Good morning, RVA: 1,284 • 12; protests across the region, and a rad cemetery map

Good morning, RVA! It’s 58 °F, and yesterday’s beautiful weather continues today. Expect highs in the mid 80s and lots of sunshine. Looking at the extended forecast, we might have a pretty nice week ahead of us.

Water cooler

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 1,284 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealthand 12 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 126 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 34, Henrico: 63, and Richmond: 29). Since this pandemic began, 197 people have died in the Richmond region.

More than a week after they began, protests for police and social justice reform continue throughout the region. Saturday night, protestors pulled down the Williams Wickham Statue in Monroe Park. Wickham served in the Confederate Army, and I’m sure there are at least a few things named after him scattered throughout the City that might could use some renaming. Speaking of, folks—including the Jefferson Davis Neighborhood Civic Association—have asked 8th District Councilmember Reva Trammell to submit the ordinance required to rename the City’s portion of Jefferson Davis Highway. No word on the Councilmember’s response. On Sunday, Henrico Supervisor Tyrone Nelson posted a few pics from a huge protest in the Countyand promises to go into detail about potential policy changes today. Also in Henrico, a Hanover County man, using his vehicle as a weapon, drove his truck into a group of people protesting. He got arrested and charged with assault and battery. The man he hit with his car is OK, but his cargo bike was damaged. Justin Mattingly and Sean Gorman at the Richmond Times-Dispatch have details and photographs from the “Mindfulness March for Kids”which took place in the City’s East End also on Sunday. With multiple thousand-person marches happening across the region on multiple days, I’d say folks' energy is still high and the desire for meaningful change pretty intense.

The Mayor and Chief of Police should take note of that previous paragraph when reading through this piece in the Virginia Mercury by Ned Oliver. Oliver tried, and mostly failed, to get some more details on what will happen to the police officers who gassed peaceful protestors at the Robert E. Lee monument last weekend. RPD was unwilling to provide the following information: Who ordered the gassing and why, what policies govern the department’s use of chemical irritants, how many officers have been disciplined in connection with the incident, what disciplinary action was taken against them, what was the finding that resulted in that action, and whether any disciplinary actions have been taken following other incidents. First, we should just take away all of RPD’s chemical irritants, then they wouldn’t have to go through all of the work of providing the policies governing their use. Second, the vibe of the RPD spokesperson is not great. This isn’t a sentence I want to read this week: “I don’t think the chief plans to revisit this anytime soon…He has apologized repeatedly.” Part of an apology involves a commitment to right the wrong that necessitated the apology in the first place. The Chief should be “revisiting” this continually and using last weekend and the ongoing protests as a lens to reevaluate his entire department. We’re a week out from the RPD’s decision to gas peaceful protestors and escalate the situation unnecessarily. What’s changed since then?

The Cheats Movement has some really excellent photos from the last week or so by Lydia Armstrong. One thing I want to point out: Notice how her photos of the monuments resist centering the statuary. So much of the video and photography I see of of the newly added context to these monuments still focuses on the bronze statues of racist men and their horses.

City Council will hold their regularly scheduled meeting today, at 6:00 PM. You can find the agenda here (PDF) and, if you’re interested, tune in to the audio here. The citizen comment period has five out of eight folks signed up to speak about the “resolution regarding monument removal.” That resolution is not yet on the agenda, so the unrelated citizen’s comment period is the only opportunity for folks to publicly get in front of Council and speak about taking down (or, I suppose, leaving up) Confederate monuments. I’m not going to make any assumptions about which side of the issue these folks are on based on their names, but, I will guess that you can expect more folks speaking out—one either side—as we get closer to Council actually voting to get rid of our monuments to White supremacy. RES. 2020-R034, which would have surplussed a bunch of Downtown properties, making them available for private redevelopment, will be amended and considered. I’m not sure how the resolution will be amended, so stay tuned. Of note at their 3:00 PM informal meeting, Council will hear a presentation on the new City website (PDF), and, big news, the URL will change from richmondgov.com to rva.gov! I am and have been irrationally annoyed that the City’s official website is a weird .com while Henrico and Chesterfield both have clean .gov domains. Also, and who knows what the reality will be once implemented, but the presentation claims that the new website will allow “individual departments to edit and manage their own web pages—without submitting a change request to DIT and involving additional parties.” Emphasis theirs! I’m hoping that the new platform will give regular folks (well, regularish) access to better and more current public information. No word on a launch date in the aforelinked PDF, you’ll have to tune in to the informal meeting, I guess!

This is pretty neat, Colleen Curran at the RTD says the Virginia Museum of History & Culture will try to acquire part of the Pulse bus burned and destroyed during the first night of protests. Historians are so awesome, and I love that they’re actively trying to find the artifacts that will tell the current moment’s story many, many years from now.

Check out this extremely rad map of the graves in the East End Cemetery. For the longest time East End Cemetery, a historic Black cemetery, sat with large parts unmaintained and overgrown. That’s changed over the last couple of years as the Friends of East End, in their words, have restored “Richmond’s historic East End cemetery one plot at a time.” It’s really impressive what the folks involved have done with a lot of their own hard work, a commitment to data collection, and support from some of our region’s institutions and leaders.

This morning’s longread

Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea

This piece from The New Yorker has nothing to do has nothing to with current events—just a rich guy trying to build a submarine to go to the deepest point in every ocean for no particular reason. Actually, I dunno, maybe this does tangentially relate to this moment in time.

Past twenty-seven thousand feet, the pilot had gone beyond the theoretical limit for any kind of fish. (Their cells collapse at greater depths.) After thirty-five thousand feet, he began releasing a series of weights, to slow his descent. Nearly seven miles of water was pressing on the titanium sphere. If there were any imperfections, it could instantly implode. The submarine touched the silty bottom, and the pilot, a fifty-three-year-old Texan named Victor Vescovo, became the first living creature with blood and bones to reach the deepest point in the Tonga Trench. He was piloting the only submersible that can bring a human to that depth: his own.

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