Aniko Bodroghkozy is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. This interview is based on her new book, Making #Charlottesville: Media from Civil Rights to Unite the Right (University of Virginia Press, 2023).
JF: What led you to write Making #Charlottesville?
AB: As a media historian who focuses on the 1960s and particularly on the civil rights era, I never expected to write about an almost contemporary event. But then far-right extremists and white supremacists came to my town in an attempt to build a movement to undermine and eradicate the gains of the civil rights and other social justice movements of the 1960s and 70s. I decided to use my scholarly tools as a media scholar and historian – and as someone who was on the streets counter-protesting during the Unite the Right rally – to make sense of what happened and why it matters in the long struggle against white supremacy.
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of Making #Charlottesville?
AB: Charlottesville’s “Summer of Hate” in 2017 became a world-wide media event putting the resurgence of aggressive, empowered white supremacy and “alt-right” extremism in the Trump era on display, along with the antiracist and antifascist movement in opposition to it. This book examines the meanings and significance of this seminal moment in recent U.S. history by putting it into dialogue and comparison with key media events of the civil rights era, particularly the 1963 Birmingham and 1965 Selma campaigns. It explores usable historical “rhymes” in the mass media treatment of these events, along with the ways that activists on both sides of the struggle used the new media environment of their day to organize and amplify their messages. What can a comparative historical analysis of media treatment of these events separated by fifty years elucidate about the significance of what happened in Charlottesville?
JF: Why do we need to read Making #Charlottesville?
AB: Readers who are concerned about the state of American democracy and the threats to the expansion of rights and social equity since the 1960s need to understand what happened in Charlottesville in 2017 and how that event fits with a long history of attempts to expand democratic access and the forces, ever attempting to regroup, trying to shut it down.
JF: Why and when did you become an American historian?
AB: As a student activist in the 1980s at Columbia University, I noticed how the media always compared our activism to student protest in the 1960s. We tended to be framed as nostalgic throwbacks. I decided I needed to understand more about what happened in “the Sixties.” I’ve sent an entire career trying to figure out that turbulent era, mostly through the lens of media treatment.
JF: What is your next project?
AB: My next book is a narrative history of how American network news, as a nascent journalistic medium that had not yet developed the protocols or technology to handle a crisis, breaking news event managed, over four days of continuous broadcasting, to cover the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
JF: Thanks, Aniko!