Thousands of people took to the streets in downtown D.C. on Sunday in protest of the white nationalist gathering and terrorist attack that took the life of a protester in Charlottesville on Saturday and injured 19 others.

“The raw edge of the real struggle in this country was exposed [in Charlottesville]. Some people want to drag this country back—make it more racist, more patriarchal, more divided, more unequal from an income perspective,” said Eugene Puryear, an organizer with Stop Police Terror Project DC. “Whatever people say, there’s been a movement growing in this country for several years, but especially since they murdered Mike Brown. It’s a movement against white supremacy, it’s a movement against racism and bigotry.”

A somber crowd gathered in front of the White House around 7 p.m., where speakers from the local Black Lives Matter and Stop Police Terror Project spoke out against white supremacy. People in the crowd chanted, “when the KKK comes around, there is no middle ground,” “they say ‘Jim Crow’, we say ‘hell no!’, and “black lives matter!”

“[Our elected officials] need to end white terrorism and call it ‘terrorism,’ as it is,” says Amelia Zurn, a Silver Spring resident and member of racial justice group SURJ, who attended the vigil last night. “I’d like to see the people who drove their car into those peaceful protesters brought to justice, and I’d like to understand why the police did nothing. Come on white people, it’s on us. Come on white people, get out here!”

The white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville took a violent and lethal turn Saturday. Neo-Nazi and other white supremacist groups organized by Jason Kessler, a 34-year-old white nationalist from Charlottesville, planned to convene at a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee to protest plans by the city government to remove it.
Counter-protesters, including clergy and anti-fascist members, tried to block their entry into the park. White nationalists, some carrying bats, shields, and guns, physically fought them to get in.

Although the rally was not supposed to start until noon, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe called a state of emergency by 11:22 a.m, as clashes erupted between the groups.

Around 1:45 p.m., a car slammed into a crowd of counter-protesters who were marching down a side street, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others. The alleged driver, 20-year-old Ohio resident James Fields Jr., is being charged with murder. To cap off the tragic day, two Virginia state troopers died responding to the situation when their helicopter crashed outside the city.

“I’m very aware that nothing new is happening, it’s just that the extreme right wing—Nazis, fascists, KKK—feel empowered since Trump was elected,” says Leah Brown, a longtime protester and local housing justice activist. “I’m just outraged, and I cannot fathom what makes a person believe that they should drive a car into a crowd, or that they should go to a nightclub and shoot people.”

The D.C. vigil crowd marched from the White House down Pennsylvania Avenue to a statue of Confederate General Albert Pike, which is located near the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department headquarters downtown. It is the only outdoor statue honoring a Confederate general in the city, though there are a number of statues inside the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection. Several protesters climbed the monument as Puryear condemned Pike’s racism, booing and chanting “tear it down!”

“[Pike] is a guy who loved slavery so much that he quit two political parties. He wrote pamphlets about it, and then when the civil war started, he raised three regiments of troops,” Puryear said over the chants. “The Richard Spencers of the world, they want to invoke fear in people, they want people to fear their fascist movement. This [vigil] is a sign that people are not going to let that genie out of that bottle, that people are going to fight back.”