A Fight Over Zoning Tests Charlottesville’s Progress on Race

Four years after a white supremacist march, the Virginia city is reconsidering its housing and zoning rules.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — In early July, crews showed up downtown for some long-delayed evictions. After years of protest, litigation and even violence, the statues of two Confederate generals, Lee and Jackson, were finally carted out of city parks, expelled by the city’s drive to right its past wrongs. Now the really hard work awaits. It has been four years since white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, wreaking bloody havoc in the streets and killing a young woman. The horror of that August weekend sent the city into a deep study of its own racial past and a debate over what to do about its legacy. The catalog of lingering artifacts of that bigoted history is daunting, beginning with statues but quickly getting to the basics of civic life like schools and neighborhoods.