Behind the Lens with Sam Corum
By: S.L. Kanai
Tags: Photojournalism, Photography, Journalism, Charlottesville, War

Can you talk about covering the events in Charlottesville — of the white supremacist rally, and the experience being there?

I had already covered a lot of social unrest, starting with Ferguson and then Baltimore and the Pulse Nightclub shooting. So I had developed relationships with activists, sources. A few of them had given me a heads up that their own people had infiltrated these online white supremacist groups and that there was going to be a torch march that Friday night [August 11, 2017].

It wasn’t publicized. The groups made public the march planned for the next day. But we got wind of the torch march that was going to happen Friday night that no one else knew about.

You couldn’t find any info about it online, but I was able to convince my editors to let me go down half a day early.

We had gotten word that they were going to gather around nine o’clock, so I sat and waited for people to start showing up. And it got really, really close to nine and nothing was happening.

But then, slowly, one, two, five, ten groups started showing up — all white supremacists. Then the pickups trucks showed up with piles of tiki torches in the back and they all started passing them out and lighting them.

And the whole time in my head I’m going ‘holy shit. Holy shit.’ It’s surreal. It was really surreal.

When they started marching through the campus, there was a moment when they were marching between a building and a parking garage, and they all started going ‘Hoo, Hoo, Hoo, Hoo,’ and it started echoing.

It was terrifying. I mean, I’m a big white man, which a shaved head and a big beard, so I blended in — but I was terrified. I was more terrified there than I was in Iraq.

There is something about being around pure hatred that is terrifying. In Iraq my life was on the line, and I could be killed any moment, but I can understand a lot of why these people are fighting. If an armed force came into the United States I would do the same damn thing.

But the hatred that they had was just terrifying.

Towards the end, there were a small amount of counter-protestors that had surrounded the statue — not the main one, but another one on campus — and marchers surrounded them. There are these crazy, heroic protestors that are standing in the face of this hatred.

I’m down in the crowd and I get to the middle and I’m between the groups, and I turn and see Peter — the guy in the white shirt — and they’re looking at the protestors and yelling at the top of their lungs, these chants.

“You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!”

And then a switch was flipped and the fighting started. I thought somebody was gonna die. I thought somebody was going to die because there were no cops — there were zero cops. When the cops finally did show up it was like four or five of them.

I thought somebody was gonna get stabbed. There were lit tiki torch canisters being thrown at people. I thought somebody was gonna get lit on fire.

Then the pepper spray came out. The counter-protestors started pepper spraying the marchers, and that’s when I got out and I went back to my car, and I just started sending images.

The next morning I woke up, and that one image was everywhere.