Making #Charlottesville

Over the summer of 2017, Charlottesville, Virginia, drew international attention as openly empowered white supremacists and alt-right extremists gathered there, and an antiracist movement mobilized to confront them. The city became a global news story.

Aniko Bodroghkozy sets that episode beside two earlier turning points of the civil rights era: the 1963 campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, and the 1965 campaign in Selma. Her central concern is the recurring patterns in how the mass media covered these events, roughly half a century apart. She also examines how activists on both sides used the media environment of their own day to organize supporters and spread their messages.

Bodroghkozy traces the connections among the three places. Each was deliberately chosen as a stage for a media campaign, each produced similarly iconic images that circulated widely, and each has retained a lasting influence on American culture and on public memory around the world.