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VINEGAR HILL MAGAZINE 2021 SPECIAL EDITION
CONTENTS 4 IN HER OWN WORDS Dr. Andrea Douglas speakes with Mayor Nikuyah Walker, ‘In Her Own Words.’
Vinegar Hill Magazine is a space that is designed to support and project a more inclusive social narrative, to promote entrepreneurship, and to be a beacon for art, culture, and politics in the Central Virginia region. Contributing Writer Andrea Douglas, MBA, PhD Advertising and Sales Manager(s) SteppeMedia Publisher Eddie Harris Layout & Design Sarad Davenport Feature Photography Jess Gabbay and Eze Amos © 2021 Vinegar Hill Magazine. All rights reserved.
14 GROUNDS Leslie Scott-Jones discusses her new fictional podcast about being a Black professor at a PWI.
18 CBD EQUITY Yolanda Rush talks candidly about inequity in the CBD and marijuana industry and ways that Black entreprenuers can get involved.
27 PRESIDENT’S WORDS Dr. George Bates talks extensively about the importants of the words that a president speaks and the constructive and destructive implications.
The Charlottesville Inclusive Media project was formed by Charlottesville Tomorrow, In My Humble Opinion Radio Show, and Vinegar Hill Magazine with the goal of bringing more inclusive representation to local media. In December it was announced that Charlottesville Tomorrow, in partnership with Vinegar Hill Magazine and In My Humble Opinion talk show, has received $150,000 through the Google GNI Innovation Challenge to augment the launch of the recently established Charlottesville Inclusive Media project.
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Blue Skies Mayor Nikuyah Walker in Her Own Words
Contributed by © Andrea Douglas, MBA, PhD Artwork by Terri Nowell | Photo by Jess Gabbay (Conversation from December 2020)
This is my third opportunity to talk with Mayor Nikuyah Walker about her impressions of her time on City Council and as Mayor—a position she has held since she joined the auspicious body. It has been a year fraught with conflict and certainly many unknowns as just three months into 2020 the governor of Virginia declared a state of emergency in response to the continued spread of COVID-19. Everybody’s lives changed. With this as the backdrop, we talked for three hours about equity, partnerships, governing style, and much more in a conversation that could have continued all day, if not interrupted by a family emergency. I hope to continue our discussion and present it here at another time. As always Mayor Walker was candid and fearless with her responses and insights. What comes through in our discussion is that she remains a champion of the under-represented as she is willing to force conversations that some deem difficult. AD: Over a year ago the city convened an equity committee that revealed that within city departments there is an uneven understanding of the importance of thinking about equity as a departmental culture. One year later how would you grade the City’s progress in this area?
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NW: The report was shelved. The major section of the report where the temporary employees were involved—how temporary employees were basically used as full-time employees—over 300 of these individuals have been laid off during the pandemic. Although they are temporary employees they are performing essential jobs, but in the pandemic you could not perform those services because, for example, in Parks and Rec., those centers were closed. I had to fight with the Council to approve keeping these people on paid status for 6 months. The administration wanted to lay them off—so equity is something that we give lip service to but we don’t handle that situation well. It is hard for this community to own up to their errors and react accordingly. There’s really no proactiveness in how the current government works. And people are interested in whatever they feel will help them govern better, whether it’s a new mayor or a different kind of Black person on Council—one who doesn’t talk about race and equity in every conversation. We don’t often talk about the fact that a number of people who make decisions in the city don’t live here and may not view their life through the progressive liberal lens that a lot of city residents do, but they have major influence on what equity looks like in the city, including where funding goes to non-profits, and what projects receive resources. There are a lot of people influencing Councilors and the City Manager who don’t even have equity on their minds. It is not something they deem important. AD: So in your mind what does an equitable Charlottesville look like? NW: It is a hard question to answer because I am grappling with whether or not even surface-level equity is possible—certainly not deep foundational shifts where every decision you make you are able to consider what a group of people who haven’t had access to what they need today, for them to have anything near a level playing field. I am also grappling with what level of ownership does the city have in creating that scenario. For instance if you take development—then you don’t have developers coming in and abusing the process because they believe they have a right to. They don’t believe that having a city that is not just filled with market rate properties catering to individuals who earn $150,000 or more per year and that people on the lower end of the AMI (area median income) in the city—30%, 50% and 60%, below that—they also deserve quality housing.
