Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads — the state’s two largest metro areas — are losing jobs, and Virginia as a whole is seeing some of the slowest economic growth in the country, according to statewide economic reports that came out in October. 

This means it’s time for Southwest and Southside Virginia to shine, said Rachel Yost, executive director of the Blue Ridge Innovation Corridor, an emerging organization that aims to promote the economic strengths of the southern and western regions of the state. 

BRIC focuses on the general region that encompasses Danville, Martinsville, Blacksburg and Roanoke, highlighting this swath of the state as a hub for innovation, workforce development and economic power. 

“By building this mega-region, we can become Virginia’s fourth economic engine, behind Northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads,” Yost said. “And in fact, those core engines are lagging behind peer cities. So we need a fourth economic engine to help drive Virginia’s economy.”

Conversations about establishing this mega-region began about three years ago, prompted by the need for infrastructure investment in these areas, Yost said. 

The idea for BRIC formed after that, and Yost said the organization has “really kicked it into high gear” in 2025, incorporating as a nonprofit, recruiting board members, conducting research and sharing the story of this region across the state. 

Lots of folks have an outdated understanding of the region, thinking only of the decline in industry that happened decades ago, Yost said.

“They don’t have an appreciation for all of the innovation happening in this part of the state,” she said. “This all started because there was a need for investment, and the investment hadn’t been coming because people didn’t understand what this area has to offer.”

There are significant industry investments coming to Danville and Martinsville, and the Blacksburg and Roanoke areas are becoming known for biomedical and life sciences innovation and research. 

By building a mega-region between these localities, “all of a sudden we have an incredible story to tell and a reason to pay attention,” Yost said. 

‘Rolling up our sleeves’ in 2025

Much has changed in the past year for BRIC. Last summer, the group was in the early stages of forming a board of directors and working to become a nonprofit.

The group has since obtained 501(c)(3) status, written bylaws and articles of incorporation, and has created an executive committee of about 19 people and a board of 26 more business and institutional leaders. Those numbers are growing all the time, Yost said. 

The executive committee is co-chaired by Ben Davenport, chairman of First Piedmont Corp. and Davenport Energy, and Heywood Fralin, chairman of Roanoke-based Retirement Unlimited, which operates senior living communities. Two research institutes in Roanoke and Blacksburg bear the Fralin family name.

The committee was meeting weekly for about three or four months, she said, and it has now shifted to every other week. 

“We’ve really rolled up our sleeves to help develop this narrative, conduct this research and identify other organizations to recruit to be on our board,” Yost said.

In 2026, the group will be launching its Vision 2050 initiative, which is a strategic plan to “unlock the full economic potential of the corridor” in a multi-phased approach that includes community engagement. 

It’s a shared vision for the region and includes detailed implementation plans for its goals, Yost said.

“We want to arrive at a playbook for how we can become that economic engine, focusing on becoming a hub for advanced manufacturing, life sciences, biotech, national security and defense innovation,” she said. 

Vision 2050 outlines a game plan to market the BRIC region across the country, pinpoint gaps in workforce, infrastructure and innovation where investment can be targeted, transform industry recruitment and mobilize collaboration between the business, higher education and government sectors. 

“We’re being really thoughtful and strategic about how we want to grow,” Yost said. “What does that growth look like, what are our needs going to be, how can we fund it, and how can we make this sustainable and long-term?”

The group is primarily business-focused, though it has been working with local and regional economic development groups and officials to ensure that it’s aligned with their goals. 

Part of Vision 2050 focuses on complementing the work that local economic development officials are doing without duplicating it, said Becky Chipman, a director with S.I.R.

S.I.R. is a Richmond-based consultant that began working with BRIC in its early stages to help the group attract infrastructure investment. Yost, in addition to being executive director of BRIC, is also a managing partner at S.I.R. 

In talking to local economic development officials, “it’s become apparent that there’s a really strong desire for BRIC,” Chipman said.

