Book Launch for Deborah Baker's CHARLOTTESVILLE: AN AMERICAN STORY

Join Deborah Baker for the launch of her new book Charlottesville: An American Story on June 3, 2025 at 6:00 PM ET in the auditorium of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. The program will include a brief reading followed by a conversation with Gayle Jessup White and audience Q&A. There will be a book signing following the program.

Free and open to the public, but registration is required. There will be a cash bar.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city’s historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far-right cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a throng of counterprotesters, killing a young woman and injuring dozens.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker has written a riveting and panoptic account of what unfolded that weekend, focusing less on the rally’s far-right leaders than on the story of the city itself. University, local, and state officials, including law enforcement, were unable or unwilling to grasp the gathering threat. Clergy, activists, and organizers from all walks of life saw more clearly what was coming and, at great personal risk, worked to warn and defend their city.

To understand why their warnings fell on deaf ears, Baker does a deep dive into American history. In her research she discovers an uncannily similar event that took place decades before when an emissary of the poet and fascist Ezra Pound arrived in Charlottesville intending to start a race war. In Charlottesville, Baker shows how a city more associated with Thomas Jefferson than civil unrest became a flashpoint in a continuing struggle over our nation’s founding myths.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Deborah Baker's books have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and the National Book Award in Nonfiction. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, and she is a former Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her previous book, The Last Englishmen: Love, War, and the End of Empire, is set in London, Calcutta, and the Himalaya and takes place in the years leading up to Indian Independence. She lives in Brooklyn and Charlottesville.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR:

American history is in Gayle Jessup White's blood. A direct descendant of both Thomas Jefferson and those enslaved at his famous Monticello estate, her story is a real-life version of Roots – a 40-year struggle to prove that her family's belief about its links to the author of the Declaration of Independence were true. She recounts her journey in her critically acclaimed book, Reclamation: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant’s Search for Her Family’s Lasting Legacy. Today, Gayle works at Monticello, as the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s first public relations & community engagement officer – the first descendant of Jefferson and the families he enslaved to work for the Foundation. Her position provides her unique opportunities to share her American story —and her hope that lessons learned from our past can guide us in the future—in evocative presentations and in a forthcoming book about her mother’s side of her family. She and her husband, award winning journalist Jack White Jr. live in Charlottesville, VA and have a blended family of five children and seven grandchildren.

PRAISE FOR CHARLOTTESVILLE:

"[Baker] shows how coordinated resistance against white supremacists both can work and will be required again in the coming years. A vivid account that capably illuminates the evils half-hidden under a flickering torch."—KIRKUS, starred review

"Heart-stopping and heartbreaking narrative, with a rich and complex story of how the everyday people of a small city fought for justice long before the tiki torches blazed. Charlottesville is essential history, reportage, and maybe how-to for all who care for that struggle."—JEFF SHARLET, NYT bestselling author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

"With the precision of a master pointillist painter, Deborah Baker puts human faces on the buried truths that imperil American democracy while also amplifying the unheeded voices of the kind of unsung citizens who may yet save it. A must-read feat of spellbinding storytelling that packs the power of prophetic truth."—NANCY MACLEAN, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America

"No one has explained the struggle for contemporary America’s soul as masterfully as Deborah Baker does in Charlottesville. Whether she’s depicting the battles of ordinary citizens against provocateurs in the street or the pentimento effect of the past in the present, Baker puts her readers right there, on the spot. A family tragedy, a ghost story and a political thriller all at once, this book is a gripping and terrifying portrait of our time."—DEBORAH COHEN, author of Last Call at the Hotel Imperial