
Charlottesville is the county seat of Albemarle County, Virginia. The Monacan village of Monasukapanough was located on the site of Charlottesville before European-American settlers founded Charlottesville in 1762, naming it in honor of the British queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. In 1768, Thomas Jefferson built his plantation of Monticello on a mountaintop just outside the town. From 1779 to 1781, the British, Hessian, and Loyalist army captured at the Battles of Saratoga was interned at Charlottesville. After the war, Jefferson founded the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, transforming the town into a center of higher education. After the American Civil War, emancipated African-Americans settled in the city's Vinegar Hill neighborhood. Charlottesville suffered from the same racism and violence which plagued other cities in the American South during the Jim Crow era, and both the Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP were active in the city during the early 20th century. In 1963, during the Civil Rights movement, Black civil rights activists staged sit-ins to protest segregation in their city. In 1965, the city government razed Vinegar Hill as part of an urban renewal project, and many local residents were relocated to the Westhaven public housing project. However, Charlottesville retained a vibrant Black community, and, during the 21st century, Charlottesville became an isolated bastion of progressivism surrounded by increasingly conservative rural areas. During the 2010s, these tensions resulted in the violent "Unite the Right" rally, where far-right protests against the removal of Confederate monuments from downtown parks were met with left-wing counter-protests, and fighting broke out between the two sides; a white supremacist terrorist, James Alex Fields Jr., killed counter-protester Heather Heyer and wounded 19 others in a vehicle-ramming attack. On 10 July 2021, the city removed its Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacagawea statues.
In 2020, Charlottesville had a population of 46,553 residents, of whom 63.6% were white, 15.1% Black, 8.73% Asian, 6.89% Hispanic, 5.03% multiracial, .14% Native American, .04% Pacific Islander, and .47% other. In 2021, 82.9% of residents voted for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe and 16% for Republican Glenn Youngkin. Charlottesville had a higher-than-national average violent crime rate.