Uniting businesses, industries and their stakeholders across the BRIC mega-region will create a “powerful shared voice” that can call for investment to drive economic growth, according to Chipman.

There’s a lot of momentum and enthusiasm in the region, she said — industrial sites that are getting attention in Martinsville, the U.S. Navy presence and shipbuilding workforce pipeline program in Danville, the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute in Roanoke and the Virginia Tech Fralin Life Sciences Institute in Blacksburg. 

Legislators in Richmond and other statewide elected officials have also expressed enthusiasm for BRIC, Yost said. 

Gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger mentioned BRIC in a written response to questions from Cardinal News earlier this year. 

“I’ve heard directly from local leaders and community members in Southside Virginia about just how vital improvements to 220 would be in particular to further development in the region, including bringing in more local advanced manufacturing and supporting the Blue Ridge Innovation Corridor,” Spanberger wrote. “We can’t ignore the nuts and bolts required to make new opportunities happen.”

Yost said that Gov. Glenn Youngkin “sees the value” in investing in the BRIC region.

“We have this incredible momentum, and we’re just trying to keep it full throttle,” she said. 

Interest in the region is here, but infrastructure is lagging behind

The importance of adequate infrastructure to the BRIC initiative can’t be overstated, Yost said.

There are more than 710,000 people in the BRIC region — more than Prince William, Virginia Beach and Loudoun County, according to a brochure about the initiative. And there are 3.1 million more people who live within an hour’s drive of the region. 

This propels the BRIC region’s ability to support new jobs, the brochure says.

“The region is growing, and infrastructure is not keeping up,” she said. “People are moving here. Companies are interested in locating here. But the challenge is that there’s not necessarily the infrastructure to accommodate that.”

The group has been conducting an infrastructure investment study that will point to specific priorities within the region. 

It will address roads, railways, housing, energy and workforce infrastructure needs, with an initial focus on U.S. 220 between Southside Virginia and Greensboro, North Carolina, which needs significant improvements, Yost said.

U.S. 220 is a “main artery” of the BRIC region, she said.

“When you hit the North Carolina-Virginia border, it’s no longer an interstate, and it ends up even becoming a two-lane, windy road in some parts,” Yost said. “You’ve got these big trucks that are traveling along this artery, and it’s not ideal because it’s windy and it’s got stoplights.”

Industrial parks like Commonwealth Crossing in the Martinsville-Henry County area and Summit View in Franklin County are adjacent to U.S. 220. 

As development locates at those sites, there will be more traffic on that road — both trucks with equipment and people traveling to and from work, Yost said. 

“It starts to trickle down, and when companies come to look [at these sites], are they seeing places for their people to live, are they seeing the infrastructure in place?” she said. 

The brochure calls upgrades to U.S. 220 “necessary and urgent.”

Infrastructure needs in the future will likely include energy and housing, Yost said, but U.S. 220 is the only one that has been officially designated as a BRIC priority. 

And eventually, the infrastructure conversations will expand outside of Virginia, Chipman said. 

“We’re trying to think beyond borders, and that also means state borders,” she said. “We need to look at what’s happening in Greensboro, because parts of the BRIC region are in that labor shed.”

The Vision 2050 plan explores infrastructure initiatives that could help the region thrive in both Virginia and North Carolina, Chipman said.

The post ‘Virginia’s fourth economic engine’: Effort to connect Southwest and Southside localities makes progress appeared first on Cardinal News.

What used to be farmland around Harrisonburg is now growing subdivisions, strip malls and something even more unusual in the Shenandoah Valley: Democratic voters.

In less than two decades’ time, Harrisonburg has flipped from being a reliably Republican city to an even more reliably Democratic one — the classic blue dot in a bright red sea. As recently as 2009, Harrisonburg cast 57.7% of its votes for the Republican candidate for governor. By last fall, the city voted 61.4% for the Democratic candidate for president.

