SEAHAWKS DEFENSIVE END Michael Bennett surely never imagined, while racking up tackles on his high-school football team in Houston, that one day he’d have to defend his mother against the President of the United States.
The chaos and violence surrounding the white-nationalist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., on the weekend of Aug. 11 had gotten under Bennett’s skin.
That Friday, Americans watched throwback scenes of white guys carrying torches around a statue of the Confederate general and brutal slave owner Robert E. Lee while raging against black people and Jews as if it were 1917.
Then on Saturday, a man who’d allegedly attended that day’s white-supremacist rally plowed his car into a crowd of counterdemonstrators, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.