Good morning, RVA! It's 76 °F, and today we’ve got highs in the mid 80s and a chance of thunderstorms later this afternoon.
Yesterday, the area saw its first deadly tornadoes “since the 1990s.” John Boyer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the science reasons behind the storms and here’s a few drone photos of the major damage in Chesterfield County off Hull Street Road. Over the course of the evening, the National Weather Service issued 19 tornado warnings for the region.
Richmond and Chesterfield Public Schools will open two hours late as crews work to assess, clear, and repair any damage. Be safe if you’re out and about today!
Water cooler
Richmond Police are reporting a murder that occurred on September 13th at the 700 block of Northside Avenue. Officers arrived and found Tanya P. Washington, 47, shot to death. Police believe Washington’s murder to be part of “domestic-related homicide and suicide.”
Michael Paul Williams at the RTD has some musings on Florence, climate change, and the future of severe weather in the region as Republicans at various levels of government roll back environmental legislation. Meanwhile, the RTD Editorial Board thought it’d be fun to run a climate change denial cartoon. Just yesterday I wrote about layoffs at the paper due dwindling subscription revenue, and you can bet crap like this does not win them many new subscribers.
Robert Zullo at the Virginia Mercury says construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline is back on track after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission gave it’s approval. Zullo’s piece is a good, quick recap of what got us to the most recent delay and how things will most likely move forward. You will probably sigh in disappointment while reading this article.
Are you an undergraduate student of color looking for experience in a super legit art museum while also getting paid? Well, you should definitely apply to this new grant program at the VMFA in partnership with the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Even if you’re just the slightest bit interested, you should apply! Do it!
I love the From the Archives pieces in the RTD—here’s one with 16 photos of Southside Plaza from back in the day. That overhead shot really drives home how much parking the place has, and how we should fill it in with...literally anything else!
This morning's patron longread
The Resegregation of Jefferson County
From patron Daniel comes this ultra depressing piece about school segregation in modern-day Alabama.
By the 1970s, white communities changed tactics, this time claiming that they wanted to secede not because they were fighting integration, but because they wanted “local control.” This race-neutral language championed the pursuit of individual rights and, importantly, freedom of association, which provided cover for their efforts to preserve the whiteness of their schools. Local control “was, in a sense, the individualized equivalent of arguing that the Civil War had been fought over states’ rights and not slavery,” Joseph Bagley, a professor at Georgia State University, wrote in a dissertation about the Jefferson County school district. After all, school systems lost local control in the first place because they refused to integrate schools, forcing the courts to usurp their authority and dictate school attendance zones, assignment policy and teacher placement from the federal bench. This form of opposition “became all the more powerful,” Bagley wrote, “by denying its roots.”
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