The August 12 weekend passed with no loss of life or serious injury, but many Charlottesville residents were not reassured by the show of police force and the restrictions on pedestrian access to the Downtown Mall that were announced a couple of days before they went into effect. The Virginia State Police provided 700 officers, […]
The August 12 weekend passed with no loss of life or serious injury, but many Charlottesville residents were not reassured by the show of police force and the restrictions on pedestrian access to the Downtown Mall that were announced a couple of days before they went into effect. The Virginia State Police provided 700 officers, […]
A month ago, around 100 locals set off on two buses to Montgomery, Alabama, carrying soil from the site where John Henry James was lynched in 1898 in Albemarle County. On August 5, nearly 200 people gathered at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center to hear the pilgrims’ report back to the community about […]
A pilgrimage is a spiritual journey that, with its elements of symbolism, ritual and enlightenment, seems almost medieval in the 21st century. The symbolic reason approximately 100 Charlottesvillians boarded buses July 8 for a six-day civil rights pilgrimage was to commemorate the 1898 lynching of John Henry James, which was virtually unknown until about two years […]
About 50 people gathered in the woods beside the train tracks running west of Charlottesville early July 7. The morning was cool and birds could be heard chirping in the quiet—a scene nothing like the one 120 years ago, when a mob yanked John Henry James off a train there at Wood’s Crossing and strung […]
What a difference a year makes. Charlottesville underwent a seismic shift shortly after we published last summer’s list of local power brokers, which is always an exercise in subjectivity anyway. Some of them have undergone dramatic reversals, new faces have appeared—and yet, much stays the same. But who wants to read about Coran Capshaw and […]
As big a role as history plays in Charlottesville’s identity, some events, like an 1898 lynching, were pretty much buried or forgotten until Jane Smith was doing historical research and going through old issues of the Daily Progress in 2013. She happened upon this July 12, 1898, headline: “He paid the awful penalty: John Henry […]
Hall of fame It’s never the right time to say goodbye, but loyal patrons of the University of Virginia’s iconic, clamshell-roofed venue with notoriously bad sound quality don’t have much longer—the dumping of more than 40 years’ worth of stuff from University Hall has begun, with a complete demolition scheduled by 2020. To help you […]
The lynching of John Henry James in Albemarle in 1898 for allegedly assaulting a white woman was both horrific—and all too common in the era of Jim Crow. More than 4,400 black men and women were the victims of domestic racial terrorism between 1877 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, […]
The second City Council meeting of the new year on January 16 was markedly different from council meetings of the past year: no interruptions, no yelling and no profanities, behavior that suspended 2018’s first meeting two weeks ago. Newly elected Vice-Mayor Heather Hill ran the meeting in the absence of Mayor Nikuyah Walker, who was […]
They said they’d be back UVA alumni/white nationalist Richard Spencer, who was maced by police the last time he was here August 12, showed up at Emancipation Park under cover of dark October 7 for a tiki-torch flash mob that police say started around 7:40pm, lasted approximately five to 10 minutes and consisted of […]