This event will be held off-site at Jefferson School African American Heritage Center (233 4th St NW).
Join authors Hawes Spencer, Claudrena Harold, and John Edwin Mason in conversation with Courteney Stuart of CBS Newsplex as they discuss their books Summer of Hate: Charlottesville, USA and Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity and reflect on the legacies of last year’s historic violence. This event is in partnership with The University of Virginia Press and will be free and open to the public.
Summer of Hate is the investigative journalist Hawes Spencer’s unbiased, probing account of August 11 and 12. Telling the story from the perspective of figures from all sides of the demonstrations, Spencer, who reported from Charlottesville for The New York Times, carefully re-creates what happened and why. By focusing on individuals including activists, city councillors, and law enforcement officials, Spencer provides a full, objective, and dramatic narrative that weaves together past and present as well as a way forward toward healing.
Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity brings together the work of UVA faculty members catalyzed by last summer’s events to examine their community’s history more deeply and more broadly. Their essays—ranging from John Mason on the local legacy of the Lost Cause to Leslie Kendrick on free speech to Rachel Wahl on the paradoxes of activism—examine truth telling, engaged listening, and ethical responses, and aim to inspire individual reflection, as well as to provoke considered and responsible dialogue. This prescient, new collection is a conversation that understands and owns America’s past and—crucially—shows that our past is very much part of our present.