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AD: Charlottesville has a very strong non-profit sector—one could argue that given the amount of money that the city spends in this area, the equity report card would be better than it is. How do you understand this disconnect? NW: Right now our non-profits are created primarily by white women, and while some of them have the best intentions, they cannot reach their missions, their goals, because there is a lack of accountability about outcomes and impacts. Nonetheless, they are able to continue, without being successful. But because we want to keep funding something, we keep giving them money. I have been advocating for a measurements and solutions office for us to gather data about the services people are receiving. Every year we put off funding those types of positions. This would allow us to create systems of accountability for both the person receiving services and those who provide it. I feel a sense of urgency here. If we could create a space in the non-profit community for accountability we could develop a mechanism for what change really looks like. I have also been encouraging people who are closer to the communities that receive services to start their own non-profits. AD: Beginning in 2017/2018 the CACF began to be more directed with their giving. How do you view their actions in relationship to equity? NW: I think the work that Brennan Gould (president and CEO of CACF) and her team are attempting to do is important. I think their biggest challenge will be getting their donors to move from this space of, ‘I want people to know that I do these things’ or ‘I want to be a part of these things,’ to understanding that people need resources to move the needle— whichever needle you are talking about—and that those resources should not come with you being able to dictate in any way. They should get out of the way. AD: If you had all the money in the world so that you could hire anyone you wanted, what qualifications would the city’s Equity Director need to be successful? NW: Someone who, although they had the necessary credentials, was still connected to people’s needs. Someone who is able to sit in any room and challenge people or build with people no matter what the circumstances are. You don’t hire a white person to do this work. You need someone who has lived the experience of being Black in America or
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being Hispanic in America. If you can reach them then you know that anyone else in this community will be reached by you reaching the individuals who are in the most crisis. When I think about the person in this position, credentials are not the first thing I think about. I think about someone who has a warrior spirit, someone who has empathy, someone who understands the historic legacy that they are trying to disrupt and who has the passion to put measures in place to start creating a different historical pattern so that when you look back 20 or 25 years from now, you understand that they were successful because how Black people do in schools has changed, because Black peoples’ interactions with the criminal justice system looks different, because Black peoples’ home ownership rates look differently,
because Black people are no longer primarily in the schoolto-prison pipeline, and they’re in a school-to-career pipeline. Education is not something that people send their kids to because they need childcare during the day—you don’t ask a child from a low-income community what is your dream and they tell you nobody has ever asked them. AD: Thinking about the year we just had, what were the first indications that the city was feeling the impact of COVID-19? NW: I have to say, as optimistic as I am and as willing as I am to fight, what has probably shattered my optimism the most is dealing with this pandemic. I am really questioning: if you can’t do what you need to do to save your life or someone else’s life, then can you really help change the world, even our little world?
So the first battle about COVID-10 with the city manager for me was March 12 or 13. We had events at Parks and Rec. and even though they were telling us they were unsure about the virus—but one thing they know for sure was that it was killing people—you have someone who was in charge of city operations saying we’ll chance it because I think it is going to be okay. I had to tell him, ‘No we’re not going to put employees and hundreds of people at risk.’ I had to reach out to Council and say that we need to strongly urge the city manager to not continue with his programming. That was the first conflict, but there have been more along the way. Councilors told me they couldn’t deal with the truth that we may not have enough information until next April or May, 2021. I had a Council member tell me
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that nobody wants to hear that. And I’m thinking of it in terms of how many people I’ve seen sit through court proceedings who just needed to know, to wrap their minds around whether they have 5 or 10 years or even 18 years. It’s like how much time do I have to do? And I thought that people just wanted to know how long am I going to be in this? And then we had a business community whose revenue comes primarily from tourists and students and we had a Council and staff who weren’t clear at any point about how serious this virus is. They weren’t sending a clear message about where the city stands while also advocating for the resources that people needed to sustain themselves and their families
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during this time. We didn’t do this well in city government and so when you have the restaurant community and you have small businesses saying we are drowning here, we’re suffering and we don’t think you care. They have a valid complaint because we didn’t set our own strategic plan and it was usually me out front saying we need to focus on public health and not the capitalistic system that is in play here. The rest of the council were either saying nothing or in agreement with those thoughts. So we did a really poor job because there was a lot of internal strife. When I get emails that say, ‘Nikuyah, go to hell with your public health response,’ I understand that the people who are used to building
