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Personality: Harrison Nathaniel Roday
Spotlight on Bridging Virginia’s founder and board chair
Harrison Nathaniel Roday learned the power of outside financial support when helping to invest in and run industrial manufacturing businesses 10 years ago in New York. He also learned that obtaining such support often is elusive for marginalized business owners.
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School Board member Jonathan Young springs open enrollment attendance plan on colleagues
Richmond School Board members were blindsided Monday night when board member Jonathan Young, who represents the 4th District, proposed that Richmond Public Schools allow students to choose which school they want to attend, with a lottery ultimately deciding where students would enroll.
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Richmond Unitarian church starts pledge to end racism
The Birmingham Pledge to end racism is painted on the wall of the city’s police headquarters in Birmingham, Ala. “I will discourage racial prejudice by others at every opportunity ...” the pledge on the wall reads. A painting of four white and black boys with their arms around each other accompanies the pledge, which first circulated around Birmingham about two decades ago.
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Clinton crime bill in context
Former President Bill Clinton mixed it up with Black Lives Matter activists last week as he defended his presidency and his 1994 crime bill while campaigning in Philadelphia for his wife, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. Hillary fans will say it isn’t fair that the Black Lives Matter folks keep raising issues from the Bill Clinton presidency. But the Clintons campaigned in 1992 by asserting that they were a “two for one” presidency, so raising those issues is at least somewhat fair.
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Jury finds Trump liable for sexual abuse
A jury found Donald Trump liable Tuesday for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996, awarding her $5 million in a judgment that could haunt the former president as he campaigns to regain the White House.
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Personality: Ollie Harvey
Spotlight on founder of The H.O.P.E. Organization
It has been more than 20 years since Ollie Harvey began her work to ensure no one in Virginia goes hungry, and the experience has been extensive, occasionally challenging and life-affirming.
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Cheating at Carver
During her six-year tenure as principal of George W. Carver Elementary School, Kiwana Yates allegedly orchestrated a major educational scam that ensured students scored high on state Standards of Learning tests even if they could not read well, write well and had not mastered arithmetic.
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Daphne Maxwell Reid rejoins cast for ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ reunion
Actress Daphne Maxwell Reid recently joined the cast of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” for a reunion show airing this week, 30 years after the popular TV sitcom premiered in 1990.
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Yay Rah Rah!
Armstrong’s Rashaundra Thomas hits 1,000 points
Rashaundra Thomas has a long name, a short frame and an often dazzling game. The 5-foot-3 Armstrong High School senior, who answers to “Rah Rah,” is the Wildcats’ first 1,000-point basketball scorer since Denise Winn in 1994.
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Gymnast Simone Biles breaks medal record with 25
American Simone Biles became the most decorated gymnast in world championship history Sunday when she won the beam and floor finals to take her career tally to 25 medals.
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‘Do we really want what Hillary Clinton has to offer?’
If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee for president, chances are that the Republicans will never allow her to run a successful race. They will dredge up every scandal she and Bill Clinton have been involved in since he was governor of Arkansas, and there have been many.
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Officials hope President Obama’s ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ program will remain under next administration
President Obama has seven months left in office. One of the leaders of one of his key initiatives is hard at work ensuring the president’s legacy will continue after he leaves the White House.
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Marita Golden’s prescription for Black women and self-care
Author, educator and literary activist Marita Golden’s 20th book that will be released June 13 builds on her previous book, which pushed back against the idea that Black women have to be strong all the time.
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Lady Panthers favored to win 4th crown in 5 years
The Virginia Union University Lady Panthers have barely tapped the brakes in running roughshod over the CIAA women’s basketball tournament during the past five years.
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Va. NAACP to be run by Tenn. official
The longtime president of the Tennessee NAACP has been handed control of the Virginia State Conference NAACP. Gloria Jean Sweet-Love, who has earned credit for turning around NAACP operations in her state during her 24-year tenure at the helm, was named administrator for the Virginia operations and given sweeping powers over state NAACP policies, programs and expenditures.
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Dr. Sheila K. Wilson Elliott
Dr. Sheila K. Wilson Elliott spent her childhood in Suffolk, unaware of the significance of her heritage in the indigenous Nottoway Indian Tribe, learning at a time when “information about Indians was just not available to us in school, and we pretty much felt that we were extinct.”
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Virginia colleges pivot post-affirmative action decision
Colleges and universities in Virginia are adjusting in the wake of a supreme Court decision last week that ended affirmative action in higher education.
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Kazoos, chants drown out church’s message of hate
Anti-gay demonstrators from the controversial Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas were met by Randy Blythe of Richmond’s heavy metal band Lamb of God at the Virginia State Capitol on Monday with an unlikely weapon — kazoos.
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Dean Yolanda Pierce on grandmother theology, Black Jesus
Dean Yolanda Pierce of the Howard University School of Divinity has been shaped by, and now teaches, womanist theology, the study of religion through the lens of gender, race and class.
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Cosby freed
After spending 3 years behind bars for drugging and assaulting a woman in 2004, entertainer Bill Cosby was released from prison on a legal technicality, drawing mixture of public praise and criticism
Pennsylvania’s highest court threw out Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction and released him from prison Wednesday in a stunning reversal of fortune for the comedian once known as “America’s Dad.”
