Good morning, RVA! It's 48 °F, but you can expect highs in the 70s?? I don’t know what’s going on out there, but yesterday evening was exceedingly pleasant and it looks like we’ll have an even warmer, cloudier version of that today.
Water cooler
The Richmond Times-Dispatch has put together a nice, high-level, topic-based overview of where a bunch of legislation stands after this week’s crossover in the General Assembly. Crossover is the fun name given to when bills that made it out of the Senate head over to the House of Delegates, and bills that made it out of the House of Delegates make their way over to the Senate. If your bill didn’t cross over, it’s dead. It’s certainly not smooth sailing from here on out, of course—your bill could still die in a thousand different ways—but crossover marks a good moment to look at what legislation is actually left standing. It’s a pretty thin list, honestly, and even thinner when you filter down to stuff that has a real chance at becoming legislation, given the split in control of the House and Senate.
Related, Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond reports on one bill that looks destined to become a law: “a rare gun safety compromise with a bill that would give gun owners a $300 tax credit to by gun safes.” The Republican-controlled House, which, as Oliver puts it, “looked less kindly on proposals that didn’t involve cash transfers to gun owners,” passed their version of the bill 99-1.
I’d like to learn more about this post on /r/rva: “VCU PD is really out here with referees for crosswalks, throwing flags for jaywalkers.” If this is an official response to the student who was hit and killed by a driver last week, I think the light-hearted tone is offensive. Optics aside, if VCU and the City wanted to keep people safe on Main Street they would implement cheap, temporary fixes to slow down drivers. We know what works and how to fix our streets! It’s not hard! Cute and clever education campaigns are fine, but it breaks my heart this is the extent of our efforts when the tools to keep people—college kids!—alive are so readily available.
You’ve got two interesting public meetings to keep an eye on today. First, the City’s Urban Design Committee meets this morning and will look at a handful of bridge updates, which sounds exciting. You can find the full agenda here, but today they’ll consider the vibes on replacements for the Mayo Bridge, a bridge over Hull Street at the Manchester Canal, and the bridge/tunnel on Broad Street at 15th (down by the site of Devil’s Half Acre). I’m interested in all of these, because bridges are cool, but certainly very interested in what’s in the works for replacing the Mayo Bridge. Second, Council’s Education and Human Services committee will meet to discuss next-steps from their recent combined Council and School Board get together. Looks like the Superintendent and some (all?) members of School Board will be in attendance, so I’m hoping for a productive time.
I missed this when it came out almost an entire month ago, but the RTD’s Editorial Board wrote an editorial opposing the Governor’s now-dead plan to defund public schools through Education Savings Accounts. While the Board still hews a little too close to the paper’s libertarian worldview for me, they do a good job of pulling the numbers on private school tuitions and the number of potentially open seats in those schools, making the whole ESA proposal look like an unserious attempt to reduce the cost of private schools for wealthy folks. Which is what it is! Good on the RTD for putting this together.
This morning's longread
The Color of Freedom
Scalawag magazine put together a short reflection on the federal government’s 1930s “slave narratives” project and also colorized some of the related photographs. You can explore almost the entire project for yourself over on the Library of Congress website, but make sure you read this piece first to put yourself in the appropriate headspace.
There are over 2,000 of these freedom narratives in all. Most consist only of short written retellings of stories elicited from formerly enslaved African-American Southerners by mostly-white interviewers. These narratives are complex and compelling, but their production and interpretation was not, and is not without fatal fault. Some of the speakers are restrained in their retelling of events. Some are clear-eyed and willing to tell the tales. Others speak explicitly of freedom, while some hold back. Some express nostalgia—longing for a more stable, unencumbered life—while others embrace the unsteadiness of the continued project of emancipation. But the ways that these narratives have been weaponized against Black communities can often limit our understanding of how folks navigated and survived the perils of slavery, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, and the rise of Jim Crow.
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Picture of the Day
Early girls in the forest.
