‘Votercade’ stops in RVA
Free Press staff report | 10/20/2022, 6 p.m.
The #10MillionMoreBlackVoters and the Arc of Voter Justice Bus Tour made its way through Richmond with an initial stop on the campus of Virginia Union University on Oct. 17.
Marcus Arbery, the father of Ahmaud Arbery, the young Black man who was murdered by three white men on Feb. 23, 2020, while jogging in Still Shores, Ga., briefly spoke to people gathered in front of the L. Douglas Wilder Library. “I had to find out the hard way how serious voting is. I lost my child,” he said. ‘When people bond together we make stuff happen. Let’s get together and let’s make something happen at that poll.”
The “Votercade” also passed down the city’s Brookland Park Boulevard before stopping at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. The tour, led by the Transformative Justice Coalition, started Oct. 8 in Minneapolis and will end in Florida Oct. 21 after stops in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The coalition’s national partner organizations include the National Newspaper Publishers Association, Rainbow/Push Coalition, Black Voters Matter, Concerned Black Men of America, Hip Hop Caucus, League of Women Voters, and the African-American Policy Forum’s 25-city Arc of Voter Justice Tour.
Along the way participants register to vote, check their eligibility to vote and read banned books as “we transform voting and the voting experience,” according to announcements about the free, nonpartisan event.