Harrisonburg’s Republican vote has stayed about the same, in terms of total number of votes, but the population growth that had pumped up city’s population by 28% since 2000 has brought in overwhelmingly Democratic voters to a city now dominated by James Madison University — a school which long ago expanded beyond its original grounds to turn what had been forestland across Interstate 81 into a second campus.

Now, all those population changes could be felt all the way to Richmond.

Out of 100 House of Delegates districts, only two of those outside the urban crescent are considered competitive this year, at least measured by which districts have been officially targeted by either Democrats or Republicans.

One of those is in the New River and Roanoke valleys, where Democrat Lily Franklin is challenging Republican incumbent Chris Obenshain in a rematch of their 2023 race. That was a close race before (Obenshain won by 183 votes) and will likely be close again, no matter who prevails.

The other race is in Harrisonburg and part of Rockingham County, where Democrat Andrew Payton is challenging Republican incumbent Tony Wilt. The district — House District 34 — is still considered “leans Republican” by the Virginia Public Access Project. It voted 52.7% for Donald Trump last year and Wilt holds a significant financial advantage — ($245,284 cash on hand at the end of August to $88,347 for Payton). Still, the fact that Democrats have chosen to target this race at all shows how much the community is changing. Almost exactly half the voters in the district (50.09%) are in Harrisonburg. In a year where polls show Democratic voters are more enthusiastic so far than Republican ones, it’s not hard to imagine the district tilting Democratic.

In many ways, Payton’s campaign is a textbook Democratic challenge this year. Much like Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger, he emphasizes the theme of “affordability.” His advertising hits Wilt for voting against expanding Medicaid and against creating a Prescription Drug Affordability Board, and for being too friendly with electric utilities.

Republican legislators felt that Medicaid expansion was too expensive and that the drug board wouldn’t be effective. The part about utilities seems to turn on Wilt’s vote for a bill that would allow Appalachian Power to recover the cost of developing a small modular nuclear reactor, or SMR; that depends on who you think should foot the bill — ratepayers or investors — or perhaps how you feel about nuclear energy in general. For what it’s worth, Wilt’s district is not in Appalachian’s service territory, so his constituents wouldn’t have been affected, but many Democrats these days are looking for ways to run against power companies.

One thing that does set Payton’s campaign apart, though, is a line of attack that essentially accuses Wilt of being on the take. Many campaigns have a sharp edge to them, but usually they’re over policy differences. The accusations here are ones we don’t see very much, so let’s look into them. There are two particular charges:

The charge: ‘Tony Wilt voted to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on major projects benefitting his company.‘

The reality: Wilt voted to raise his own taxes.

The footnotes in the ad cite House Bill 2718 in 2019 and an April 11, 2019, issue of Bond Buyer.

The bill in question dealt with the creation of the Interstate 81 Corridor Improvement Fund. The bill created a regional gas tax and other fees to help fund improvements along I-81. Most Republicans opposed the bill because of the increased taxes but enough supported it for the measure to pass the GOP-controlled House by 58-39. Among those voting yes were several Republicans along the I-81 corridor, including Wilt. It went on to pass the Senate 22-14 (with three Republican votes) and was signed into law by then-Gov. Ralph Northam. If you travel along I-81 today and see construction underway, this bill is part of the reason why.

So how did Wilt allegedly benefit from this vote? Here’s what that Bond Buyer article referenced in the ad says:

Delegate Tony Wilt, R-Harrisonburg, whose family is in the trucking business, said funding I-81 improvements was a top priority for him. He voted against the bills when they proposed using
tolls, but later voted for them when the plan was changed to taxes and fees.

While Wilt said the bill will still pose additional costs on his family’s trucking business, “there is
absolutely a cost to all citizens and businesses along the corridor if we continue to do nothing.”

“This plan is a more equitable approach than some previously considered and will fund
improvements that result in more efficient traffic flow and a decrease in the terrible loss of life so many families have had to endure,” he said.

