Nation and World-Wide Response to the Riot

On August 12th news of the events in Charlottesville, VA spread like wildfire. None of the citizens of our small town of Charlottesville expected people in Germany, the Netherlands, NYC and Boston to have photos and videos of Charlottesville spread across the front pages of their newspapers, highlighted on their TV channels and discussed on their local radios. The responses from all over the nation and the world shocked the community of Charlottesville as people showed their love and support to the small town.

A major highlight in the Charlottesville community was the performance put together by the Nashville Pearl-Cohn Entertainment Magnet High School alongside other Nashville public high schools. The recording label at Pearl-Cohn enabled the students, alongside Cedric Caldwell, a Grammy-winning teacher at the high school, to compose a piece of music for the Charlottesville community. The students came to Charlottesville to perform their piece for C.H.S. on Friday the 15th of September; many students and other members of the C.H.S. community expressed that the event had a great impact as a unifying force in a time of disarray.

Caldwell noted his motivation for putting together the event, saying,“[I am] in awe that things like that still exist in society. You just wonder, are we ever going to get along, are we ever going to respect each other? The days of the K.K.K. and Nazis, I just thought it was gone, I was just in awe.” He put together a group of five students from both Nashville public schools and Pearl-Cohn, where he is a teacher, to sing a song they had made. They came to C.H.S and gave a touching performance of their song for the whole C.H.S. community.

Chad Prather, former C.H.S. history teacher and current teacher at Pearl-Cohn, gave a good sense of how the Nashville community responded towards the events in Charlottesville. Prather had been in Charlottesville on August 11th and witnessed the events at the Rotunda. Of the response in Nashville, a blue city in a red state, Prather said, “People had different reactions in Nashville and when I presented it to students… I presented kind of what had taken place, some kids were already familiar with it having seen the news, just from the few days before and from social media, other kids were not familiar, and the range of emotions was pretty drastic. Some kids initially just started joking and they said ‘I have to laugh at it, I have to find a reason, some ridiculous reason to laugh at the ridiculousness of it because if I don’t the alternative is really dark.’ Other kids were really confused about, well, what had been going on in Charlottesville that made this happen in Charlottesville? The overwhelming reaction though was ‘Is this going to happen in Nashville?’ There was also a lot of ‘I wish they would come here, come here and see what happens.’ So there was a very aggressive response.”

Many other people from different parts of the world showed responses to the riot as well. Livia McPhee, a senior in high school and long term friend of C.H.S. student Mila Cesaretti (11) from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York said, “When I hear people at Spence [my high school in New York] talk about Charlottesville, it’s slightly unsettling because I feel like I know the city outside of the context of the nice August 12th events.” She noted that the people of NYC, “Had a pretty productive response to the events. We were all shocked but I think we’re using this shock to gain a better understanding of the large amount of societal change that must happen now, and soon, and within every community in America.”  

Jornel Torres, a 2016 U. Va. School of Commerce graduate who now lives in Washington, D.C., shared his take on the response of D.C. saying, “As you might expect, D.C. is very responsive to major events that take place across the country, so very shortly after the events in Charlottesville, I caught wind of marches, rallies, vigils, etc. that were being organized in response. In general, I’d say initial feelings were a mixture of sadness, disappointment, disbelief, and anger: sadness for those hurt/injured while peacefully counter-protesting and their families; disappointment in administrative bodies at both the local and national levels for letting things spiral out of control; disbelief in the realization that in 2017 this many Americans (and young ones at that) could be so ignorant and hateful; and anger surrounding the very fact that such devastating events transpired.”

Yang Zi Long, a student in China and friend of Lucas Higgins (K.T.R.’s Editor-in-Chief, 12), described the general feeling as “amazed.” He said, “According to our understanding of American history, the perspective is complex. We thought that the riot was not just a racial and political problem, but that it involved unresolved historical issues. This uprising was only a matter of time. We should admit that in this respect, America still has a long way to go. There is no doubt that this road would be full of hardships and frustrations, given the complexity of your national conditions. As for the response of China people, we were not like what you supposed. We just sit there, discuss and analyze it calmly without posters or vigils.” While China did not have a response like Nashville, the way they responded is just as interesting and understandable–and could provide insight into the ramifications of this event on the international view of the U.S. It is clear, now, that, no matter what many thought about the scope of the event, many are seeing the U.S. in a different light.  

While the tragic events that transpired on August 12th are still relatively fresh in the minds of the C.H.S. community, the response from the nation and the world has shown C.H.S. that they are not alone and that there is still so much good in the world. People continuing to reach out towards and show love to Charlottesville shows just how much this event has triggered a response from the whole world. A response to make a change, once and for all.