Hale now lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, the same town where groups of white supremacists had marched with tiki torches and loaded guns, vowing to save their country. She said the incident allowed her to revisit racism in this country from an entirely different angle — one that would make others reflect on their own family history.

“All history is somebody’s family story,” Hale said. “Frankly, that’s what gave me the courage to revisit this situation, because it was hard to do. I had grown up with a story of my grandfather’s heroism. And I thought my not wanting to know was symptomatic of a lot of white Americans. I wanted to make the point that this erasure of history is foundational to why racism and white supremacy persists.”

Historian

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