Building workers' power in Roanoke, VA
Virginia had no public local police force until 1932, before then, policing was almost totally a private affair. The protection of private property & reinforcing the white supremacist social order were & are the two major functions of police in America. Roanoke has its contribution to that history in the form of the Baldwin-Felts Detective... Continue Reading →
(photo: James Rucker, Langston Hughes in Madrid | credit: Langston Hughes Estate) Here is James Bernard “Bunny” Rucker (1912-1992), born in Roanoke, Virginia, raised in Columbus, Ohio, veteran of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Spanish Civil War (as a volunteer with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade), and World War II (three bronze stars and a purple heart), one-time Communist... Continue Reading →
The United States, like most western industrial democratic experiments, underwent an iteration of the intensive land redevelopment process often known as “urban renewal” in the postwar period. Under the auspices of liberal progress, massive amounts of civic space were reconfigured to address “urban blight,” facilitate the growth of highway systems, and to enable faster connective... Continue Reading →
"Who came first? There have been people living in what we today call Virginia for many thousands of years. There is mounting evidence from archaeological data ascertained from the Cactus Hill site, in SE Virginia, that pre-Clovis culture existed in what is today Virginia over 16,000 years ago. People lived in small units or bands... Continue Reading →