As Sunshine Week wrapped up, Richmond picked up a distinction that’s less celebration and more indictment. The city was named a 2026 recipient of the “City of Darkness” Award, part of The Foilies, an annual project from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock...
In April of 2018, Richmond received a rude wake-up call. We were called out on the front page of the New York Times for chronically tolerating the second-highest eviction rate in the country, over 4 times the national average. Even today, in 2021, thirty percent of renters in the City of Richmond get an eviction notice on their door every year....
I’m attending a conference in Washington, D.C and it’s finally lunch break. I’ve been inside one room all morning and this break is my first opportunity to grab a bite to eat and hopefully, sit near a window with some sun. Conference attendees are milling about, and as most breaks during conferences go, conversation with other attendees is a high...
A racially equitable Richmond is a city that makes my dad feel comfortable and welcome. I grew up as the only child of my single-mother, Lydia Mercado. I had a complicated relationship with my biological father, Dimiter Gorchev, who was 23 years older than my mother. Dimiter struggled to connect with me, his Puerto Rican daughter who grew up in...
As a Black woman who grew up in New York and has now lived in Virginia for 18 years, I’ve seen racial differences written into every landscape of my life for as long as I can remember. I began to notice these differences when I was around 8 years old. As I rode through my working-class Black and Latino community in Hempstead, NY into Garden City...
An Afghan family who left their home country years ago and resettled in Virginia attempt to help family members still stuck in Kabul, and grapple with the unavoidable question: With the US military gone, what happens to those attempting to leave Afghanistan now? Bahar serves paratha and tea in her Richmond, Va. home, as she recalls the first time...
This morning, over 130 years after it was installed, the Commonwealth of Virginia finally removed the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from Monument Avenue. RVA Mag's John Donegan and Branden Wilson were on hand to see history being made. Robert E. Lee, former commander of the Confederacy, awoke atop his bronze horse today to clamoring...
Virginia legalized it; mere hours from now, you will legally be able to possess small amounts of marijuana within the commonwealth. But can you legally buy it? Grow it? Well, that's complicated. Let RVA Mag break it down for you. Beginning July 1, 2020, adults in Virginia aged 21 years old or older will be able to legally possess and cultivate...
For Highland Support Project's Ben Blevins, the United States' goals for international relations should begin with decolonizing. And he can explain... starting with potatoes. When I was a child growing up in Richmond's West End, I had the luck of living next door to the world's best maker of potato latkes. Being of Irish descent, I shared a...
In the wake of last summer's protests and the pulling down of Confederate monuments around the state, universities within the commonwealth are dealing with the remnants of the Confederacy and of systemic racism that remain on their campuses today. Virginia universities in the former heart of the Confederacy are reckoning with their past as...
