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Articles by Margaret Edds
Edds: The death of the Richmond Free Press
Researching a book about Richmond and Virginia civil rights icons Oliver W. Hill and Spottswood Robinson III some years back, I came to a quick realization. The story could not be told — at least not with the same nuance, humanity and depth — without the archives of the city’s former Black newspaper, the Richmond Afro-American. The cover of “We Face The Dawn” by Margaret Edds.
Commentary: In Trump, faith leaders face another moral test
Seldom in recent times has the old union organizing song — “Which Side Are You On?” — echoed so loudly. This time the targets aren’t mine workers, however, but millions of Americans, including prominent religious leaders who must confront the Trump administration’s cruel plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Who will stand with “the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings ...
'Equity' isn't the enemy, racial injustice is
T he recent maelstrom over the future of diversity efforts in Virginia state government boils down to a dispute over two words: equity vs. opportunity. When Virginia's Chief Diversity Officer Martin Brown proclaimed at the Virginia Military Institute that "DEI is dead. ... Let's take a moment to kill that cow," presumably he was not abandoning the "D" or the "I" in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
'Equity' isn't the enemy, racial injustice is
T he recent maelstrom over the future of diversity efforts in Virginia state government boils down to a dispute over two words: equity vs. opportunity. When Virginia's Chief Diversity Officer Martin Brown proclaimed at the Virginia Military Institute that "DEI is dead. ... Let's take a moment to kill that cow," presumably he was not abandoning the "D" or the "I" in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Blinded by what we can't see
Critical race theory emerged as the bête noire of the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial campaign. The concept ought not to be taught, candidate Glenn Youngkin said to loud applause, because it is inherently divisive. It also might make children (white) feel badly about themselves. That's possibly true, though not necessarily - just as it also is true that Americans are almost daily assaulted with evidence that critical race theory is more than theoretical.
Opinion: Don’t backpedal on pledge to teach all of Virginia’s history Original
Now is the time for Gov. Glenn Youngkin to make good on a major education promise — the one about teaching all of our history, the good and the bad. Taking office last January, Youngkin lost no time acting on his campaign pledge to quash the presence, however minimal, of critical race theory in Virginia’s public schools. As promised, he also has promoted a louder voice for parents in classroom instruction.
Barbara Rose Johns Powell
Barbara Rose Johns was born on March 6, 1935, in New York City, the first of Violet Adele Spencer Johns and Robert Melvin Johns’s five children. The young couple had moved to Harlem from their birthplaces in Prince Edward County to find work during the Great Depression. Violet Johns’s employment as a domestic worker and Robert Johns’s as a handyman did little to improve their finances, so when their daughter was fourteen months old, the couple returned to Prince Edward County.
Spottswood William Robinson III (1916–1998) - Encyclopedia Virginia
Early Years Robinson was born in Richmond on July 26, 1916, to Spottswood William Robinson Jr., a lawyer and real estate entrepreneur, and Inez Clements Robinson, a homemaker educated at Howard University. He had two younger sisters. Robinson’s grandfather, Spottswood William Robinson, was an enslaved man who, according to family lore, walked away from his owner’s farm in Spotsylvania County and became part of Richmond’s substantial prewar, free black population.
Margaret Edds column: Recognition of two legal titans is long overdue
The campaign to reclaim Richmond’s full history leaps forward Thursday, Feb. 6., with the unveiling of historic markers honoring Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson III, African American lawyers whose work helped transform 20th century America. The ceremony — scheduled for 2:30 p.m. outside the federal courthouse at 1100 Bank St. — comes in the wake of Gov.
Margaret Edds column: How would Oliver Hill regard Virginia's current scandals?
In six-plus years writing a book about Virginia civil rights lawyers Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson, one of the puzzling small mysteries I came across was that Hill had supported conservative Democrat Mills Godwin Jr. in his victorious race over Republican Linwood Holton in the 1965 gubernatorial contest. Yes, that Mills Godwin, the unapologetic champion in the Virginia Senate of Massive Resistance to school desegregation during critical years in the late 1950s.
Brink and Edds: Let's set the record straight on Capitol Square
By Robert Brink and Margaret Edds Brink, a Democrat, represented Arlington in the House of Delegates for 17 years. He is a member of the Capitol Square Preservation Council. Edds, a retired journalist, is the author of “We Face the Dawn,” a biography of Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson. On the grounds of Capitol Square in Richmond, a few hundred yards separate the statue honoring Harry F. Byrd Sr., erected in 1976, and the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial, dedicated in 2008.
Opinion | Let’s set the record straight on Capitol Square
The Harry F. Byrd Sr. statue in Richmond. (Gregory Schneider/The Washington Post) January 18 at 4:13 PM Robert Brink, a Democrat, represented Arlington in the Virginia House of Delegates for 17 years. He is a member of the Capitol Square Preservation Council. Margaret Edds, a retired journalist, is the author of “We Face the Dawn,” a biography of Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson. On the grounds of Capitol Square in Richmond, a few hundred yards separate the statue honoring Harry F.
