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Book release
How do you release a book in the middle of a pandemic and a contested election? By recognizing it is not the most important thing in the world, of course. But also by relying on your friends – starting with Richmond’s own Chop Suey Books, who will be hosting my book talk for Death and…
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Three minutes each at the horror show
Imagine having ancestors buried in Richmond’s East End Cemetery, or simply caring about this important and historic site. Then, imagine learning that the site’s new owner, the Enrichmond Foundation, discovered human remains exposed at a crumbling bank on July 20, 2020, around the same time that the Foundation had blocked longtime volunteer leaders from continuing…
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Second African Burial Ground on the rise
Two enormously promising developments have occurred lately to shift the prospects and recognition for the second African Burial Ground (aka the Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground aka the Burial Ground for Free People of Colour and Slaves). Recall that the burial ground opened in 1816 by the city of Richmond for the burial of black…
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Un-Friended?
Why have the Friends of East End Cemetery not been on the cemetery grounds collectively since March 2020? Longtime volunteers John Shuck, Justin Curtis, Maurice Fountain, Erin Hollaway Palmer, Brian Palmer, Melissa Pocock, Mark Schmieder, and Bruce Tarr are exiled from the property, as are the community groups whose efforts they have cultivated since 2013.…
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Woodland Cemetery’s new owner
There is a new day for Woodland Cemetery, the final resting place of tennis champion Arthur Ashe and thousands of other black Richmonders. In early August 2020, Marvin Harris’s Evergreen Restoration Foundation purchased Woodland Cemetery from the Entzminger family – the remaining force behind the UK Corporation that had once also owned Evergreen Cemetery. Harris…
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Richmond’s Berlin Wall moment
“This is our Berlin Wall moment.” So read the chalk message on the sidewalk alongside the Robert E. Lee monument on Richmond’s Monument Avenue today. Looking up at the statue and its pedestal, I could recognize the familiar forms, but they had been transformed by the impromptu messages painted up and around its base: “Amerikkka”;…
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A Richmond play
Recently I’ve been corresponding with Faulker Fox, an acclaimed writer and faculty member at Duke University with deep roots in central Virginia. One of Faulkner’s most recent works is a play titled “Horse: A Richmond Story,” which grapples with contemporary debates regarding the city’s commemorative landscape including Monument Avenue as well as the installation of…
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Hollywood during quarantine
Last week, I made it out of the house and up to Hollywood Cemetery. This is the time of the semester that I usually walk my class through the cemetery on a field trip. But of course there is no opportunity for a field trip this semester. So I tried to recreate the experience as…
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Indian remains
For centuries before the arrival of European colonists, the falls of what would become known as the James River marked a rough borderland between the Siouan-speaking and Iroquois-speaking people to the west and the emerging chiefdoms of Algonquians to the east. Burial mounds and group ossuaries were characteristic of each group, though no such mounds…
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Pandemic shutdown, week 1
One week ago, the schools around Richmond closed. Most businesses prepared workers for telecommuting from home or had to let them go. The healthcare industry and governments ramped up for a big wave of Covid-19 cases on the near horizon. We had all heard about the novel coronavirus outbreak in China by the start of…