Charlottesville Self-Guided Historic Downtown Walking Tour

On August 12, 2017, James Alex Fields Jr. drove from Ohio to Charlottesville, accelerated his car into a crowd of counter-protesters on Fourth Street Southeast, killed Heather Heyer, and injured thirty-five others. The city designated that stretch of Fourth Street as Honorary Heather Heyer Way in December 2017. Charlottesville's self-guided downtown walking tour threads through that history — the Downtown Mall, Court Square, the footprint of Vinegar Hill, a Black neighborhood erased by urban renewal. The map marks the sites. Walking it is how you understand what the city has done with what happened here.