We’re a city that can’t seem to escape our statues, and at Monday’s City Council meeting they were on the agenda again—this time, the West Main monument to Lewis and Clark, with the figure of Sacagawea at the men’s feet, either cowering or tracking. Paul Goodloe McIntire, who commissioned the statue in 1917, had only […]
As city and county residents decide who should represent them next year, we sat down with someone who’s been there and back—former mayor Maurice Cox. In his time on council, Cox, now Detroit’s director of city planning, dealt with controversies like the building of the Warner Parkway and the proposal for Charlottesville to revert back […]
It’s a few weeks to primary day (June 11), and here in heavily-Democratic Charlottesville, the question of who will represent us next year will largely be determined now, not in November. Among the Democrats, the choices in both the state delegate and City Council races offer strikingly similar dynamics: establishment candidates versus more progressive upstarts. […]
On a brisk but sunny spring morning, more than a dozen pre-kindergarteners file out of the imposing red brick building that is Clark Elementary and seat themselves, excitedly, on the sidewalk in front of the school’s garden. Sarah Harris greets them with a big smile. “Hello, my friends!” she calls. Harris is the early childhood […]
Sylvan and Sheria Kassondwa’s 860-square foot, three-bedroom apartment would be fine, they say, if they had one or two kids. As it happens, they have five. “In my country, time is not money like here, you can spend more time with your family,” says Sylvan, who is originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “And […]
Award-winning Canadian author Esi Edugyan’s latest novel, Washington Black, begins in the brutal world of a Barbados sugar plantation in the 1830s. But the story, quite literally, soon soars beyond, as the young boy Washington Black escapes from the plantation in a hot-air balloon, spirited away by an English gentleman-scientist named Titch. The book traces […]
As measles make a comeback in pockets of the United States, a resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases in Charlottesville in recent years has some local health experts worried that messages about the importance of immunization are not sinking in. In just the first two months of 2019, the U.S. has seen five outbreaks of measles–a highly […]
In 1986, a young lawyer and UVA grad named Rick Middleton left his job at a national environmental nonprofit in D.C. and moved to Charlottesville. With two other lawyers, a three-year grant, and a small office on the Downtown Mall, he established the first environmental advocacy organization focused on the South, determined to use the […]
February is Black History Month, a time when schools across the country dutifully trot out lessons about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. In 2015, a minor firestorm ensued when Orange County High School students connected the civil rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter movement in a school performance, and an […]
“C’ville is awash with monuments. Why no statues to women besides a cowering Sacajawea (who happened to be pregnant but still led the white guys through the wilderness)?” – Donna Lucey “We do have three statues of women, you know,” says former mayor Virginia Daugherty, her soft Southern voice a bit sly. She’s referring to […]