bystanders to the unfolding riot.

No matter where you were on August 12 and how much you think you’ve heard about what went on, you will come to a deeper, visceral place reading this history. Neus, who was a local TV reporter at the time, is an excellent journalist with a great ear. My only quibble was with the downtown maps which located the city’s command center a block from where it actually was, a location that was actually further from the main conflicted intersection than the map indicates.

I was on a renewal leave in Texas on August 12 and I wrote about my immediate reactions here on Heartlands. Now I’m the pastor of the church that featured so prominently in pictures of the day and which served as a refuge for people escaping tear gas and violence and as a sanctuary for people who met the day with fervent prayer. Many of my congregants were present on that day and look back on that day as one of the most pivotal in the church’s history, a day when they felt most like they were living out what Church with a big ‘C’ means.

The aftermath of the Unite the Right Rally made national headlines, but the struggle in Charlottesville was mostly under the media radar. UVA professor Emily Blout, spouse of the then-Mayor Mike Signer, gives some indication of what came next: “There was just like one week of unity [after the weekend] where people joined together and helped each other and solidarity. After that, it all fell apart. It was like the whole city just fell into itself and it started eating itself alive.” (212)

These have been difficult years and the work of taking actions and building relationships that can help us root out racism and reckon with our wounded souls is ongoing. As Rev. Brown-Grooms puts it:

If I heard it once I heard it a million times: Everybody kept saying, But this is not who we are. This is not who we are. Yeah. It’s exactly who we are. We don’t want to admit it, but it’s exactly who we are. Can we be someone else? Of course, we can be, but it takes work. It takes commitment. It takes being willing to be uncomfortable. (214)

—Rev. Dr. Brenda Brown-Grooms

The statues left soon after I got here in the summer of 2021. We’ve had gatherings and conversations on the anniversary of the weekend each year since 2017. Charlottesville is still a mostly progressive city that sometimes fancies itself a small piece of the Northeast Corridor. But every so often we get painful reminders that this is still the South and there is much to do. This is the searing record of one of the most painful.

I recommend both Standing Up to Hate and 24 Hours in Charlottesville but Neus’ book makes my list of Best Reads of 2023 at #10.