Good morning, RVA! It's 29 °F, and it looks like yesterday’s rain has moved on out leaving us with highs near 50 °F and lots of sunshine. Careful outside early this morning as there may be a thin sheet of slippery frost on everything (he says with first-hand experience nearly tumbling down his back stairs).
Water cooler
The General Assembly’s 2020 session kicks off today! What should you expect? Well, yesterday, the Governor and a bunch of the various legislative leaders announced the pretty solid, yet flaccidly-named Virginia 2020 Plan, highlighting 11 priorities they want to tackle over the next 60 days. I’ll just list all 11 points for you here: Pass the Equal Rights Amendment, restore women’s reproductive rights, expand affordable housing, ban discrimination in housing and employment, raise the minimum wage, make voting easier, reform criminal justice, advance common-sense gun safety measures, fight climate change and protect natural resources, increase education funding, and expand transit and broadband. Hey! That’s a pretty good list and even mentions transit! The gov will deliver his State of the Commonwealth address tonight at 7:00 PM, and I am sure he will dig into each of these a bit further. For folks who want to know how to get involved but are, justifiably, intimidated by the whole process, Del. Cia Price from Newport News has an excellent GA primer thread on Twitter.
The city announced that their new eviction diversion program “has diverted 76 evictions and is on track to meet its goal to divert 300-500 evictions in its first year.” For some context, according to the NYT piece about Richmond’s nation-leading eviction rate, the City saw 5,803 eviction judgments in 2016. So we’re making big progress, for sure, but there’s still a lot of big work left to do.
Someone spray painted the factual statement “THIS IS RACIST” on the Jefferson Davis monument. VPM’s Roberto Roldan rolled by and got a picture. This is obviously the first monument that needs to come down, but it’s also, practically, the most complicated to repurpose (assuming we’re not just razing the thing). You gotta dump the statue, of course, but there’s also stuff etched into the the large column and some text that’s surely problematic written across the colonnade.
Trevor Dickerson at RVAHub has the official opening date for the Whole Foods on Broad: January 30th! It’s been a long time coming, and I’m excited to see how that intersection is activated when the store opens. As much as I want a Pulse station at the Lombardy Street Kroger, it’ll be nice to have a grocery store in that part of town adjacent to a frequent bus.
Exceedingly rich White dude and presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg was in town yesterday meeting with Mayor Stoney. People had strong feelings about this, and some of the twitteratti dragged the Mayor for even meeting with a guy who’s used his vast wealth to basically buy his way into the presidential primary process. But, idk! Bloomberg has a ton of cash and gives a ton of it away to issues related to cities—like, for example, the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge from a couple years back and a bunch of gun safety groups including Everytown for Gun Safety. Would I rather see pics of Mayor Stoney grabbing coffee with Elizabeth Warren? Yeah, duh, obviously. But, if it were me, I’d take the meeting and spend the most amount of time possible talking about how Richmond has big needs that could interest philanthropic folks on a national level. The RTD’s Justin Mattingly has the details on Bloomberg’s press conference held later that day.
Sarah Vogelsong at the Virginia Mercury says a federal court has rescinded a necessary permit from the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and asked the State Air Pollution Control Board to “reconsider the case.” The issue at hand was the decision to locate a compressor station in the historically Black community of Union Hill and the disparate environmental impact the compressor would have on that nearby community. This quote from the court’s opinion is pretty stellar, “Environmental justice is not merely a box to be checked, and the board’s failure to consider the disproportionate impact on those closest to the compressor station resulted in a flawed analysis.”
Reminder! Tonight, City Council will host their first in a handful of public hearings on the proposed North of Broad Development aka NoBro aka Navy Hill. Head on over to Binford Middle School (1701 Floyd Avenue) at 6:00 PM and let your thoughts, feelings, and emotions out and straight onto the public record. This meeting does show up on Legistar (the incredibly nerdy but surpassingly useful City meeting and document website), so we may get streaming audio from tonight’s event. Tune in here if it exists and if that’s your jam.
This morning's longread
A Black kingdom in postbellum Appalachia
A fascinating bit of regional history that made a me think about what pieces of our past, here in Richmond, are slowly slipping away, nearly forgotten by everyone.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognize that many white people, those raised in the region and not, are reproducing a singular history of white settler place-making in Southern Appalachia. To indulge in an illusion of a homogeneous white geography has harmful consequences. Namely, it erases the histories of Native and Black and brown people who live in the mountains of Western North Carolina and beyond. When white people overlook the past and present of Appalachia’s diverse communities, we facilitate the rapid displacement of Native, Black, and brown peoples to make way for more economies of pleasure based on white settler visions of mountain leisure. In other words, if we cannot imagine Native and Black and brown people living in the Appalachian Mountains, it is because we have ignored their histories and their present-day lives, and thus we aid the foreclosure of their futures here. In Western North Carolina, Black community organizers and scholars work hard to preserve Black Appalachian histories to create Black Appalachian futures. One of those histories was hidden in my own community—The Kingdom of the Happy Land.
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