Eight years on, troubled by a city's grim history

Author and Charlottesville native Deborah Baker revisits the devastating events of 2017 and examines how they speak to a difficult past

- By Martin Pengelly

Deborah Baker's new book, Charlottesville, is about her home town in Virginia, where in summer 2017 white supremacists marched, violence erupted and a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was murdered. In dizzying detail, Baker charts and reports the chaos. In interludes, she examines the dark history of a city long linked to racist oppression, from the days of Thomas Jefferson, Robert E Lee and slavery to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and resistance to civil rights reform.

Putting it all together was a new challenge for a writer whose books include In Extremis, a biography of the 20th-century poet Laura Riding, and A Blue Hand: The Beats in India.

"As a literary biographer, a narrative nonfiction writer, I mostly work out of archives and libraries and letters and diaries and things like that," Baker said. "And of course, for this, there wasn't anything like that in a library or institution. So I had to make my own archive, which involved the interviews I did with around 100 people but also old Twitter streams."