An assembly of torch bearing white nationalists at the University of Virginia devolved into several fist fights and arrests before demonstrators evacuated the campus on Friday night, August 11.
The hundreds in attendance marched throughout the UVA grounds as a demonstration staged in lead up to the massive "Unite The Right" rally to be held in Charlottesville's Emancipation Park midday Saturday. Between 2,000 and 6,000 are expected to take to the city, as pro-Confederacy groups have for months, in protest of the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. In response, Charlottesville City Manager Maurice Jones is promising to have the largest deployment of Virginia State Police in three decades on hand to assist approximately 1,000 police officers.
Marchers remained relatively peaceful as they moved through the campus, but once they made it past Nameless Field and began to occupy the rotunda, the police declared the congregation unlawful assembly. The atmosphere would also get testy as physical altercations with anti-fascist protesters began to spring up, leading to officers swooping in to make arrests, and chants of "white lives matter" and "anti white."