To believe that Wilt or his company benefited from this vote, you’d have to believe that he or they would have paid more in tolls than in taxes. That seems impossible to figure out, though, since no toll rate was ever set. The original bill set no toll rates, merely creating the authority to impose them. Tolls proved quite unpopular, though, which is why tolls were later stripped out of the bill and a regional gas tax was substituted. In the end, Wilt voted for a bill that Bond Buyer says “will still pose additional costs on his family’s trucking business.”

Feel free to see this differently, but that does not sound to me as if the bill benefited his company, except to the extent that the trucks could run on a better interstate with all the rest of us. In theory, Wilt and his trucks might have wound up paying more under the version of the bill he voted for than the one he opposed. He and his trucks could have avoided tolls by not driving on I-81; with a regional gas tax, he and his truckers can’t avoid paying more for gas no matter where they’re driving in the valley.

Wilt could more fairly take credit for some of the improvements underway on I-81 and claim a “profile in courage” vote for bucking the party line to side with Democrats on the funding plan.

The charge: ‘Wilt took $700,000 in taxpayer loans and kept them.‘

The reality: He paid them back when most other borrowers didn’t.

The source line here credits Pro Publica from April 8, 2020. This references a database of Paycheck Protection Program loans that were given out during the early days of the pandemic so that companies could keep paying employees even if they had no or reduced revenue. The goal was to avoid both mass unemployment and business bankruptcies. That database does show that Wilt’s concrete company, Superior Concrete, took out a Paycheck Protection Program loan for $702,000 on April 8, 2020.

To be fair to the Payton campaign, that database entry doesn’t show the rest of the story: Wilt says he paid the loan back in full, with interest, on Oct. 26, 2020. When I asked for documentation, Wilt’s campaign shared copies of the checks.

Pro Publica did not respond to my inquiry about why its entry for Superior Concrete is not updated when other loans are.

In paying back the loans, Wilt was something of a rarity. The Small Business Administration reported in 2022 that 92% of the PPP loans were forgiven. A report this year by the human resources website Homebase says the forgiveness rate was up to 98% but did not cite a source.

Payton’s ad would not be wrong — if this were five years ago. As things stand now, though, Wilt could claim that he made sure his employees got paid through the pandemic — and then did something that very few other business owners did: He paid back the loan.

The rest of this particular ad stands on firm ground. If you disagree with Wilt’s votes on Medicaid expansion, the Prescription Drug Advisory Board or who should pay for development of small modular reactors in Appalachian Power’s service territory, then you have a viable alternative in Payton. Those are all standard policy differences that voters can and should make up their minds about. However, the allegations that Wilt voted for a bill to benefit his company and “took” taxpayer money seem misleading, at best.

Medicaid expansion happened before Cardinal was launched, but if you’re curious about the proposed Prescription Drug Affordability Board, you can read coverage by Cardinal health care reporter Emily Schabacker here and some of our early coverage about small modular nuclear reactors here.

People often ask me about various campaign ads that they see. I always tell them the same thing: You’re better off to ignore most of them, because they are not a reliable source of finding information about the candidates — no matter which side they’re on. If you do start paying attention to ads, I caution people to apply the same consumer skill to politics that they do to anything else. You wouldn’t take a commercial’s word that one particular car brand was better than another; you’d do some comparison shopping, you might even take it for a test drive. That’s obviously harder to do with politics; it’s taken me inquiries over several days to sort through the claims made here.

It’s been a long time since that part of the Shenandoah Valley has had a competitive General Assembly race. We have to go back 40 years to find a Democrat who won there: Paul Cline upset Phoebe Orebaugh when the Flood of ’85 kept many of her supporters from getting to the polls. Two years later, with more normal weather, Orebaugh returned to office with a wide margin and Republicans have been pretty secure since. A lot has changed demographically in the Shenandoah Valley since then to make this district competitive without a flood skewing the turnout. If voters today prefer the Democratic challenger over the Republican incumbent, it ought to be because they prefer his policies, not because they’ve fallen for two attack lines that don’t really hold up under scrutiny.

