‘If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,’ she wrote in her last Facebook post.
But her biography suggests that she would have been the first to object to any special treatment. It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out, that even in her death, Heyer was a beneficiary of white privilege, remembered as a ‘strong woman’, rather than subjected to the invasive examination of background typically meted out to unarmed black people killed by the police. And now Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. The struggle to achieve full enfranchisement for black people in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. Nor has it been confined to the South: the North has had its own, scarcely less virulent form of white supremacy. The battle over Reconstruction never ended it has simply changed form. Eric Foner has described the Reconstruction era, when ex-slaves became citizens and the first biracial Southern governments were elected to power, as America’s ‘unfinished revolution’. The ‘Unite the Right’ protest was a reminder that the dream of the Confederacy has never died: the vision of Herrenvolk democracy has continued to smoulder since Union troops left the vanquished but still defiant South, scarcely a decade after the end of the war. A helicopter surveilling the event crashed, killing the two officers inside. One young woman in the counter-demonstration was murdered by a man who rammed his car into her, weaponising his vehicle just as jihadists have done in London and Nice and Barcelona. Emboldened by having an ally in the highest office in the land, they came with Confederate flags, swastikas, medieval-looking wooden shields, torches and, of course, guns. This ‘pastoral scene of the gallant South’, as Billie Holiday might have described it, was open to anyone who hated black people and Jews, from members of the Ku Klux Klan to neo-Nazis.
Weiss, one of the producers of Confederate, explained the thinking behind the series: ‘What would the world have looked like if Lee had sacked DC, if the South had won – that just always fascinated me.’ On 12 August, in Charlottesville, Virginia, Weiss got his answer, with the ‘Unite the Right’ demonstration against the planned removal of Lee’s statue in Emancipation Park (formerly known as Lee Park). Lee, has successfully seceded from the Union. , HBO unveiled plans for a new show set in an alternative reality, in which the Confederate South, led by General Robert E.
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