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and creating want to continue to do that and that there have been mixed messages given to them. Businesses who adapt early on have been more successful than some others because they took the pandemic not as something that was going to be a week or two but understood they were in this and were being more proactive you see them having more success during this time than businesses who did not do that. We are probably not going to be very successful in the school system especially with the most vulnerable students, the students who were falling behind before the pandemic, because we spent more time debating whether it’s an actual pandemic and how serious we need to take it. You
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can’t spend resources on both because they are limited, so when you’re forced to do something where you could have spent these months being as proactive as possible and figuring out how to be as successful as possible, you spent the majority of the energy that people have and assuming people can function in the same way that they were functioning pre-pandemic when if you were to take an account then we know that people shouldn’t have been forced to continue functioning as they were pre-pandemic. You are asking them to divvy up their time between two polar opposite viewpoints and expect there to be success. You can’t even do what is necessary for the business owners, for citizens, because there is mixed messaging at the highest levels of people who have to come up with these measures and policies. There was a lot of misinformation being passed to staff. Now we have the vaccine. The vaccine is about people’s bodies not about a system, so if the system is broken, and it was broken before, you couldn’t really respond to it. AD: What have you learned? Can you rectify the system in any way so going forward it can be proactive and serve citizens better? NW: This is one of the times where we definitely need a strong mayor system. You have a city manager who is primarily influencing these decisions that doesn’t really have to answer to anyone. If you had a strong mayor system, the public would have been demanding answers because they would have known that they could demand answers. There were days where I and the rest of the Council sat there and said nothing because we were unsure. Who wants to hear that your government was
unsure about how to paddle through this process. Our local government was more aligned with what was going on on the federal level. We had leaders who were more concerned about the bottomline than people. Some of the things staff was trying to figure out was, ‘Can we order PPE?’ and there were internal debates about, ‘We may not need them so why would we spend the money on them?’ Those were the kind of conversations we were dealing with during the early months of this pandemic. AD: This is a conversation about partners. How would you characterize the University’s response to the pandemic and their stated commitment to working with the community? NW: I have probably had fewer conversations during the pandemic with Jim Ryan and JJ Davis than I’ve had since they arrived and I think that is telling. It is probably easier for them to talk to other Councilors than it is to talk to me, therefore I don’t know every conversation that they have been having on this subject. I know that there were times that staff reported that UVA wasn’t really at the table, that they were kind of doing their own thing and just informing us. When I would talk to JJ and say, ‘This is what staff feels,’ she’d say no we are there and I will make sure that staff knows this is our commitment. I will say I understand why the system that’s in place—UVA has definitely gone into a bubble of how do we survive this pandemic and the majority of the conversations that I have had has been around how to make sure the community is being safe so that the numbers won’t rise and be blamed on the students because of things like the rallies. But we haven’t been
meeting regularly. I have felt that this has been more like we update you on what we’re doing and not that you carry any weight in determining what we do and that’s alarming. We have an equity meeting with Albemarle County scheduled for January. I have the least amount of confidence in our ability to transform the town and gown relationship since President Ryan arrived because they went into survival mode. To have a top official say the Aramark employees are going to get unemployment and that should be sufficient for them as a reason to why they didn’t have to be concerned about the fact they laid them off back in the spring was truly alarming. And then we turned around and did the same thing—I had to remind everyone how much pressure we put on UVA to do the right thing and then we were turning around and laying off the most vulnerable employees too. AD: But we are not talking just about the city of Charlottesville, we are talking about the partnership that is built. And we are not just talking about public health, we are talking about how to create an infrastructure that can survive this pandemic. NW: I don’t know how you look at that outside of a public health standpoint because maybe we’ll continue to have the low numbers and low fatalities in our area but if anything similar to what’s happening across the country happens here, we are in for a very harsh winter and if you take care of people, which we just have a difficult time taking care of people and making those investments in people, then in the long run you create less disruption to a system to have to repair. Since we already know we don’t have a good history of prioritizing repair for the people who are
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most impacted, we prioritize the people who are considered leaders of the system to make sure that they are stable because the story that we tell ourselves is that without that stability the people at the lower end won’t have the opportunity to transform their lives. The belief is that if we take care of the companies, the larger employees—even when you look at the city and the both times we funded CARES Act, the majority of the money came in on operational modifications and that’s not to say those operational modifications didn’t need to happen but if we can get most of the people out of the building, if we can have people successfully and safely working from home and still meeting their needs, do we need every door or faucet? We don’t even know if we are ever going back to the way things were. This is part of responding to
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the pandemic to be able to make modifications quickly. We have not been able to do that. We’ve been trying to hold on to this traditional model.
