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Affordable housing for whom?
Next week, City Council plans to declare an affordable housing crisis in Richmond as rents and house prices soar, leaving many with below average incomes unable to afford housing. However, neither the council nor Mayor Levar M. Stoney who has pushed the resolution to be voted on Monday, April 10, plan to mention the ways he and the governing body have quietly reduced funding to support development of housing for families with incomes of $40,000 or less a year.
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Community advocate raises concerns about City’s new Confederate shrine
Even as Mayor Levar M. Stoney and City Council revive a citizen commission to help Richmond eliminate slavery-defending Confederate names from streets and bridges, the city Department of Public Utilities has created a new shrine to fallen Civil War rebels.
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Planning Commission rejects fire training facility
A controversial proposal to install a training facility for Richmond firefighters on a major section of lawn at the Hickory Hill Community Center again has been rejected.
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Equal justice, even for Trump, by Clarence Page
Yusef Salaam, whom you may remember as one of the exonerated Central Park Five, had only one word to tweet to those who wanted to know his feelings about the indictment of Donald Trump: “Karma,” he offered. Karma? I’ve heard about it. Drawn from concepts of re- birth in Indian religions, I’ve been advised to think of kar- maasaformof cosmic justice: Good deeds and intent lead to good karma and happier re- births while bad karma may lead to times that are not so jolly. Mr. Salaam was one of five Black and Hispanic teenagers wrongfully imprisoned for the 1989 rape of a white woman in New York’s Central Park, a case that later was explored in a 2019 Netflix series “When They See Us” and a PBS documentary “The Central Park Five.” In 1989, before any of the five teens had been tried, Mr. Trump, then a major Manhat- tan real estate developer with a bottomless appetite for self- promotion, took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty to be reinstated in New York. Adding kerosene to public anger at the time, the ads were reported to have played a major role in securing a conviction. So did false confessions, it turned out, since no DNA linked them to the crime scene and their descriptions of the victim didn’t match. Mr. Salaam served nearly seven years in prison before he and the other wrongfully accused teens—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise—were Clarence Page exonerated in 2002. Serial rapist Matias Reyes, already in prison, confessed to the assault and DNA confirmed his admission. Ah, how the mighty have fallen. The presumption of inno- cence until proved guilty seemed almost nowhere to be seen in Mr. Trump’s world when the Central Park Five case raged across the headlines and boiled over into a national media frenzy. Yet, as Mr. Salaam mentions in his tweet, Mr. Trump—for whom “apologetic” is not part of his brand—never has apologized. Still, he seeks the presumption of innocence he has denied to others. So be it. Let’s see how well his innocence claims hold up. For now, Mr. Trump’s chants of “Lock her up” in his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton come to mind. Now that it is he who faces what has been reported to be more than 30 counts related to business fraud in a sealed indictment from a Manhattan grand jury, I wonder: Can chants of “Lock HIM up” be far behind? Still, the stress test to which the former president has put our crimi- nal justice system offers a valuable opportunity to view fairness in our system with new eyes. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the ultraconservative Repub- lican from Georgia, suddenly has become a major advocate for inmates of the District of Columbia jail, now that their ranks were joined by detainees from the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. Interesting, I said to myself. Since the alleged insurrectionists are mostly white and the D.C. jail’s traditional population is overwhelmingly Black, maybe now they can see how the other half lives. Unsurprisingly, they were shocked. The jail’s conditions, were so bad that 34 of them sug- gested in a letter to federal court last fall that they would rather be moved to Guantanamo Bay. Detainees, through their lawyers, raised concerns that included threats from guards, standing sewage, and skimpy food and water. A federal judge held top jail officials in contempt after they delayed prompt medi- cal care for a Capitol defendant in their custody. Things have gotten better, spurred partly by Rep. Greene and other congressional visitors. But the irony of how it took 40 or so Capitol rioters to get more attention and action than the jail’s roughly 1,400 total inmates is not lost, especially on the inmates of color. Rep. Greene, seldom known for understatement, visited the jail and likened the rioters inside to “prisoners of war,” implying that they were being punished for their politics. Actually they’re being held for a lot more than that. Don’t forget the physical assaults on Capitol Police with pepper spray, bear spray and riot shields, just for starters. Equal justice for all is a cherished ideal in the American system, a system they tried to disrupt. We must do all that we can to preserve that ideal, even for those who try to destroy it. The writer is a syndicated columnist and senior member of the Chicago Tribune edito- rial board.
