AP
When the door opened at West County Detention Facility for Tamisha Walker, it was dark. After six months in jail, Walker was free. But she was alone. No one was there to pick her up. All she had was a bus ticket and a bag. “You just get on a bus,” Walker said. “And it’s a long, lonely ride.” Jeff Rutland knows the lonely freedom Walker spoke of. He’s reminded of it every time he sees a released inmate walk…
In the summer of 1975, Richmond Councilman Nat Bates received a call from Ben Brown, a Democratic campaign organizer in Atlanta. Brown needed Bates’ support rallying African American voters behind his candidate, Jimmy Carter, a little known peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia who had just finished his term as governor and was seeking the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Bates was split. Back in California, incumbent governor Jerry Brown was also running for the Democratic presidential ticket, and Richmond councilmembers were…
“Knock! Knock!” Compared to the red door, the woman’s head and shoulders, blurry through the window, look enormous. The weather outside is ominous, dark and cloudy. “Who’s there?” The door opens. The giant (surprise!) is City Council candidate Marilyn Langlois, and this is the inside fold of a slick red and olive political flier. Don’t vote for Langlois, the ad implores the reader—“She wants to raise your family’s taxes!” and, “She even refused to pay her own taxes!” The real…
On a night when Barack Obama and Mitt Romney held most voters’ attention, the four candidates for the West Contra Costa Unified School District board spoke Tuesday to about 15 people at a candidate forum at Murphy Elementary School in Richmond. Todd Groves, Robert Studdiford, Antonio Medrano and Randy Enos are vying for two seats on the school board. “I thought all of them were very articulate and very knowledgeable,” said moderator Jackie Coulter-Peebles, a member of the League of…
Eduardo Martinez sits at the front desk of the Richmond Progressive Alliance hunched over a pile of donor thank-you letters. It’s midday and the quiet of the office is punctuated by the hum of vehicles that pass by on Macdonald Avenue and the occasional police siren in the distance. As Martinez picks up the letters and shuffles them a bit, several stray postcards—decorated with antique cars and a family of raccoons and littered throughout the pile—pop out. The postcards are…
There wasn’t anything unusual or exciting about the white shirt, gray slacks, black shoes or the red, diamond patterned tie that Jael P. Myrick wore. Even the way he blended in with people didn’t make him seem out of the ordinary. Myrick is to all appearances a regular guy. But in a field of City Council candidates where many of the big names are part of a deep partisan division, the 27-year-old Myrick hopes his youth and regular-guyness brings a…
In Richmond, a city in which 51 percent of students in grades 5, 7 and 9 were obese or overweight in 2010 and where two-thirds of students are from families near and below the national poverty line, how to feed the children, what to feed the children — and if the children choose to eat what they’re fed — has created a world of dietary perplexity.
With exactly three weeks until the upcoming election, Richmond’s key political players were out in full swing and the council’s division on full display at Tuesday night’s meeting. The main source of tension for the evening was a recent fight between Corky Booze and Richmond Progressive Alliance member David Moore. The much-disputed incident between the two men resulted in an exchange of blows outside the Sept. 20 Point Richmond Neighborhood Council’s Candidates Night forum. Councilmember Nat Bates placed an item…
On Saturday, students from Making Waves teamed up with The Watershed Project for a trash assessment and cleanup effort at Baxter Creek, which was recently named one of California’s trashiest waterways. From cardboard and paper, to styrofoam and plastic bags—and even the occasional shoe—students and other volunteers removed debris and freshened up the area. Richmond Confidential caught the action in the video above.