Tag: richmond

The Legend of Black Dog

 

I wonder if anyone in Richmond has considered erecting a statue in memory of Black Dog. This near-mythical, dread-locked stray canine roamed the streets of Richmond’s West End neighborhood for nearly fifteen years, some say, eluding animal control the entire time. A woman once claimed he saved her from a mugging, such was his legend. Some Richmonders built dog houses and left food out for him, hoping to adopt and domesticate him (he never let humans get too close), but that is not how outlaws roll.

In the two years I lived in Richmond I saw him three or four times. He would sometimes come out of hiding and walk the perimeter of the park near Mary Munford Elementary in the mid-afternoon, when the kids were being let out of school. I looked for him every day for a year before first clapping eyes on him. When I did finally catch a glimpse, it was as if I had just seen Bigfoot. One afternoon, my toy poodle at the time got loose on a walk and, to my horror, approached him, as if to say, “Hey buddy, wanna play?” He declined the offer, but was cool about it.

His longevity was such that some speculated it was “Son of Black Dog” they were seeing in those later years. But they underestimated the indomitable old lion.

Mark Holmberg, a celebrated Richmond journalist who penned several columns about the stray, said it best when he wrote: “It’s important to remember how much Black Dog reminds us it’s okay to be independent, to be free, to be scruffy, and to be hungry every once and a while.”

Black Dog has been gone for nearly a decade. It’s high time the city of Richmond commemorates his legend.

Richmond’s Difficult Legacy

Originally published in The Washington Times – Saturday, May 3, 2008

On April 4, 1865, just two days after Union forces had taken Richmond, President Abraham Lincoln arrived in the Confederate capital with his son Tad. The city’s black residents gave the Great Emancipator a hero’s welcome, while the city’s whites greeted him icily.

Today, a bronze statue of Lincoln and his son sits at the Richmond National Battlefield Park Civil War Visitor Center. The president, who wears a melancholy expression, has his arm wrapped around his 12-year-old boy. Behind him, etched in stone, are the words: “To bind up the nation’s wounds.”

The unveiling of the Lincoln statue in April 2003 marked a turning point in Richmond’s attitude toward the historic conflict. “We in Virginia are glad to claim him as one of our own,” said then-Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine. “Abraham Lincoln is one of us.”

Richmonders, of course, have not always considered Lincoln “one of us.” Any visitor to Richmond recognizes what seems to be the city’s preternatural obsession with its Confederate past. Monument Avenue, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, boasts monuments to four Confederate generals, including Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

However, a new museum in Richmond is taking on the conflict in a different way. The American Civil War Center, which opened in 2006, approaches the conflict from three perspectives: Union, Confederate and black. The museum offers a more balanced interpretation of the war. “No side offered a monopoly on virtue,” a video tells visitors at the beginning of the exhibit.

James M. McPherson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author at Princeton, was one of several historians involved in the planning. Mr. McPherson, whose scholarship has dealt with all three perspectives addressed by the exhibit, says the museum is unique on the national stage. “Most of the other museums that deal with the Civil War have a particular perspective,” he says.

Though the museum opened in 2006, the foundation has been around since 2000. H. Alexander Wise Jr., a former director of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, got the ball rolling back in the late ‘70s. Mr. Wise created a national board and enlisted the support of historians from different viewpoints. Those involved collaborated in a “harmonious and creative” manner, Mr. McPherson says.

The center’s founders felt it was important to have the center in Richmond. Also, the center is located on historic ground, atTredegar Iron Works, an iron foundry that was the largest munitions factory for the South during the war. Across the James River is Belle Isle, a former Union prison camp that has become a public park.

At the beginning of the exhibit, visitors have the opportunity to vote on what caused the war. The exhibit concludes with a look at the war’s legacy. Adam Scher, the center’s vice president of operations and interim president, says one of the primary goals is establishing a connection between the war and contemporary life. He adds that the legacy portion of the exhibit strikes the greatest emotional chord.

