Good morning, RVA! It's 72 °F, and today's highs are still in the 90s! Yesterday was no-joke hot, y'all, and you should expect similarly humorless heat today. Stay hydrated, OK?
Water cooler
Richmond Police are reporting a homicide that occurred on Tuesday night. Officers responded to the 700 block of Stockton Street and found Jaquan A. Harris, 25 shot to death.
Tomorrow is National Bike to Work Day! In addition to taking advantage of the beautiful weather, you can join the mayor for a cool bike hangout at Kanawha Plaza at 8:00 AM. Eat some pastries, drink some coffee, and then, around 9:00 AM, follow the mayor (by bike, of course) across the T-Pot bridge for an announcement about the Riverfront Plan. Biiiiiikes!
Well, this is a wild story from Ned Oliver in the RTD. Some smart and dastardly company out there may have used a tax loophole to make $475,000 off of taxpayers by overpaying their taxes. While I can appreciate the cleverness behind this fleecing of Richmond citizens, we do not have that kind of money to spare. Dear other shady companies, please refrain from doing this.
Yesterday Governor McAuliffe signed HB 1547 into law, providing about $34,000 toward the care and maintenance of the Evergreen and East End historic Black cemeteries. The funding formula in the bill fascinates me: "$5...multiplied by the number of graves, monuments, and markers of African Americans who lived at any time between 1800 and 1900." If you'd like to help out with the preservation efforts, you definitely need to contact John Shuck—he's been leading up regular work in Evergreen for a while now.
While I was poking around on John Shuck's site, I found this really interesting story from February when they discovered Thomas Mitchell's grave. Thomas Mitchell was John Mitchell Jr.'s brother and manager of the Richmond Planet. Here's the story in the Planet when they unveiled his grave marker.
Vox explains what the appointment of Robert Mueller as a special counsel investigating Russialago means.
Oh no: Chris Cornell died last night. Cry, if you want to cry.
Allow me short bit of self promotion: With an additional $580 per month in Patreon support, I'll start a fortnightlyish, newsy interview podcast. The idea being that I'd sit down and chat with someone who was part of that fortnight's news or who'd have an interesting perspective on it. This has been a Patreon goal for a while now, but I've never really talked about it in this space before. With all of this past week's budget shenanigans, I think it would have been a really good week for it. So! If that sounds interesting and useful, chip in a couple of bucks and help me get to my goal of $1000 per month.
Sports!
- Squirrels lost the final game in the series against Akron, 5-7. They've got the day off today.
- And just like that, the Kickers are out of the Open Cup with a 0-1 loss to Christos FC.
- Nats fell to the Pirates, 1-6. That series wraps up today at 12:35 PM.
This morning's longread
Why the obituary for Eudocia Tomas Pulido didn’t tell the story of her life in slavery
Remember yesterday's longread and the obituary that accompanied it? Here's thoughts from the author of that 2011 obit.
Tuesday night, I read with horror and growing anger Alex Tizon’s account in The Atlantic magazine of Ms. Pulido’s life with three generations of his family, and his journey to come to terms with it. Many of the details were familiar, as Tizon had shared them with me during a long interview following the death of a woman he knew as “Lola,” an honorific title in her native Tagalog that Tizon took to mean “grandmother.” In retrospect, the obituary reads as a whitewash for a fundamental truth known only to Tizon and his family: Ms. Pulido was a slave.