every time they paid their sales tax? How do we show them that we understand their current plight? We haven’t done a good job of that.
And I know your question is about partnerships but a key part of that is how having our level of disfunction influences whether those partnerships are successful and who is successful coming out of this. We have to consider how the economic development for smaller businesses, not larger employers, look? We know that the state government will invest in UVA, we know that they are not going to leave them hanging, but what about the small businesses? How do you sustain a restaurant community that expected for most of the year there to have students and tourists to sustain them? How do we support that industry that we told ‘Thank you for operating,’
If we have any of the type of devastation that they’re experiencing across the country, those smaller businesses won’t be able to rebound and even if they do, who will work there? If the lower income community starts getting hit by this virus, who is going to work at your stores and restaurants? AD: Where are the wins for you right now? You were a casualty of the virus in a way. NW: You need to ask somebody else because this virus is driving me crazy and I am respecting it. I’m definitely a casualty. I had to resign to advocate for other
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people, because the story line was ‘She’s advocating because she’s benefitting,’ versus I’m advocating because I care about people so, I said here is my resignation, I don’t benefit. To have these people laid off was unacceptable to me. The win is that I have remained consistent even though I have received a lot of backlash from every area. There are parents who are like ‘What are you talking about? My kids need to go to school.’ There are business owners like, ‘What are you talking about? How do you get sales tax to do any of the things you want to do if my business isn’t surviving?’ What I have learned during this pandemic is that there’s really no win right now. What I’ve learned is that our sixth counselor, who is the city manager because he has veto power, should be elected. Our response to the pandemic is clouded as much by the fact that we are a Dillon Rule state and because we are a council/manager form of government there is tension between the two. Each position comes with its own agenda. AD: People seem to attribute a lot of what happens in the government to your influence. NW: I think people say that because I am usually vocal. I was the only one to speak out about UVA students returning to Charlottesville. No one had to ask me if I had an opinion. I shared it with the University and with the public. I am a very persistent and consistent and predictable person although people seem to call me unpredictable. For them ‘unpredictable’ means that there’s a way government has functioned traditionally, there’s a way that people traditionally conform and there’s a set of actions that, if there’s not consensus, you don’t have to ever worry about it coming to light. I am unpredictable in that system. AD: I want to talk a little about this notion of an elected city manager. This assumes that the city manager would be someone who lives in the city and not someone potentially hired from somewhere else. Is this really possible? NW: I think it is possible. I also think you have to shift how you feel about systems and who can run them. It is assumed that because you have a PhD in public administration or you have gone through ICMA training that you know how to run a city and that’s not always true. When you start talking about strong mayor systems people assume that someone has to have everything going in versus do
they have the most important thing we’re asking for and can everything else be learned? And, do you have the experts on staff that can support them? We may even find a renewed interest in local politics once you switch the system. We are going to have to make a change if you want government to address the needs of the people rather than their special interests. I am an advocate of the strong mayor system because then a person cannot be complacent in their job. Ideally the council/ manager form of government should make sense however there are Councilors who are elected and implement policies and ask for the city to implement those policies. In a healthy system, the city manager should be able to say, ‘Hey, based on what you want to implement, this is why I do or do not recommend the action.’ There are going to have to be some trade offs to creating it. This system we have here in theory should work. I don’t know why it is not working because I think it started out as sort of like this gentleman’s kind of government—governing of the same people with the same general interests and we haven’t addressed the fact that the Civil Rights movement occurred and that the same systems don’t always work. I don’t act like a strong mayor. I am just Nikuyah being Nikuyah. Every place I have ever been that has been a problem—me being me. Whether I am mayor, vice mayor, Councilor, I am showing up with the same energy. That is a problem for people. But we can’t discount that I am the reason that we are having certain conversations about mayor. In the past people haven’t even known who the mayor was and the next person who is mayor will be expected to show up. So by default we have created a system where people are expecting mayor-like things from the mayor. That is what happens in a strong mayor system. We are never going to go back to the normal unless we return to the normal system of only a few people being heard. The citizens in this community are never going to go quietly. The excuses that white leaders have been able to make in the community, they won’t be able to make anymore. They cannot say ‘We didn’t know it was a problem,’ because it is going to be in your face everyday. People will hold them accountable for the decisions they made—those decisions that they should have known would not have led to equity. I just want people to do a little more research when they bring an issue to light to be debated by the people who are responsible. The easy cop out is that people don’t have enough information.