“We talk about issues that still linger,” he says.

The museum also has worked with several schools in the area as part of an effort to foster civic engagement and explore issues of race and reconciliation.

“Students are our most important audience,” Mr. Scher says, “and in many cases, they have not formulated a perspective about this story. It allows them the opportunity to see the story from different sides.”

Less than 1½ miles away from the American Civil War Center is the Museum of the Confederacy. Founded in 1890, it is one of the oldest museums in the nation, but it has struggled in recent years. Attendance is down, and funding has long been a problem. Not to mention that the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center has practically eaten the museum, making it nearly impossible to locate. Next to the museum stands the White House of the Confederacy, which is open daily for tours.

Waite Rawls, the museum’s president, acknowledges that the museum has suffered an image problem for some time. “There’s a big gap in the reality of what the museum is today and the perception the public has,” he says.

During the 1990s, Mr. Rawls says, the museum began an effort to change its image, offering exhibits on the struggle of blacks for freedom in the South and the role of women in the war.

Mr. Rawls insists that the museum is not in competition with the American Civil War Center. In fact, he says, Richmond as a whole is in competition with other historical cities. However, he thinks his town comes up short when it comes to marketing its historical offerings.

“If you look at Northern cities, particularly modern, progressive cities, they put [historical legacy] at the forefront,” he says, citing Boston, Philadelphia and Washington as examples.

Richmond, Mr. Rawls says, has an advantage in that regard. Cities such as Charlotte, N.C., he says, aren’t so fortunate. Still, Richmond is unique in that its history is sometimes considered an albatross, a fact that is often chalked up to race.

“Twenty-first-century racial politics have used the Civil War as a political football,” Mr. Rawls says. “Blaming that on the Civil War is a peculiarly local phenomenon.”

Nevertheless, the conflict is still a big draw for tourists in the Old Dominion. One out of every 10 visitors goes to some Civil War site, says Richard Lewis of the Virginia Tourism Corp. “There’s so much to see,” he says. “You’d be hard-pressed to do all the Civil War stuff in Virginia in one day.”

There has been a move recently by city officials to pay greater tribute to the role of blacks in the city’s past. Last year, the city unveiled the Slavery Reconciliation Statue in the historic Shockoe Bottom area. Identical statues have been erected in Liverpool, England, and Benin, in West Africa, representing three prominent focal points of the slave trade.

Virginia is planning its Sesquicentennial Commemoration — or 150th anniversary — of the war, beginning in 2011 and running through 2015. That will likely set the tone for Civil War tourism in the former capital of the Confederacy in the 21st century.

“We’re looking at this as an opportunity to improve the way Richmond has been marketed,” says Jeannie Welliver, director of tourism for the city of Richmond.

Rising Son

Jay Farrar has always been known as a songwriter’s songwriter. Even during his salad days with the seminal alt-country group Uncle Tupelo , the Belleville, Ill. native was writing world-weary, poetic songs that belied his young age.
Farrar formed Son Volt shortly after Uncle Tupelo called it quits in 1994 (with Tupelo band mate Jeff Tweedy starting Wilco). The group’s first album, Trace , was a mostly acoustic affair that now ranks as one of the musical high-water marks of the ’90s. The band released two more albums before going on hiatus in ’99.

After two experimental solo projects, Farrar resurrected Son Volt in 2005. But this time around, the band had a new lineup. Their first comeback album, Okemah and the Melody of Riot , found the group moving away from its signature traditional sound into more rock-oriented territory.

With their latest effort, The Search , Son Volt continues to plow new ground musically. With frequent looping, horns and the occasional sitar, it sounds far more like The Beatles circa 1968 than any neo-traditional band you’ve ever heard.

But despite the new sound, Farrar’s lyricism remains the band’s hallmark. His surrealistic evocations of the American road on The Search affirm that he is, first and foremost, a songwriter. Richmond.com recently spoke with the Son Volt frontman, who comes to Richmond this Thursday with his band “Groovin’ in the Garden.”

