Staying active: As a part of the Charlottesville Player’s Guild’s Amplify season, Leslie M. Scott-Jones’ play Thirty-Seven explores living, surviving, and fighting while being Black in America. Jamahl Garrison-Lowe plays Seth, a young Black man struggling with the decision to become an activist, and he asks himself: What will I risk? What will I gain? […]
Staying active: As a part of the Charlottesville Player’s Guild’s Amplify season, Leslie M. Scott-Jones’ play Thirty-Seven explores living, surviving, and fighting while being Black in America. Jamahl Garrison-Lowe plays Seth, a young Black man struggling with the decision to become an activist, and he asks himself: What will I risk? What will I gain? […]
Turkey time Community is hard to come by these days, especially as we’re all hunkering down for a long winter indoors. But at the Jefferson School on Saturday, the community put on an impressive show. During the annual We Code, Too turkey drive, 200 birds were handed out to those in need ahead of the […]
Since press time, Governor Ralph Northam has proposed legislation to make Juneteenth a paid state holiday. If it passes, all state employees would get the day off. With additional reporting by Erin O’Hare Every July 4, people across the country don their red, white, and blue; pull out their grills; and watch fireworks with family […]
The city of Charlottesville wasn’t incorporated until 1888, but people are recorded as living in the region as far back as 1612, when English explorer John Smith encountered a Monacan village and documented it on the very first map of Virginia. The Native Americans gradually left as European immigrants moved in, relying on the Three […]
The work of antiracism is “fundamentally focused on looking in the mirror” with the goal of transforming society, scholar and National Book Award-winning author Ibram X. Kendi told a packed auditorium in Charlottesville on Tuesday night. And, he added: “Because we live in a racist society, it is extremely hard to be antiracist.” As Kendi’s […]
By Ben Hitchcock The roof of the front porch is missing, leaving exposed wood visible from the road. A notice from the Board of Architectural Review approving a window replacement has hung on the front door since 2017. Unused scrap wood sits piled in the side yard. Neighbors report that until last week, the grass […]
An all-black town. An all-black town? It was a stray mention in a book on the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, but Jamelle Bouie was intrigued. An all-black town. “It got stuck in my craw,” says Bouie. He found a few local news articles, a mini documentary film, and a couple books on the subject—the dozens […]
She’d been here before. During a recent rehearsal of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, a feeling of recollection overcame Brenda Brown-Grooms as she recited her lines. She was in character as Bertha Holly, wife of Seth Holly and a boarding house matron who likes to bake biscuits, make coffee and care for her […]
When Charlottesville decided to keep the historic Jefferson School and its prime real estate as a community center rather than selling it for condos, a complicated financial structure was required to make the $18 million rehab of the 1926 high school possible. Four years after the renovated school reopened in 2012, fundraising that was supposed […]
In its first listening session July 28, the City Council-appointed Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces heard from well over 100 citizens, who packed the African American Heritage Center at the Jefferson School to talk about Charlottesville’s painful history. Their responses weren’t always clear-cut as far as the statue of Robert E. Lee was […]