A savage attack on a counter-protester during Saturday’s violent “Unite the Right” rally in Virginia evoked memories of the ugliest days of the civil rights movement, an original Freedom Rider said Monday.
Among the victims of the Charlottesville violence was a local resident who joined his friends to demonstrate against the organizers of the white nationalist event in the city’s Emancipation Park.
Deandre Harris, 20, was attacked in a parking lot by a group of white supremacists who kicked him, punched him and pummeled him with metal poles.
“I was knocked unconscious repeatedly,” Harris wrote on a GoFundMe page set up to help with his medical expenses. “Every time I went to stand up I was knocked back down.”
The fund was seeking $50,000. More than $106,000 had been raised by Monday night.
Video posted on Twitter shows the aspiring hip-hop artist desperately trying to escape his attackers as they repeatedly strike him with poles and other objects. The images provide disturbing insight into the level of hate behind the actions of some of the white nationalists.
One photo, which Harris shared on his GoFundMe page, shows blood dripping down his face from a gash on his head.
The pictures of Harris’ suffering were eerily similar to photos of original Freedom Rider Charles Person after he was viciously attacked at a Birmingham, Ala., bus station in 1961.
Like Harris, Person suffered a brutal blow to the top of his head. But unlike his modern counterpart, Person was unable to be treated at a hospital. The result was a golf-ball-sized knot on head that was surgically removed decades later.
Person, 74, said he was surprised at the level of hatred after all these years.
“They did a pretty good job on him,” Person said of the attack on Harris. “I was under the impression that a lot of this was behind us.”
Side-by-side photos of both brutal beatings have been circulating on social media.
“I wasn’t prepared for that,” Person said about Harris’ photo. “Not in this day and time.”
Harris said the attack happened right next to the Charlottesville Police Department, but none of the cops helped him.
He said his friends noticed the brutal beating and stepped in and pulled him to safety.
“They could have killed my son,” his mother, Felicia Harris, told Charlottesville’s News 3. “That blow to his head could have taken his life.”
Harris was taken to Martha Jefferson Hospital, and received eight staples in his head.
Harris, an instructional assistant for a local high school’s special education program, said he also suffered a concussion, a broken wrist and chipped tooth.
He told The Root website it was “really crazy” that white nationalists, members of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis were even allowed to protest.
“I understand everyone is entitled to their freedom of speech, but the government and the mayor made a bad business move,” Harris said. “It has only caused havoc in your own city.
“It’s crazier that people have the hate in their heart to want to kill people,” he added.
At the same rally, a paralegal, Heather Heyer, 32, was killed when a Nazi sympathizer plowed his car through a group of of counterprotesters.
The driver, James Fields, injured another 19 people in the attack labeled by the Department of Justice as an act of domestic terrorism.
Person said he was disappointed to see the country still in such a state of turmoil.
“It hurts because I think sometimes you think they didn’t get our message or what we were about, because we were nonviolent,” he said.
Saturday’s rally was organized by white supremacist groups protesting the pending removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
The protest took a violent turn even before speakers got a chance to address the unruly crowd, and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe was forced to declare a state of emergency.
Charlottesville Police Chief Al Thomas said protest organizers did not follow the safety plan.
“We were hoping for a peaceful event,” Thomas said. “Absolutely, I have regrets. We lost three lives this weekend. A local citizens and two officers. It was a tragic, tragic weekend.”
Person said the nation still has work to do.
“It’s hard to reach people when you got this kind of reminder,” Person said.
“It’s like they have not left the Civil War. It’s ever-present right there. I thought we got beyond that. I think a lot of us thought we had got beyond that.”
