As he prepares to step down, the founder of the Southern Environmental Law Center looks back on three decades of defending the region’s natural treasures Ambitious and naive. That’s how Rick Middleton describes himself 33 years ago, when he founded the Southern Environmental Law Center, a small nonprofit that would protect the air, the […]
A resolution to ban Confederate imagery on clothing in Albemarle schools was back on the agenda at the February 14 Albemarle County School Board meeting. The last time the issue came up, in August, six people were arrested. School board members were split on the issue, and again postponed a decision, to the dismay of both […]
Phoebe Stevens is a pacifist. She says that’s why she wrapped her arms around Jason Kessler at his August 13, 2017, press conference as a crowd of angry protesters closed in on him. But after she knocked him down in the chaos, he accused her of assault and battery—a charge she was convicted of in […]
Big things happen when The Suffers go to work on their fusion of jazz, R&B, reggae, and funk. The eight-piece act plays Gulf Coast soul defined by the sultry vocals of Kam Franklin, whose warmth is so energetic she was asked to be a spokeswoman for tourism in the group’s hometown of Houston. The good […]
When Police Civilian Review Board member Katrina Turner got involved in her son’s February 1 traffic stop, a local defense attorney asked the city’s commonwealth’s attorney to determine whether she had violated the state’s conflict of interest act. At last week’s review board meeting, attorney and regular attendee Denise Lunsford told the board she’d asked […]
Before Charlottesville’s first hardcore punk band played Charlottesville’s first hardcore punk show, Lackey Die bass player Danny Collins had a prediction. “I think we’re gonna be the hottest thing that ever came out of this stinkin’ little town,” Collins said to one of his bandmates. It was 1983, and the band was about to take […]
Things were looking good for opponents of Virginia’s automatic suspension of driver’s licenses for nonpayment of court costs. A federal judge had opined the state law is likely unconstitutional, a Republican state senator carried a bill that repealed the law, and it passed the Senate 36-4. Then it got to a House subcommittee, where four […]
Art in a white-walled gallery can take on an aura of total separation from the person who made it, and the context in which that person worked. For that matter, so can murals seen from the car—so often, we’re looking at art in a vacuum. Here’s an antidote: Second Street Gallery’s current show, “Inside The […]
Thomas Jefferson was not an IPA guy. We know this thanks to the scholarly efforts of J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, a Randolph College professor, whose research provides a fascinating account of the work of Jefferson’s enslaved brewer, Peter Hemings, a son of Elizabeth Hemings. Jackson-Beckham’s recently published article, “Missing Ingredients—The (Incomplete) Story of Thomas Jefferson’s Unsung […]
Zyahna Bryant became an activist about three years before she wrote the petition to remove the Robert E. Lee statue and rename Lee Park in 2016. It was the day after George Zimmerman’s acquittal for second-degree murder charges in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, when Bryant, then age 12, organized her first protest. In […]
In the summer of 1999, Anne Williams had just relocated to Virginia from Ohio, and she brought along some on-air experience from Yellow Springs’ WYSO that helped her land an interview with independent radio station WNRN. Williams says she was driving on Interstate 64, headed to the interview with her radio dial tuned to 91.9, […]
In 2010, Charlene Green, now head of Charlottesville’s Office of Human Rights, was directing the city’s first Dialogue on Race, an initiative to engage residents in an ongoing discussion of race, racism, and diversity. “As I was having discussions with people around the community on these issues, I began to wonder: ‘Who knows all this […]