Since your first solo album Sebastopol , you’ve been a lot more experimental with the instrumentation and the arrangements. Was that a natural evolution for you, or more of a conscious decision to break free from the alt-country pigeonhole?

It felt natural. So I guess it was evolution. Coming off a period where the instrumentation was fairly static but it remained the same, I think the solo records just sort of represented a challenge to see where things could go.

Are you listening to completely different stuff than you were listening to, say, 10 years ago?

Probably. You change over the time. I think there was maybe a song on the first solo recordat that period, I was even listening to jazz. That was something that I definitely wasn’t listening to [in the past], and trying out some jazz time signatures and things like that. I try to keep an open mind and learn from whatever I’m listening to.

Other than yourself, the current Son Volt lineup features none of the members that were on the first three albums. Why did you keep the name?

I felt like there was unfinished business. I felt like Son Volt had more to offer, so I stuck with it.

Your lyrics have always been more impressionistic than narrative-driven. I’ve always heard a strong Townes Van Zandt influence. Who are some of your guiding lights, in terms of songwriting?

Townes Van Zandt would be one of them. I didn’t actually hear Townes Van Zandt until ’94 or something like that. I’d been doing a fair amount of writing before I came across him. He definitely left an impression. Maybe even certain writers have even as much of an influence, whether it was Jack Kerouac, who had more of a stream-of-consciousness style that I could really relate to and learn from, I think, as far as the idea of just getting your thoughts down on paper and not editing them along the way. I could relate to that and I’ve done a lot of that. I feel like that’s a good way to create.

A lot of the songs on the last two albums decry conservative, Middle America politics. Yet you still live in the Midwest. Can you explain that?

In the Midwest, I guess you can keep your finger on the pulse really. I prefer to live in a place where, in like St. Louis especially, it’s primarily a more working-class city. There’s more realism there than there is, sometimes, on the coasts. Anyway, that’s my take. I never really considered living anywhere else, except maybe during the period of making the Okemah and the Melody of Riot record, and that only lasted a couple of days.

In the press release you say the Beatles were the first band you were really into, though you suppressed the influence for a while. Any other influences you’ve consciously suppressed, like ABBA?

Reggae was probably one that I consciously suppressed for a long time. In our live shows we sort of adapted an Uncle Tupelo song, “Life Worth Living,” that has some reggae overtones now. I think it just took me a long time to be able to actually appreciate reggae in a certain way. I think a lot of it is as a result of finding out more of the history of it.

Many of the songs on The Search draw inspiration from the road. Is the American road still romantic, in the sense that it was for artists like Kerouac and Woody Guthrie?

I think there’s still a lot of Jack Kerouac and Edward Hopper out there. Especially in the west, in the middle and the south. I shouldn’t leave out the north. It’s out there, especially late night. You find it in the truck stops, the diners. They’re still there.

You’re often labeled as the godfather of alt-country. Is that a title you’re comfortable with, or do you find it ridiculous?

I see it as more of a continuum where you’re inspired by people that came before you. You give some, you take some, and that seems to be the way that it all works. I don’t see that anything’s starting at any one discernible point. I guess that’s looking at it from more of a historical perspective. It’s hard to really say that anybody really started anything.

What can we expect next from Jay Farrar more Son Volt albums?

I guess we’ll see. That’s the focus for now. We’ll be touring through the fall anyway. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I’ve been in contact with Anders Parker some, and we’ve done some demo work towards another Gob Iron record. It could be Gob Iron. I’ll just have to wait and see.

(Richmond.com, June 2007)

Old Business

Prostitution is not a new enterprise in the City of Richmond, or anywhere else in Christendom for that matter.

But, according to many Richmonders, more people are practicing the world’s oldest profession in River City than ever before. At the City Council meeting on Sept. 26, a number of people from a civic association in Battery Park , which is located on the citys North Side, testified to the severity of the problem in their district, citing instances of prostitutes “flashing” innocent bystanders, as well as non-camouflaged sexual activity between prostitutes and johns occurring in the clear light of day. The association’s members said they loved Richmond, but they did not love what the non-stop trafficking of sex was doing to their property value, and their children’s worldview.

After listening to the litany of complaints from the residents of Battery Park at the meeting, Councilman Chris A. Hilbert (3rd) vowed to introduce legislation in the near future that would help stem the tide of prostitution in Richmond.

Hilbert had already introduced one initiative to help combat the issue, recently hosting a Town Hall-style meeting with the Richmond Police Department in which local officials and the public discussed ways in which to address the problem. During the meeting, Police Chief Rodney Monroe presented a slide show of prostitutes that had been known to work the Chamberlayne Avenue corridor. One slide featured a transvestite prostitute, whom an audience member knew was camped out at the Red Roof Inn. The police chief made one call, and the prostitute was arrested there minutes later.

This year, the RPD also launched “Johns TV” on the citys public-access station, a controversial program that airs the faces of all those who have been convicted recently of soliciting a prostitute in Richmond.

On Sept. 30, this writer had the opportunity to witness one of the police departments undercover sting operations, which on this day happened to target johns.

From 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., I sat in an unmarked car with an RPD lieutenant in a parking lot across the street from a motel on Chamberlayne Avenue, where a rotating cast of female undercover officers from the RPD posed as prostitutes. The operation began at noon. By the time I joined the lieutenant, the department had already arrested four johns.

“Believe it or not, there is a demand for sex during the day,” the lieutenant told me, tongue-in-cheek. It is well known, even among non-shoppers, that the Chamberlayne Avenue corridor has long been a hotbed of prostitution in the city. Other popular spots include parts of Jefferson Davis Highway, First Street and West Grace Street.

The lieutenant, who shall remain nameless, had been working the prostitution beat for seven years. He said the volume of sex traffic had been relatively constant during that span, although he said there seemed to be a slight upsurge this year, at least on Chamberlayne Avenue.

“They seemed to have all migrated here,” he said.

The undercover officers who may or may not be armed, it’s their choice – were dressed in jeans and T-shirts, standard garb for female prostitutes in the city, the lieutenant said.

“They don’t look like they do on TV here, like they did on that HBO special,” the lieutenant said. “If theyre dressed up, theyre going to be a man, and those only come out at night. And some of the transvestites look rather attractive from a distance.”

Here’s a how a deal would go down during the sting: The johns would drive by and see the undercover pacing up and down the sidewalk, often twitching so as to imitate some kind of drug withdrawal. The john would pull over to the side of the road and talk to the officer, who would dictate the terms of the agreement. The officer would then “make the case,” which means that the john would agree to offer “something of value,” i.e. money or drugs, for some type of sexual activity ($20- $25 for oral sex and $30-$35 for intercourse are the standard rates, the lieutenant said).

The undercover officer would lead the john to the motel room, where two uniformed officers would be waiting to make the arrest. Once the arrest – a Class 1 misdemeanor – had been made, the RPD would issue a summons for the john to appear in court. The lieutenant said they did not have a problem with the johns appearing for their court date. A “SWAT” team was also camped out in the area, in the unlikely event that the operation went haywire.


During the hour that I was with the lieutenant, two arrests were made.
The johns run the gamut of the social order, from blue-collar workers to teachers to doctors and lawyers, the lieutenant said. “I’ve even some johns who were prominent members of a church,” he added. But no pastors. Just some deacons or such.

He said they dont see many johns that are repeat offenders, but he said they do arrest many of the prostitutes multiple times.

The lieutenant estimated that 99 percent of the prostitutes were addicted to some kind of drug crack, cocaine and heroin being the most popular.

Asked where prostitution sat on the department’s priority list, the lieutenant said near the top because prostitution went “hand-in-hand” with violent crime. “There’s more to it than sex,” he said. “Some of the girls rob the johns. And some of the prostitutes have been murdered.”

(Richmond.com, October 2005)