Late in June, the city of Charlottesville issued a request for proposals for redesigning Justice Park and Emancipation Park—formerly known as Jackson Park and Lee Park, and named for the two Confederate generals. As the fatal white supremacist rally in the city over the weekend demonstrated, what these spaces stand for is a subject of bloody debate.
The “Unite the Right” rally was ostensibly organized to protest the city’s plan to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from what is now Emancipation Park. The blood shed nearby when James Fields allegedly drove his car into counter-protesters, injuring more than a dozen and killing a 32-year-old woman named Heather Heyer, has given new and unintended meaning to the grounds where the rally was staged. This may be the most urgent landscape brief since the memorials commemorating the attacks of September 11, 2001.
