Unite the Right rally

Unite the Right
August 12,2017



From Wikipedia:
Kessler, the organizer of the "Unite the Right" rally, applied for a permit from the City of Charlottesville to hold the event at Emancipation Park.

The city's leaders cited safety concerns and logistical issues associated with holding the event at Emancipation Park, adjacent to the densely populated Downtown Mall. Kessler refused to agree to relocate the rally, but the City relocated the rally anyway, a decision praised by the Downtown Business Association of Charlottesville. Kessler, supported by the Rutherford Institute and the ACLU, sued the City of Charlottesville and Jones on First Amendment grounds in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia. The night before the rally, Judge Glen E. Conrad granted an emergency injunction declaring that the Unite the Right rally could go forward.

Prior to the rally, counter protesters obtained permit(s) to gather at McGuffey Park and Justice Park, both less than a quarter-mile distant from the Emancipation Park rally. Charlottesville City Council spokeswoman Miriam I. Dickler later remarked that counter-protesters did not need permits to protest the rally at Emancipation Park.

Among the far-right groups engaged in organizing the march were the clubs of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, The Right Stuff, the National Policy Institute, and four groups that form the Nationalist Front: the neo-Confederate League of the South, the Traditionalist Workers Party, Vanguard America, and the National Socialist Movement. Other groups involved in the rally were the Ku Klux Klan, the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, the 3 Percenters, Identity Evropa, the Oath Keepers, the American Guard, the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia, the New York Light Foot Militia, the Virginia Minutemen Militia, the Detroit Right Wings, the Rise Above Movement, True Cascadia, and Anti-Communist Action.

Groups counterprotesting included representatives from the National Council of Churches, Black Lives Matter, Anti-Racist Action, Antifa, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Workers World Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, Redneck Revolt, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council, and Showing Up for Racial Justice.