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When making exceptions for Ramadan is no longer the exception, by Dilshad D. Ali
Scrolling Twitter on the first evening of Ramadan 2023, I was greeted (well, as all Muslims were) by Elmo. “Ramadan Mubarak to all of Elmo’s friends!” the red toddler Muppet said. “Elmo loves you!”
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President Biden says tech companies must ensure AI products are safe
President Biden said Tuesday it remains to be seen if artifi- cial intelligence is dangerous, but that he believes technology companies must ensure their products are safe before releasing them to the public.
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LSU ends season winning 102-85 over Iowa in NCAA finals
Jasmine Carter leads scoring with 22 points
One of the first things Kim Mulkey did upon becoming women’s basketball coach at LSU was to study the available talent in the transfer portal. She obviously made some wise personnel decisions.
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Ryan Odom replaces VCU’s Mike Rhoades
VCU’s basketball forecast has gone from sunny and bright to overcast and complicated.
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John Marshall loses to Central Cabarrus 67-65 in ATL
John Marshall High’s magical ride on the basketball court hit a patch of turbulence and fell back to Earth in Atlanta.
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Game changer: Attendance, ticket sales surge since Squirrels arrival
The Richmond Flying Squirrels had a good season on the field in 2022 and a great season at the ticket booth.
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Bagby wins Va. Senate special election
Henrico Democratic Delegate Lamont Bagby, as anticipated, crushed Republican rival Stephen J. “Steve” Imholt in Tuesday’s voting for a Richmond-area seat in the state Senate.
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Richmond’s Randall Robinson reshaped American’s foreign policy, forced change in South Africa
Seared by the segregation he grew up with in Richmond, Randall Maurice Robinson championed change in American policies toward African and the Caribbean nations that he considered unjust and undergirded by racial bias.
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Personality: Shirley H. Scarborough
Spotlight on Cry Loud, Spare Not, Speak Up founder
For the past two years Shirley H. Scarborough has worked, in her own words, to create “Beauty for Ashe,” through her organization Cry Loud, Spare Not, Speak Up.
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Can’t stop dancing
NCAA’s Final Four
Something missing here? For the first time since the NCAA basketball tournament began in 1939, there are zero No. 1 seeds remaining in the Final Four.
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Richmonders want funding for schools, housing, less gas
Fund the full request for Richmond Public Schools. Improve our parks. Fully fund the Affordable Housing Trust Fund and fund repairs for decaying mobile homes. Protect the environment by planning for elimination of the city’s gas utility. Those were among the ways that least 20 speakers urged City Council to amend the 2023-24 budget plan at a public hearing Monday night.
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Hickory Hill community opposes planned fire training facility
In a retreat from a two-year-old policy of expanding parks and green space in overly hot South Side, Mayor Levar M. Stoney and his administration are quietly pressing to replace 2 acres of lawn at the Hickory Hill Community Center in South Side with a $1 million fire training building.
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Free community testing for COVID-19 continues
The Richmond and Henrico County health districts are offering testing at the following locations:
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RRHA seeks additional funds to maintain public housing
The city’s public housing authority needs to invest $42 million to fix the most urgent problems with roofs, boilers, plumbing, wiring and other aging infrastructure in the apartment communities it operates in Richmond, according the chief executive, Steven B. Nesmith.
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University of Richmond has new provost
Joan Saab will become executive vice president for academic affairs and provost for the University of Richmond effective July 1.