Home Sweet Home
In the summer of 1978, a Richmond bus driver named Paul Allen Coles visited the Camelot Townhouses near Regency Mall in western Henrico County looking for a new home. A rental agent informed Coles, who is black, that there were no vacancies at Camelot and politely directed him to the adjacent Colonial Court Apartments. Within hours, a white applicant heard a different story. Housing was, indeed, available at Camelot — for him. The discrepancy was not hard to explain.
OPINION: A Case for Integration
The two Virginians in the small brain trust that executed the national assault on school segregation in the early 1950s disagreed about where to start. Spottswood Robinson III believed the first line of attack should be classrooms themselves. Oliver Hill preferred tackling segregated housing first.
Margaret Edds column: Oliver Hill: a most worthy namesake for this Richmond school
As the Richmond School Board weighs the renaming of J.E.B. Stuart Elementary School, it need look no further than the suggestion of Superintendent Jason Kamras: Oliver White Hill.Hill, who died in 2007 at age 100, was the face and soul of the civil rights movement in Virginia for many years. While his various law partners — Judge Spottswood W. Robinson III and Samuel W.
Margaret Edds: History shows that teenagers can change the world
CAN A GROUP of teenagers fed up with injustice and the frozen mindset of antediluvian elders change America?Why, yes, they can.Because once they did.As students across America plan a March 14 school walkout in the wake of a gunman’s slaughter of 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., their fury and solidarity bring to mind a smaller, stalwart band that exited a rural high school in Southside Virginia on April 23, 1951, and refused to return until things...
Edds: Oliver Hill never flinched
Edds, a retired journalist, is the author of “We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow,” released this week by the University of Virginia Press.As we face the tortured political landscape of 2018, Oliver White Hill offers a useful model of citizenship.In April 1943, just months before his induction into the U. S.
A Battle on the Horizon
Margaret Edds’ “We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson and the Legal Team That Dismantled Jim Crow,” published by the University of Virginia Press, will be released Feb. 6, 2018. Edds will speak at the Library of Virginia on Thursday, Feb. 8. Oliver Hill arrived in Richmond on the first day of May 1939, his 32nd birthday. Global events dominated morning headlines.
Edds: Oliver Hill never flinched
By Margaret EddsEdds, a retired journalist, is the author of “We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow,” released this week by the University of Virginia Press.As we face the tortured political landscape of 2018, Oliver White Hill offers a useful model of citizenship.In April 1943, just months before his induction into the U. S.
We Face the Dawn
You are here Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team That Dismantled Jim Crow Margaret Edds BUY Cloth · 424 pp. · 6 × 9 · ISBN 9780813940441 · $29.95 · Feb 2018 BUY Ebook · 424 pp. · ISBN 9780813940458 · $29.95 · Feb 2018 BUY Paper · 424 pp.
How Jim Crow Codified the Bigotry Already Woven Into the Fabric of Virginia | Cover Story | Style Weekly - Richmond, VA local news, arts, and events.
Oliver White Hill and Spottswood William Robinson III, who were born into early 20th century Richmond, became the nation’s most significant grass-roots legal team to erase Jim Crow segregation in the 1940s and ’50s. A forthcoming book, “We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow,” by Margaret Edds and set for publication in February by the University of Virginia Press, details the lawyers’ lives and contributions.
Doug Wilder's Campaign
RICHMOND, Va. -On a cloudless late October day, Paul Goldman steered his cluttered compact through noontime traffic in the Confederate capital and contemplated the storm gathering on his personal horizon. Goldman, a transplanted New Yorker who had almost single-handedly managed Douglas Wilder's historic campaign for lieutenant governor of Virginia, knew that victory astonishingly was within grasp.
Another America | Alicia Patterson Foundation
SUNFLOWER COUNTY, Miss. -The faces at the courthouse in this languid and historic central Delta county seem largely untouched by time. On Mondays, Joe Baird, John Parker, Jim Corder, Edgar Donahoe and Billy Cummins gather for supervisors' meetings. Like generations of local officeholders before them, they are mostly farmers, men whose fortunes spring from the dusky, alluvial soil swept here thousands of years ago on the floodwaters of the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers.
Life In The Black Belt
TUSKEGEE, Ala. -In 1974, on the day the mayor and the councilmen christened the Tuskegee Industrial Park with flowery speeches and a stone slab marker, Jim Roberts stood in the doorway of his rustic, pine-sheltered grocery and watched. Promises of new industry and jobs and a better life drifted across the highway, and Roberts felt the breeze of change. "At least, I was hoping so," he recalled.
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