Arts This Week: Deborah Baker’s Book Launch at The Jefferson School
By Sage Tanguay
Date: 06/03/2025
Sage Tanguay 00:08
On Tuesday, June 3rd at 6pm, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center will host the launch for a new book about the fateful Unite The Right rally titled “Charlottesville: An American Story”. For Arts This Week, we spoke with the author, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Deborah Baker.
Deborah Baker 00:25
My name is Deborah Baker. I grew up partly in Ivy. I started thinking about this book soon after August 12th happened. I thought someone should write a book about it. I didn’t think it would be me. I’m used to writing about dead people and the prospect of talking to people who had been through such a traumatic event really put me off. I started out as a literary biographer, and then I moved into what’s called creative nonfiction, or narrative nonfiction, and that generally involves going spending a lot of time in libraries, going through people’s letters and diaries and photo albums and trying to reconstruct events in their life, a particular period of their life, to tell a sort of larger story about the history of that period, or to sort of focus on really the dynamics of that period through these people’s lives. But then something someone in the community said made me rethink that, and I began thinking about how I would put together an archive and write out of that.
Sage Tanguay 01:24
What was your memory of that day that inspired you to write this book?
Deborah Baker 01:28
Well, I watched it unfold from a distance, and I hadn’t lived in Charlottesville since the 90s. I wanted to sort of figure out, you know, what is it about the stories that we tell ourselves about our hometowns or our country that has blinded us to civic unrest.
Sage Tanguay 01:46
What was the biggest difference for you in your process?
Speaker 1 01:51
Well, I’m a very nosy person. That’s why I like to read people’s private letters and things like that, but I found that it was very difficult for me to actually look someone in the face and ask them, you know, really personal questions, especially people that were, you know, still pretty much suffering the after effects of that weekend. But I did enjoy sort of going back and listening to the Commission hearings about the statue. I did listen to a lot of city council meetings. I got a sense of, you know, the civic temperature in the year leading up to the weekend of the unite the right. But I wanted to keep my focus largely on the people that were driving the conversation, like the activists, Wes Bellamy, Mike Signor, those people. And the clergy, of course.
Sage Tanguay 02:37
What can people expect? What are they going to see on the pages?
Deborah Baker 02:41
I think they’ll see a story of a lot of really inspiring people coming together, across faiths, across age differences, temperamental differences, race, trying to bring attention to what the threat that these men posed. And you see them failing at that, particularly when it comes to representation of what was the threat to the City Council. And so I was also interested in trying to understand, why wasn’t it heard? Why weren’t they taken seriously? You know, the arrival of fascism in America. Some people have been talking about that for years now, and some people are just coming round to the fact that, yeah, maybe we do have a big problem here.
Sage Tanguay 03:23
Was there anything through your research that totally surprised you?
Deborah Baker 03:27
Fairly early on, when I was still in denial that I was writing this book, I found a comparable event that happened in Charlottesville in 1956 and the ways in which it echoed with Unite The Right were really kind of uncanny. The other thing that surprised me was when I spoke to old Charlottesville African American community people, how forthcoming they were with their experience. I don’t know if person like me had come up and asked them the answers to answer these questions, like 10 years ago, whether they would have been as forthcoming, I was really honored by their openness and their honesty about what it is like to be a Black person in this community.
Sage Tanguay 04:09
What is your hope for the impact of this book? What do you hope people take away from it?
Deborah Baker 04:14
You know, the process of it, for me involved a lot of self-questioning, a lot of self-reflection on, you know how I have been formed, by Virginia, by Charlottesville, by Albemarle. You know, in terms of the local audience, especially people that maybe didn’t follow it, blow by blow, what unfolded, blow by blow, I hope that they’ll take away a clearer vision of, you know, who are these people, both the ones that came to town, and the ones that were already here and who were the people that stood up to them.
Sage Tanguay 04:44 The book launch is on Tuesday, June 3rd from 6 to 8pm at the Jefferson School. To find more information and register for this public event, visit https://jeffschoolheritagecenter.org/events/book-launch-for-deborah-bakers-charlottesville-an-american-story/
Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance, music, theater and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu
