University of Virginia Press
2018 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
First published 2018
ISBN 978-0-8139-4208-7 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8139-4207-0 (e-book)
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.
Its just a beautiful place to be, and its far enough away from centers that you get a chance to smell the flowers. But its also a very cultured place because of the university and because of its history. Youre not in a cave or under a rock somewhere.
Dave Matthews on the Charlie Rose program, September 16, 1999
I love that town, and its more home than anywhere for me. A year ago, anywhere in the world, people would say, You guys are CharlotteCharleston, West Virginiawhere are you all from? Now, everybodypeople in Nairobi know, people in Cape Town know where Charlottesville is, and they know its where nazis are. And thats not my town.
Dave Matthews on the Charlie Rose program, September 22, 2017
CHARLOTTESVILLE
A TRAFFIC STOP
On May 25, 2017, a policeman in Maumee, Ohio, a small city ten miles southwest of Toledo, made a routine traffic stop of a Dodge Challenger for expired license plates.
Do you own this vehicle? asked the officer.
I do, sir, came the reply.
Its a nice ride, said the officer.
Less than three months later, that ride would carry James Fields Jr. to Charlottesville, Virginia, to demonstrate, and clash, with thousands from every corner of the United States, some who shared his set of alt-right beliefs and others who emphatically rejected them. The Unite the Right rally, as the August 12 event was billed, was the culmination of a series of controversies and demonstrations that put the small southern city, home to Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia, at the center of a storm. It was a storm that had begun brewing years earlier when a city councilor provoked gasps by suggesting that a venerable bronze equestrian statue of Civil War general Robert E. Lee might be removed from a downtown park. It would take a high school student and another politician, Wes Bellamy, the only African American on the city council, to launch that process. And in doing so, they unwittingly propelled a local activist named Jason Kessler onto the national stage. By the time Kessler invited Richard Spencer, the National Policy Institute president who had popularized the term alt-right, and about a dozen like-minded white nationalists to Charlottesville, the town had already hit the map with a KKK rally and a torch rally led by Spencer himself. These spectacles provoked fear and soul-searching in a community that had perhaps hidden its racial past beneath a college-town surface of relative affluence and self-congratulation.
Unite the Right would become the largest gathering of white nationalists in decades, and from the moment it began with a Friday-night torch march along UVAs hallowed Lawn, it became clear that Charlottesville authorities were not ready for what was happening. If the sight of torches, the smell of pepper spray, and the sound of recycled Nazi slogans like blood and soil made August 11, 2017, a bad day, what would happen on Saturday the twelfth would be much worse.
What was to be an afternoon of speeches extolling the supposed merits of a whiter America turned into a series of street brawls. The police chief declared the event itself an unlawful assembly, prompting cries of free-speech suppression, but James Fields Jr., one of the mornings earliest arrivals, allegedly turned the day deadly, driving his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of celebratory counterprotesters and killing one woman. As her name, Heather Heyer, along with those of State Troopers H. Jay Cullen and Berke M. M. Bates, whose helicopter crashed after tracking Fieldss car, would forever be associated with Charlottesville, so would another name: Donald J. Trump. His many sides comment later that afternoon would, for many, come to define the man in the Oval Office.
CONSCIOUS SHEEP
When James Alex Fields Jr. lived with his mother, his car was known, according to a neighbor quoted in the Toledo Blade, for blasting polka, the folk dance music popular in the nations of the former Austrian Empire. But the young man would seize on more disturbing aspects of that regions past.
The man who taught Fields history for two years described him as quiet and smart but unusually attracted to Germany.
He was a German-phile, teacher Derek Weimer told the Associated Press. He loved all the German language and culture, and of course that went much further and darker into Nazism and Adolf Hitler and views on race and white supremacy.
Fieldss former teacher also told the AP that his former student had confided that hed taken medication to control schizophrenia.
I knew he had some really far-out beliefs, but I never thought it could come to this point, said Weimer.
At the time of his arrest, Fields identified himself on his Facebook page as Conscious Ovis Aries, Latin for Conscious Sheep. His page was filled with fascist and alt-right images including a picture of baby Hitler, Pepe the Frog, and a portrait of a crowned Donald Trump on a throne.
One classmate told a television station that Fields once showed up at school with a Hitler-style mustache. Fieldss roommate on a 2015 trip to Europe told the Associated Press that Fields, while there, denigrated France and conveyed that the only reason he took the trip was to visit the motherland, that is, Germany. Two others on that postgraduation tour told ABC News that when the group arrived at the Dachau concentration camp, Fields said, This is where the magic happened.
Later that summer, Fields enlisted in the U.S. Army, but he didnt make it past boot camp.
There were other signs of trouble. When Fields was a teen living with his mother in suburban Cincinnati, she called 911 multiple times alleging problems with him, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. Confined to a wheelchair, the mother feared her own son, claiming that he hit her, spat on her, and threatened to beat her up. The Washington Post uncovered a call log suggesting that Fields was detained after an incident in which he allegedly stood behind his mother with a twelve-inch knife.
Fields never knew his father, who was killed by a drunk driver in a bizarre crash a few months before the boy was born in 1997. The Enquirer reported that the two survivors from the single-vehicle crash hitched a ride back to a bar and left the elder Fields to die alone and unreported. An uncle said that when James Jr. turned eighteen, he received the proceeds of a trust from his fathers estate.
Fieldss mother, Samantha Bloom, knew terror before losing her sons father. When she was sixteen, Bloom witnessed her father kill her mother and then himself with a shotgun, the Enquirer reported. She apparently learned of the allegations about what her son did in Charlottesville from reporters who filmed an interview in her garage as she returned home from dinner August 12. Bloom told reporters that Fieldswho lived in a separate apartment in the city and earned $10.50 an hour as a security guardhad asked her to watch his cat while he attended Unite the Right.
I didnt know it was white supremacists, Bloom said. I thought it had something to do with Trump.
She can be seen expressing shock at the allegations.
