Statues have been on Emily Gorcenski’s mind for a while. Three years ago, she was living in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the tumultuous week of protests over the removal of Confederate statues and monuments, during which a white supremacist drove a vehicle into a crowd of peaceful protesters and killed activist Heather Heyer. Seeking to track the judicial progress of hate crime cases, Gorcenski used public records to build First Vigil, a database of legal proceedings related to far-right and white supremacist violence. It’s what she does. Gorcenski is an engineer,…
