In August of 2017, alt-right activists, Klansmen, and neo-Nazis marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, claiming the town as their own, partly responding to the town’s battle over the fate of a statue of Robert E. Lee that occupied a central place in a park. This past week, that statue—the symbol of what white supremacists sought to preserve—was melted down in a Southern foundry. It seems a fitting demise.

In her new book Making #Charlottesville: Media From Civil Rights to Unite the Right, University of Virginia media historian Aniko Bodroghkozy investigates whether what happened in 2017 in Charlottesville was ever really about the statue at all. Instead she analyzes the relationship between the mass media and Civil Rights Movement, tracing a straight line from the 1963 Birmingham and 1965 Selma Civil Rights campaigns to the events of Charlottesville 2017 as worldwide media events. She was the person I most wanted to hear from after news of the statue’s end came out—and as one point of disclosure, we are friends, and were members of the same synagogue when I lived in Charlottesville. Our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, follows.

Dahlia Lithwick: You argue that in a sense, Selma and Birmingham’s Civil Rights protests of the 1960s and Charlottesville 2017 are media bookends, with the former signaling how a social change movement could push government to repair its racist past, and the latter signaling the rise of a political movement dedicated to reversing that project.
You write that “What the SCLC did in Birmingham and later in Selma, the alt-right wanted to do in Charlo­ttesville.” Talk more about the ways in which the two movements are connected, in your view?

Aniko Bodroghkozy: They’re connected in a mirror-image way in what they represent and signpost about U.S. history and the struggle against white supremacy and for democratic access across the past half-century. The 1963 Birmingham campaign and the 1965 Selma campaigns were high-water marks of the Civil Rights Movement—they’re two major media events that got massive amounts of national and international press attention and that led directly to the passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

From the perspective of white supremacists, that movement and those pieces of legislation effectively dismantled “the White Republic.” In the alt-right timescape, as scholar Alexandra Minna Stern argues, 1965 is like year zero for white supremacists. In the Civil Rights Movement timeline, 1965 is often seen as the apotheosis, the crowning moment. What the alt-right wanted to do was build their own dynamic social change movement to reverse all those racial equity and democratic access gains—and do so by tapping into the very movement media strategies that the Civil Rights Movement had honed in the 1960s. The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was supposed to ignite an in-the-streets movement as a visually stunning media event. It was never about coming to Charlottesville to protest the removal of Confederate statues.

You describe the construction of media events specifically designed to elicit the attention of the media for publicity purposes in the........

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