Vaccine scene Charlottesville Fire Department Captain Lance Blakey was the first to receive a coronavirus vaccine at the Blue Ridge Health District’s new vaccination facility in the Kmart parking lot last week. The city continues to move through phase 1A of vaccinations, which includes doctors, nurses, EMTs, pharmacists, social workers, and other frontline health care […]
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Not over: Activists reflect on Black Lives Matter protests, next steps in 2021
While the coronavirus pandemic has disproportionately impacted communities of color this year, Black people have been dealing with “a pandemic of racism” in the United States for centuries, as Black mental health advocate Myra Anderson told C-VILLE over the summer. When Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes […]
Street smarts: City committee revamps honorary street name policy
Want to take a walk down Black History Pathway? Or maybe Waneeshee Way? Or even Tony Bennett Drive? Soon, you might be able to. These are among the honorary street names that area residents have submitted to the city in recent months. After debating the issue late into the night during several meetings, Charlottesville City […]
In brief: Biden defeats Trump, ’Hoos rank high, and more
Bye-bye, Trump! A quiet fall day on the Downtown Mall quickly turned into a party on Saturday morning as word spread that Joe Biden had won Pennsylvania, giving him enough electoral votes to win the presidential race. People cheered and clapped in celebration of the Democrat’s long-awaited [...]
Campaign pain: Joe Biden talks about Charlottesville a lot. Charlottesville isn’t sure he’s listening.
When Joe Biden announced last year that he was running for president, the first words he uttered were “Charlottesville, Virginia.” The campaign video that followed featured footage of the Unite the Right rally overlaid with a voiceover from Biden, responding to President Trump’s infamous [...]
Remembering the forgotten: UVA Memorial to Enslaved Laborers leads calls for change
Elijah. Julia. Sam. I took in every name, and let each resonate within me, as I quietly examined the granite slabs. I saw the name of my brother, then I saw it several more times. If he had been born just over 150 years ago, he could have been enslaved at the University of Virginia, […]
In brief: Activist fined, white supremacist jailed, and more
Cracking down Just days after a Kenosha police officer shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back, sparking national outrage and protests, City Manager Tarron Richardson decided to crack down on gatherings in Charlottesville—targeting those organized by Black residents. While Richardson supports [...]
How to take down a statue: Legislature’s busy final days include passage of bill allowing localities to move monuments
On March 7, Virginia’s legislature passed the Conference Substitute to House Bill No. 1537, which will allow localities to control the placement of their war memorials. In other words, our city will soon be allowed to remove the statues of Confederate generals from our parks. After the [...]
In brief: New memorials, kayak commute, gaga for Wawa
Back to the drawing board Three weeks after the Court Square slave auction plaque was stolen in the middle of the night, the hole left in the sidewalk has been bricked in, leaving little evidence that any memorial ever existed. The city quickly removed unauthorized replacement plaques by local [...]
In brief: Tree huggers, get out of dodge (challenger), and more
Tree huggers On an unseasonably warm December Sunday, Yoseph Asmellash, owner of Little River Christmas Trees, had dozens of Fraser and Douglas fir trees for sale in the parking lot of the Fashion Square Mall—one of many local spots for buying Christmas trees that pop up around the holidays. [...]
In brief: New Hogwaller project, march on, cyberstalking arrest, and more
Hogwaller reset After City Council’s rejection of his zoning and permit requests earlier this year, Justin Shimp, developer of the embattled Hogwaller Farms project in Belmont, is back with fresh plans for a newly acquired parcel partially overlapping the site of his previous proposal. The name [...]
Moving forward: Two years after A12, how do we tell a new story?
It’s been two years since the “Summer of Hate,” and Charlottesville, to the larger world, is still shorthand for white supremacist violence. As we approach the second anniversary of August 11 and 12, 2017, we reached out to a wide range of community leaders and residents to talk about what, if [...]
Surprise, surprise: Councilors Bellamy and Signer will not run for re-election
For some, it came as a shock when City Councilor Wes Bellamy announced yesterday that he would not run for re-election, especially considering his public remarks the week before that made it sound otherwise. At his March 20 Virginia Festival of the Book event with former New Orleans mayor Mitch [...]
Words hurt: Civilian Review Board member accuses police chief of verbal attack
The complaint in front of City Council February 4 was pretty extraordinary: “Chief [RaShall] Brackney came out of nowhere and literally attacked me that night.” That it came from a member of the police Civilian Review Board was all the more astounding. At a February 5 protest in front of the [...]
Confederates win: Subcommittee kills bill to give localities control of statues
Ultimately, no one was surprised that a House of Delegates subcommittee, made up of eight white men, killed a bill that would let Virginia localities decide what to do with Confederate monuments–not even the bill’s sponsor, Delegate David Toscano. “They knew when we walked in what they [...]
Slight snag: City Council candidates, new PAC launch campaigns
It wasn’t your typical launch party. Supporters of local activists Don Gathers and Michael Payne gathered at Kardinal Hall January 8 for the official tossing of the hats into this year’s City Council races. But Gathers made a different kind of announcement: A doctor’s visit three hours earlier [...]
In brief: Out of business, second wettest, medically deficient and more
Knock, knock. Who’s [not] there? Sears. Sweethaus. Performance Bicycle. And Brown’s Cleaners, just to name a few recent local closings that left community members shocked, and in at least one case, without their clothes. The closing of Sears at Fashion Square Mall heralds the demise of one of [...]
Tackling hate crimes: Attorney general, local leaders discuss new bills
Attorney General Mark Herring has spent the past few years studying the issue of hate crimes and white supremacist violence across the commonwealth and advocating for new legislation to combat it. On December 5—coincidentally during the state’s murder trial against the neo-Nazi who drove his [...]
Pilgrims’ report: What they brought back from civil rights pilgrimage
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 [...]
Re-righting history: Katie Couric documents what divides us
During her 15-year tenure as NBC “Today Show” co-anchor, UVA alum and journalist Katie Couric was known as America’s Sweetheart. These days, she’s way past that chipper morning news persona, and having finished a six-part series delving into the most contentious issues facing the country today, [...]
In brief: Council campaign spending, lazy slobs and a tv boycott
Show us the money Getting on City Council can cost a lot more than what the part-time job pays, even after a raise in 2018 boosted the salary to $18,000 annually. So far, no one’s touched Mayor Mike Signer’s all-time high of $51K to get elected, but major cash has been raised this year in […]
A Vinegar Hill memorial you can actually see
A forthcoming addition to the Downtown Mall will commemorate Vinegar Hill, the historically African-American neighborhood that saw displacement of 158 families when city residents voted to develop the land in the 1960s. Officially called Vinegar Hill Park, this chunk of real estate between the [...]
‘Lightning in a bottle:’ Statue commission chair disappointed by decision
In a 6-3 vote, Blue Ribbon Commission members recommended that the city keep its General Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson statues in their current Lee Park and Court Square locations, though the committee’s chairman Don Gathers voted otherwise. “We as a commission and as a city missed an [...]