Charlottesville: 'Very Fine People on Both Sides' After Neo-Nazi Violence

Overview

On August 12, 2017, a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of people in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing Heather Heyer. She was 32 years old.

Three days later, the President of the United States held a press conference in which he said there were "very fine people on both sides" of the rally and placed equal blame on the neo-Nazis who had marched and the people who had gathered to oppose them.

The Rally

The Unite the Right rally was organized by self-identified white nationalists and neo-Nazis. On the night before the main event, attendees marched through the University of Virginia campus with torches, surrounding Black and Jewish students and faculty, chanting "Jews will not replace us" and "Blood and soil" — a slogan directly from Nazi ideology.

There was no ambiguity about what kind of event this was.

The Three Statements

Trump gave three statements on Charlottesville. His first, on August 12, condemned "violence on many sides." His second, on August 14, named white supremacists, the KKK, and neo-Nazis under visible duress. His third, on August 15, was the one he chose unprompted: "very fine people on both sides," defending attendees as people who "protested the taking down of a statue."

Bipartisan criticism followed all three, but the third — the one he chose — was the one that reflected his actual assessment.

The Statues

Trump defended the rally attendees as people who had come to protest the "taking down of a very, very important statue" of Robert E. Lee. The Charlottesville Lee statue was erected in 1924 — part of a wave of Confederate monument construction during the Jim Crow era, when the monuments functioned as symbols of white supremacy rather than historical commemoration. Historians documented this context. It was not contested.

Fields was later sentenced to life in prison. Heyer was killed for being present.