When right-wing extremists arrived with guns and camo, swords and shields, photographers naturally turned their lenses on the white supremacists. Charlottesville journalist Eze Amos was attacked while capturing one of them on film.
“He had a T-shirt with a swastika sign, and on top of that the face of Hitler," he recalls. "This guy looked like someone’s dad, you know? So I was photographing his T-shirt, and I came a little close, and he swung at me, and hit my camera to my face.”
Amos did not press charges, but for years he felt traumatized by what happened and did not look at what he had shot. Now, however, he’s ready to talk about his photos of people who fought back against the invaders.
“Letting the world see that there’s more to Charlottesville than what happened. We all have personal stories of that day – stories that show love, that show us being strong and being very resilient as a community.”
And he’s sharing 36 of his pictures with a larger-than-life exhibit hung from the trees on Charlottesville’s downtown mall.
“And the cool thing about this project is all the stories have been recorded, and at the base of each photo that will be installed on the trees, and with the aid of a QR code at the base of each photo, the person you see in the photo is going to be describing to you what you are looking at – taking people back to the time, and showing them what we did and how we came together as a community," Amos explains.
“My name is James Platts-Mills," one subjects begins. "This photo was taken on August 13th, 2017 – the day after the horrors of the Unite the Right rally and a bit more than 24 hours after Heather Heyer was murdered. I attended the vigil with my wife, who – at the time – was pregnant with our twin girls, now four, and my eldest daughter on my shoulders who was five at the time. My daughter is ten now. I hope she will inherit a city that we are all proud of.”
Another picture shows a woman weeping as she sits on the curb after a car crashed into counter-protesters, killing one and seriously injuring many more. That woman was protected by the quick action of a fellow counter-protester.
“Someone pushed her, and I’ll bet the person who pushed her probably even got hit. People looked out for each other," Amos says. "They tried to help each other. Let’s tell those stories!”
In her recording, April Muniz says she has lived in and around Charlottesville for over 30 years.
"When these photographs were taken, I was 49-years old, and my soul had just broken," she recalls. "I came to Fourth Street the evening of August 13th, 2017 to honor the life of Heather Heyer, a young woman whom I had never met but whose life had been tragically taken in a terror-filled moment, right before my eyes just the day before. When I returned the next evening, a small crowd had begun to gather at the site of the car attack. I sat on the curb, not far from where I had been pushed aside to safety the day before. As the crowd began to grow around me, I felt their shock, disbelief and sorrow. Grief overtook me and began to weep. I didn’t stop for days.”
Amos raised $75,000 to print the 8-by-10 foot photos on vinyl and to hang them on the downtown mall. The show called The Story of Us will be up through September 29th, and the photographer plans a book about Charlottesville’s response to the threat of white supremacists before, during and after August 12th of 2017.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
