Good morning, RVA: Great weather, register to vote, statues of women

Good morning, RVA! It’s 47 °F, and today looks absolutely beautiful. You can expect highs in the low 70s, a bunch of sunshine, and every excuse in the world to spend some time outside.

Water cooler

Today is the LAST DAY to register to vote or to update your existing voter registration information. You can (and should) verify your existing info here, and if you aren’t registered, get registered over here. Remember: Every single seat in Virginia’s General Assembly is up for grabs this November 5th.

Speaking of, here’s an election-related update: Graham Sturm has withdrawn from Richmond’s 5th District City Council special election race and endorsed Candidate Stephanie Lynch. You can read Sturm’s full statement here (PDF). Then there were…seven! That’s still a big bushel of candidates to split votes between (and I think we’re past the point of getting names removed from the ballot). I still believe that the new 5th District Councilmember will win their seat by a very small number of votes.

Yesterday on the Capitol Grounds, the State unveiled the striking part of Voices from the Garden: The Virginia Women’s Monument. Seven bronze statues of Virginian women now fill the circular space just southeast of the George Washington Statue—Cockacoeske, Anne Burris Landon, Mary Draper Ingles, Elizabeth Keckly, Laura Copenhaver, Virginia Randolph, and Adèle Clark. I’m stoked to stop by, sit a minute, and take some pictures later this week. There are future plans to install five more statues, as funds are raised, to honor additional women—including Sally Louisa Tompkins, Martha Washington, and Clementina Rind. We can do better. Tompkins ran a Confederate hospital during the Civil War, and a statue of her has no businesses at our State Capitol. Surely now, in 2019, this is obvious and uncontroversial. Washington, just like her enpedestaled husband up the hill, benefited from the the institution of slavery throughout her life. Rind founded the Virginia Gazette and appears to have owned one slave inherited from her husband. I know folks have arguments to make over why these women should be permanently honored in bronze at our state Capitol, but the reality is there are millions of Virginia women who had absolutely nothing to do with slavery. It’s not like we’re lacking in choices—in fact, there’s an entire glass wall that’s part of the same monument etched with dozens and dozens of women’s names. Please take a minute to read this piece by Chelsea Higgs Wise who has more details—and pointed me to the aforelinked Google Doc of research around the three women.

I was busy riding my bike all over the place with my son during his day off from school yesterday, so thanks to the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Mark Robinson for covering yesterday’s City Council meeting. Looks like Council delayed rezoning some properties owned by Micheal Hild, since who even knows what the future holds for that whole situation. Plus, Council approved another year of locating the City’s cold weather shelter down on Oliver Hill Way, which was supposed to be a temporary location. Ultimately, they’ll will need to find a better connected, easier accessible spot for that shelter.

Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense says the Birds are back in town! As of this morning, you should now have two dockless, electric scooter options in the City. Looking at the app this morning and the polygon within which you can scoot around, Southside will still lack a reliable scooter option.

RVAHub’s Richard Hayes has some great photos from this past weekend’s Folk Festival if you couldn’t make it (or if the idea of all those people crammed on an island gives you the shivers).

A couple of solid organizations have put together some benches to…supplement…the existing bus stop amenities on the Northside and those benches need some paint! They’ve set up some times this week and next for folks to stop by, hangout, and express their creativity while beautifying the benches. You can find the full list of dates and times over on Facebook.

This morning’s longread

I’m Black, not black. The rest of the world needs to catch on.

I was once this editor and am thankful for someone patiently explaining to me why I was in the wrong.

As a writer, I’ve struggled with editors and publications who are unwilling to push back on “the style guide” they abide by that still uses a lower case ‘b.’ I personally identify as Black and have done so for some time. So when writing about myself, my identity, and those of other Black folx, I own the right to use the accurate descriptor. When an editor isn’t willing to create that space for me, it feels suffocating not just to my creativity, but to my being. The media is a tentacle of the many systems of anti-Blackness people of color have to navigate. Not being able to resist this particular anti-Blackness — the denial of cultural identifiers in Black storytelling — makes me wonder: What’s the point of telling our stories? Where’s the joy in reading them?

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