Local poet and pediatrician Irène Mathieu has been a storyteller for as long as she can remember. Before she learned to write, she would observe her mother and narrate everything she did. “She found it super annoying,” Mathieu says with a laugh. Mathieu, who lived in Charlottesville for parts of her childhood, returned last July […]
Local poet and pediatrician Irène Mathieu has been a storyteller for as long as she can remember. Before she learned to write, she would observe her mother and narrate everything she did. “She found it super annoying,” Mathieu says with a laugh. Mathieu, who lived in Charlottesville for parts of her childhood, returned last July […]
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 […]
Author’s note: With race at the heart of this story, an editorial decision was made to identify every person’s race in this piece. This may appear jarring or unnecessary to readers, but the aim is to be fair in our descriptions of people and, more so, to draw attention to racial conceptions and how they […]
City Council unanimously approved a Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces May 2 after a Charlottesville High School student presented a petition to remove the statue of General Robert E. Lee and rename Lee Park in March. The nine-member commission will look not only at Confederate monuments like Lee and Stonewall Jackson, […]
Every March thousands gather in Charlottesville for the Virginia Festival of the Book, now in its 22nd year, to celebrate storytelling and literacy. With most events free of charge and open to the public, the festival encourages book-lovers from all over to attend readings and panels, to see some of their favorite writers up close, […]
According to the Virginia Historical Society, “The most violent episode of the civil rights movement in Virginia occurred in Danville during the summer of 1963.” Demonstrators were beaten back by police in the streets, and legal battles for equal rights simmered. In July of the same year, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was motivated to […]
March 17—St. Patrick’s Day—was a pretty typical day for third-year Martese Johnson at the University of Virginia. A Tuesday, it was one of the heaviest academic days for the media studies and Italian major, and he was in class until mid-afternoon. That evening, “I hung out with friends on the Lawn for a time,” he […]
In the past year, Charlottesville Police Chief Tim Longo stood in front of the national media scrum multiple times to deal with a horrific murder and a searing rape allegation, while nationwide people were protesting fatal police encounters with black men. Then came the arrest of Martese Johnson by Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control agents on […]
There is little doubt that the subject of race relations is currently at the forefront of the American conversation. From “hands up, don’t shoot” to “black lives matter” to Starbucks’ condescending, widely derided Race Together campaign (in which a rich white business owner encouraged his majority-minority workforce to converse with coffee-craving customers about skin color), […]
The same people who came to Charlottesville earlier this year to defend the city holiday honoring Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, which City Council axed March 2, now plan to raise a Confederate flag on private property here. “Any time people try to take something away from our heritage, we try […]