Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

One Dead As Car Plows Into Anti-Racist Counter-Protesters In Charlottesville

(JTA) — CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (JTA) — A car traveling at a high speed plowed through a crowd during protests against a white supremacist gathering, killing one person and injuring at least five.

At least one of the injured was in critical condition, sources close to law enforcement told JTA on Saturday. A JTA reporter counted at least eight injured, although several of these suffered minor wounds and were treated at the scene. Security sources said a man was in custody and that the FBI was sending agents to the city, although a motive was not yet clear.

Some 500 white supremacists, believed to be the largest gathering in recent history, gathered in Emancipation Park on Saturday in the university town’s center to protest plans by the city, a liberal enclave in central Virginia, to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. (The park was previously known as Lee Park.)

Protesters and counterprotesters started throwing things at one another, including plastic bottles and gas bombs, and at one point the two groups charged one another and there were tussles. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency and police asked the white supremacists to move. The organizers of the supremacists group were unclear about where to go and dispersed to different parts of the city.

Although the focus of the white supremacists ostensibly was on preserving symbols of the confederacy, there were overt expressions of Nazi sympathy, including swastika flags, and signs that said “The Jewish media is going down.”

President Trump condemned the violence, but appeared to blame all sides. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of bigotry hatred and violence on many sides,” he said at an impromptu press conference.

Trump has made a point of naming Islamic radicals as responsible for terrorist attacks even before the full details are known.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.