On this 50th anniversary of the hippies’ “Summer of Love,” Charlottesville, Virginia, will be weathering a long, hot, right-wing extremist “Summer of Hate.” The July 8, 2017, Ku Klux Klan rally planned for Charlottesville is not the group’s first appearance in our “beautiful, ugly city,” as one local African-American pastor recently characterized this ostensibly liberal (Hillary Clinton received 80% of the local 2016 presidential election vote) but racially-riven university town. And one month after the KKK rally comes a larger, more ominous event: the Klan’s 21st century counterparts’ August 12, 2017, “Unite the Right: March on Charlottesville.” We are bracing ourselves.
Charlottesville’s local chapter of the KKK can hardly be described as having humble beginnings.