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VINEGAR HILL MAGAZINE 2021 SPECIAL EDITION
GROUNDS: Black Tales from the Ivory Tower A CONVERSATION WITH LESLIE SCOTT-JONES
by Sarad Davenport | Photo by Ézé Amos In the story of the cosmic struggle for equal rights for Black people in America, there is a segment of the Black population that finds themselves battling on multiple fronts—the Black professor. In talking with Leslie M. Scott-Jones, Artistic Director of the Charlottesville Player’s Guild at the Jefferson School African-American Heritage Center, I learned that the struggle for Black humanity extends also into the ivory tower of academia. Scott-Jones, through her podcast called GROUNDS, brings to life the story of five Black professors at a predominately white institution in a fictitious college and town in the rural south. The story chronicles the lives of these professors—
the only full time, tenure-track Black lecturers who work at Morris & Wilkins University.
oftentimes for the Black academic, disassociation often does feel like the cost of acceptance by the academy.
“I wanted to humanize black proScott-Jones further explores this fessors because there is a stigma idea that there is some type of within the black community that quid-pro-quo happening in the because someone Black has a academic world by saying, “That Ph.D., then they’re not down and is a product of how the system is not in touch with their people anyconstructed. And in talking with more. That is not necessarily the my story consultants, that’s what case,” said Scott-Jones. Through really started to come out—that this conversation, we explore the the things that these people have issues of how, in the Black comto go through and have to put up munity, education is preached as with—the amount of work they salvation, yet those who pursue have to produce and the way they higher education often feel ostrahave to produce it [in order to be cized and disassociated from the accepted].’ Through her voice, you very people who sent them. Scottcan hear and feel the psychological Jones states the critical point that, w w w. v i n e g a r h i l l m a g a z i n e . c o m | V I N E G A R H I L L M A G A Z I N E 1 3
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brutality endured in what seems to be a systematic process of breaking the spirit of the Black academic. The irony is that, while many people believed that those who rose in the ranks of the academy have somehow made it and are excluded from the realities of what it means to be Black, this is far from the truth. The GROUNDS podcast makes it clear that there is a certain beauty in having more intellectual tools at one’s disposal, yet having a Ph.D. does not allow the Black academic to escape the fight for recognition and acceptance of their fundamental humanity. Leslie doubles down here and says, “It is six years of training someone to assimilate into a certain structure, and the kicker is that once you get to be a full professor and have tenure, then your department turns around and says to you, ‘Okay, now you’re our black professor. So what do we need to know about being black after we have spent six years training you not to be black?’”
This cadre of professors at Morris & Wilkins is accomplished in every sense of the word. They are world-traveled and renowned scholars, yet on GROUNDS, they struggle. They straddle the world that their intellect and mind have created for them and a world that treats them as Q-Tip and Yasin Bey once said, “Mr. N***a”, or in this case Dr. N***a. To close our conversation, Leslie said, “That’s the biggest win for me, though, because that’s what I wanted. I wanted them [black academics] to have their flowers right now, to be able to say, ‘No, I do exist, and here’s proof that I exist because this art piece has me in it.’” The first season of GROUNDS can be found on Anchor, YouTube, Soundcloud, and wherever you get your podcasts. The second season of GROUNDS was funded by Virginia Humanities and will be released later this Spring.
