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From rally to power
Who would have thought that in less than 15 days, I would have to coordinate and manage 1,000 young black student leaders from more than 24 cities on 17 buses in the name of gun reform and safety? The reality is sometimes the work chooses you.
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Loyola Ramblers like ‘The Little Engine that Could’ in NCAA Final Four
This year’s NCAA Final Four could be billed “Three powerful locomotives and The Little Engine that Could.” Kansas, Villanova and Michigan are Final Four regulars, while Loyola University -Chicago seems misplaced, like it has arrived at this idyllic destination by accident after somehow taking a fortunate wrong train on the “L.” Kansas, Villanova and Michigan feature big-time recruits, many of whom figure to soon cash in on NBA stardom.
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Robinson works to get Armstrong on track
As a teenage athlete, Valentino Robinson ranked with top high hurdlers in Virginia. Now as coach, he faces a different type of hurdle.
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Annie Giles, community activist, dies at 81
As a minister’s daughter, Annie Marie Turner Giles felt driven to help others overcome problems and challenges in the Whitcomb Court public housing community in the city’s East End.
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Personality: Frances K. Scott
Spotlight on chair of The Charmettes’ annual prayer brunch
Cancer does not discriminate. Age, race, ethnicity and economic background don’t matter, Frances K. Scott has learned.
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City Council calls for Washington team to pay its way or end relationship
Will Washington’s pro football team continue to run a summer training camp in Richmond after 2020? That question is expected to be decided after Mayor Levar M. Stoney and team representatives hold talks, likely in May, on a potential extension of the current agreement.
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Heating repairs still needed on 104 public housing units
Heat has been restored to more than 300 public housing units, but work still needs to be completed in more than 100 other units.
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‘Our ballots will stop bullets’
Thousands take to streets in Richmond, D.C. and across the nation to demand gun control and school safety
Chanting “Enough is enough” and “Never again,” more than 5,000 students and other demonstrators marched through Richmond last Saturday as part of a nationwide protest against mass school shootings and gun violence.
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Volunteers working hard to clear, maintain cemetery
Re “VCU center developing master plan for historic Evergreen Cemetery,” Free Press March 15-17 edition: We’re writing to offer a clarification to your article. Toward the end of the story about Evergreen Cemetery, the writer refers to “adjoining neglected and abandoned East End Cemetery.” In fact, a huge swath of East End has been cleared for years and is being maintained year-round by volunteers.
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Richmond love?
School shootings. A mad bomber.
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The greater good
We are disappointed that Mayor Levar M. Stoney’s proposed 2018-2020 budget holds no more additional funds to fix up the city’s dilapidated schools than the revenue expected from a meals tax increase.
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3 honorees to speak March 31
Two educators and a historian from the Richmond area will speak at a panel titled “Honoring Women Who Tell Our Stories.”
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U.Va. makes NCAA history it would like to rewrite
The University of Virginia basketball team seemed ticketed for a magic carpet ride to the NCAA Final Four in San Antonio, Texas.
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Coach Tubby Smith gets the boot at Memphis
Memo to colleges in search of a new basketball coach: One of the very best, Tubby Smith, is available again. With Richmond roots, Smith is among college basketball’s most successful coaches. He is also among the most traveled.
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Maye to leave VCU Rams
Tyler Maye becomes the latest player with the Virginia Commonwealth University Rams to come down with “transfer-itis.”
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‘Rethinking Incarceration’
Author on justice, race and Jesus as a prisoner
The problems in the United States’ criminal justice system go all the way back to slavery, according to Dominique DuBois Gilliard, who directs racial reconciliation work for the Evangelical Covenant Church. Both slavery and incarceration are means of racial and social control, said Mr. Gilliard, who sees these controls working together throughout American history — from Jim Crow to lynchings to the war on drugs to the privatization of prisons.
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Dr. Marshall Banks, retired urologist and Roman Catholic deacon, dies at 78
Dr. Marshall D. “Billy” Banks devoted his life to ministering to people as a physician and as a deacon at Cathedral of the Sacred Heart near Virginia Commonwealth University.
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Wilder sues VCU president, dean of school named for him
He may be 86, but former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder is showing Virginia Commonwealth University he is not to be trifled with.
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‘Immortal’ Henrietta Lacks to be honored with cancer center
The year was 1951. The place: Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where Henrietta Lacks, a native of Halifax County, Va., sought treatment for cervical cancer.
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Play it forward
Richmond Flying Squirrels go to bat for the community
As the Richmond Flying Squirrels prepare for the spring season and the opening home game on April 13 at The Diamond, the baseball team continues stepping up to the plate in the Richmond community — on and off the field. “Our philosophy, and what the team hinges on, is three things,” said Todd “Parney” Parnell, the Squirrels’ vice president and chief operating officer who has been with the team since its Richmond debut in 2009.