Good morning, RVA! It's 61 °F, and, it’s been a while, but rain will most likely return this afternoon. The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s John Boyer says to keep an eye on the skies from 12:00–7:00 PM.
Water cooler
Police are reporting another murder. Last week, on the evening of April 15th, officers arrived at the 4000 block of Meridian Avenue and found Samuel Flaugher, 19, suffering from a gunshot wound. On April 18th, in a local hospital, he died from his injuries.
Justin Mattingly at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a nice update on NATIONAL TEACHER OF THE YEAR Rodney Robinson after his big win earlier this week. I’ve enjoyed seeing our citywide celebration of this man and his accomplishments, and I’d like to keep the good vibes flowing! Here’s a great couple of pictures of Robinson celebrating with his former students yesterday. Also check out the WaPo’s story, if you’re looking for a national angle and a reminder that this is a big deal!
Colleen Curran, writing an exclusive for the RTD, has a preview of the American Civil War Museum 💸 which opens next week on May 4th. CEO Christy Coleman is definitely one of Richmond’s Raddest, and the new museum sounds pretty impressive—both in that it’s the combination of Historic Tredegar and the Museum of the Confederacy, and that they built a new thing directly on top of the ruins of the old munitions factory.
I wanted to take advantage of this small lull in the budget season to remind y’all to email your City Council person about making our streets safer for people. Last weekend, Yvonne Charity was hit and killed by a driver in the East End on a known dangerous street. What are our elected officials doing, right now, to make that street—and all of our streets—safer for humans via infrastructure or policy changes? If you’re willing, share your email with me (feel free to steal/borrow/tweak any and all of my language), and I’ll add it to the Twitter thread.
If, instead, you’d rather use this tiny gap in the budget calendar to listen to the marathon budget session from this past Wednesday and hear for yourself how everything fell apart at the end...you can do so over on The Boring Show.
Tomorrow, from 11:00 AM–3:00 PM, at Historic Tredegar, you can Party for the Planet. We’re slowly killing the thing, so throwing it a party seems the very least we could do, right? Anyway, head down by the river and spend the afternoon chilling, eating, listening to music, and learning about sustainable living.
This morning's longread
The Religion No One Talks About: My Search For Answers in an Old Caribbean Faith
Well, I learned a bunch of stuff.
I’d spent a couple weekends stopping by the apartment to get to know everyone. The journalist side of me wished I could embed. Over time, I came to love the familiarity of it all. The smell of incense was welcoming. I was taken back to when I was 6, following my abuela around her Vermont apartment placing incense in front of each saint. It was a daily chore, the lighting and the turning off. Making sure candles were in a pot of water so the place wouldn’t burn down overnight. I didn’t even remember these inconsequential memories until I started spending those weekends up in the Bronx.
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