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Equitable Entry Into the CBD and Marijuana Industry by Sarad Davenport with Yolanda Rush As the American economy prepares for a boom in the cannabis, hemp, and marijuana industry, there remains uncertainty about how people of color and Black people, in particular, will be integrated as owners in the burgeoning market. For many Black people who have suffered from excessive sentencing in the years of marijuana prohibition, it is mind-bogglingly ironic that the people who have suffered most appear to be being blocked out from participating in the new cannabis economy. Yolanda Rush of Otha George Hemp & Wellness, a new Blackowned CBD company said, “It
is already a multi-billion dollar industry.” Yolanda’s interest in the CBD or cannabidiol business came as a result of her work on her day-job. She went on to say that she noticed that right around the time that CBD legalization happened across the United States, law firms began launching CBD and Hemp practice groups. “People began flocking to the practice group[s] and began making a killing.” Brookings Institute reported that before the new Farm Bill of 2018, “federal law did not
differentiate hemp from other cannabis plants, all of which were effectively made illegal in 1937 under the Marihuana Tax Act and formally made illegal in 1970 under the Controlled Substances Act—the latter banned cannabis of any kind.” But the 2018 Farm Bill allowed for the manufacturing and production of hemp products but with the strict restriction that products couldn’t have a THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol) level of higher than 0.3 percent. For context, THC is the main psychoactive compound in cannabis that produces the feeling of being ‘high’. Yolanda went on to say
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many of the law firm’s jobs is to give guidance to manufacturing and trucking. “It was strictly White people and they were making a crapload of money. I started to recognize that Black people were being shut out of the marijuana industry. Black people needed to be there. We were late for the party.” Entering into the CBD marketplace was not only business for Yolanda, it was personal. The interview took a more somber tone when she revealed, “Personally, my father passed in 2014.” Chemo wasn’t working well for him and the doctors eventually green-lit marijuana. “He said it made him feel better,” she said. “My dad’s name is George Otha, so I flipped it around and named my company after my father.” Not only did her father use it to help him through his cancer diagnosis, but Yolanda also added, “I had family who used it socially.” We shared a laugh about how social use of marijuana is very common in the African American community, yet it was a source of
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relentless criminalization until more recently. “I started doing my own research. I know about this personally and professionally. This is a billion-dollar industry,” said Yolanda. “People were getting locked up for years. This plant has been around for thousands and thousands of years. The government and states are involved now and they are making a lot of money.” The obvious interest of the government is the tax revenue that will continue to line the coffers of states across the country. The estimated tax revenue for marijuana in California alone in 2018 was $300 million, so collecting these taxes could help many states remain solvent even through lean times. Otha George Hemp & Wellness has a host of products on their website such as full-spectrum CBD oil, CBD bath bombs, CBD topicals to treat inflammation of joints and muscles, and also CBD gummies. They even have a line of CBD honey and pre-rolled cigarettes. “All of our products have 0.3% THC or less.” It appears that Virginia Governor Ralph
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Northam has put a law on the table to legalize recreational marijuana and Yolanda believes that this pending legislation provides an opportunity for BIPOC. “A lot of Black and Brown people see this as reparations and a way to build wealth. We are still being shut out of conversations and that needs to change.” Yolanda emphasizes the importance of staying abreast of the rapidly changing laws. “Those laws change sometimes weekly and daily. If we stay on top of the laws and regulations then there is a lot of money to be made.” As a final note, Yolanda says that one can enter the CBD market with as small as a $5,000-$10,000 investment, but leaves this caveat, “My greatest expense thus far has been attorney fees. It’s no joke.” Learn more and buy CBD products at Otha George Hemp & Wellness, LLC www.othageorge.com
VINEGAR HILL MAGAZINE 2021 SPECIAL EDITION
Have you been previously incarcerated? Do you need money to pay court debt, start a business, or for down-payment assistance?
THE FOUNTAIN FUND MAY BE ABLE TO HELP.
We provide low-interest loans (3-5%) to provide the elevation you need.
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To learn more, call Martize Tolbert, our Client Navigator, at 434-234-3600.
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VINEGAR HILL MAGAZINE 2021 SPECIAL EDITION
Ally
Manny
Seth
Cultivate Charlottesville
Rosy
Lynaisha
2020 Food Justice Interns
Food justice is helping our community by making it easy for everyone to access food and coming together and talking to bigger organizations to make a change Keyshanna
Aina
Hallie
DaTayveyus
BriAsia
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Circa 1956 at The HIPP on the famous 2nd Street in Richmond, Virginia
Hidden In Plain Site: Richmond is a VR exploration of distinct but easy to overlook sites around Richmond, VA, that tells the story of the Black experience throughout history. hiddeninplainsite.org The HiPS™ VR Experience is curated by: TM
Just visit hiddeninplainsite.org and
EXPERIENCE HiPS™ IN THREE WAYS!
LET’S MAKE HISTORY ™
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VINEGAR HILL MAGAZINE 2021 SPECIAL EDITION
OCULUS
DESKTOP
MOBILE
The Words of a President Really Do Matter by Rev. Dr. George A. Bates, JD
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AP Photo/John Minchillo (Licenced)
When President Lyndon B. Johnson said, “We Shall Overcome” as the last line of a speech following the horrible beatings of non-violent Black civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus bridge on March 7, 1965, it echoed a resolve from the “head of State” that open racial hostility America will not be tolerated. It was a new beginning for any U. S. President to openly oppose racism in any form. From that day forward the Johnson Administration got passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 1968 Civil Rights Act for Fair Housing and many more measures to end America’s racism against people of color. The compassion of one dedicated leader of a nation with its many advocates of racial justice including Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, and civil rights activists John Lewis, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Andrew Young, Stokeley Carmichael
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and many more who urged Johnson to move forward on this great cause. Likewise some twenty-two (22) years later, Pres. Ronald A. Reagan told Michal Gorbachev to “tear down the Berlin Wall” on June 12, 1987. Much of the free world joined Reagan to urge Gorbachev, the then President of the Soviet Union to allow Germany to reunite as one nation to remove this wall of separation. Approximately two and one-half (2 ½) years later, the German people began to tear this wall down on November 9, 1989, without Soviet opposition intervening! The people of the world united around this cause to make it a reality—all because one man stepped out of the shadows to register his support for the same. Sadly, the previous President of the United States
VINEGAR HILL MAGAZINE 2021 SPECIAL EDITION
(POTUS) Donald J. Trump has not been inclined to speak to a cause or movement that unites our citizens for a popular common good. Upon his perusing of the opposing sides at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, Trump opined that “there were many good people on both sides.” He just could not bring himself to publicly oppose the white supremacist marching with guns against ordinary citizens who were against rallying America in support of racism! He could not grasp the mood of a nation that has been trying to free itself from the tragic racial past of the 1960s. Perhaps, he does not know our history well enough to appreciate the benefits of a united America. Some have compared Trump’s campaign to “Make America Great” similar to the strategy of Adolf Hitler to brainwash the German citizens of the 1930s into thinking that they were the “master race.” I refuse to believe that Trump is that intelligent and devious enough to formulate a concise theory to brainwash millions of Americans. What I do believe is that he has promoted his beliefs and desires all of his life in selfish ways to completely omit any thought that there are valid opinions to the contrary of him! Trump has lived all his life in a world that did not allow other opinions to defy and defeat him. Hence, his followers are nurtured just like he has been groomed, that is, if you do not agree with him, you are his enemy!
dismiss the detractors as lunatics, fanatics, and imbeciles. It was perhaps his lack of understanding of this fundamental trait of American democracy that led to his loss to President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice-President Elect Kamala Harris in 2020! You cannot ignore the “will of all of the people” constantly and expect to remain in the majority. Trump came close to admitting that he was human and had human frailties during the late Summer of 2020 when he murmured that he could have possibly had a better response to the covid-19 virus. He only said it once then he caught himself and returned to his usual self-report card that he has done more than anyone could have done under the circumstances. No American President in history has allowed the far-right extremist to align themselves with him. The day after the tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, David Duke former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan declared that Trump was their “moral leader.” The press and the President’s critics waited and waited for his vehement denial that he was their leader. It never came!
In American democracy, the public has a right under the Constitution to disagree with leadership and voice their opposition. Trump silences all of his detractors with denial and derision and, if you work for him, with termination. Likewise, his followers embrace the same posture that there are no other viewpoints but their’s and w w w. v i n e g a r h i l l m a g a z i n e . c o m | V I N E G A R H I L L M A G A Z I N E 2 7
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VINEGAR HILL MAGAZINE 2021 SPECIAL EDITION