The post The Shenandoah Valley spawns a rare competitive race — and charges that an incumbent used his office to help himself. But did he? appeared first on Cardinal News.

Robert Gilbert was taking out the trash one night at his father’s restaurant in Chatham when two long black Cadillac limousines pulled up. 

It was 1960, and he was in his early 20s working at Gilbert’s Restaurant, which had garnered a reputation as a safe haven for Black travelers in the South during the Jim Crow era. 

Gilbert watched in awe as the driver of one of the limos opened the back door and out stepped Fats Domino, the iconic singer-songwriter, pianist and pioneer of rock and roll music. Now in his 80s, Gilbert calls this one of the most memorable moments of his life. 

“Fats Domino was my Elvis Presley,” he said. “I had all of his records.”

Gilbert remembers the singer coming into the restaurant, though it was almost closing time and practically empty, and eating several servings of his mother’s pinto beans and corn bread. He was mesmerized by how the ceiling fan flung flashes of light from Domino’s diamond ring.

Other singers like Lloyd Price and actors like James Earl Jones also ate at Gilbert’s Restaurant and sometimes even boarded at the Gilbert family home, which eventually became a tourist home with added rooms to accommodate all of the travelers. 

Black folks, famous or not, traveling through the South during segregation had very few safe places to stop, eat or lodge, Gilbert said. 

“Once you passed the Mason-Dixon line, you couldn’t find anywhere to go into,” he said. “I know this from experience. You might find a roadside stand, but most times, they would deny you any kind of service.”

Gilbert’s father, the Rev. Robert Gregory Gilbert, opened the restaurant in 1945 to provide a space for Black travelers and locals alike.

During the Jim Crow era, an annual guide called “The Negro Motorist Green Book” listed businesses and amenities where Black travelers would be welcome and safe.

Gilbert’s Restaurant was never included in the Green Book, Gilbert said, but it gained popularity through word of mouth throughout the second half of the 20th century, until it closed in 1999. 

Since then, the building has fallen into disrepair, and Gilbert was actually considering tearing it down until he learned about the state’s historic designations. 

After he applied with the help of local historian Ina Dixon, the restaurant was added to the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places earlier this year.

“The restaurant has always been locally beloved,” Dixon said in an email. And its inclusion on state and local historic registers helps the story of Gilbert’s “as a haven for civil rights and community” to be known to a wider audience. 

These listings also allow the building to qualify for historic tax credits, should it be renovated for a new use in the future, Dixon said. 

In June, the restaurant was also approved for a state highway marker, which will stand outside the building to recognize its history. The text for the marker was finalized at the Virginia Board of Historic Resources meeting Thursday, along with text for another local marker on the Danville Canal. 

“It makes me proud,” Gilbert said. “I’ve never been one to speak a lot about myself, but the fact that my mom and dad, people with such limited formal education, would be able to create something noted as historical, I’m proud of their achievement and I’m proud to be a part of it.”

Much more than a restaurant

When Gilbert’s father opened the restaurant 80 years ago, it was much more than an eatery. Back then, the business was spread across several buildings on North Main Street in Chatham and sold farming supplies, animal feed, motoring products, gasoline, produce and canned goods. 

In the early 1950s, Gilbert’s father combined everything under one roof in the building that still stands in the northern part of the Pittsylvania County town.

“He brought gas tanks out here, oil tanks,” Gilbert said. “When farmers killed cattle, we would grind the beef, slice up hams. But he always had a section for people to eat.”

This was before the U.S. interstate highway system was built, and one of the most direct routes between Washington and the Carolinas went right down Main Street in Chatham, Gilbert said. 

In addition to glamorous visitors and budding superstars, the restaurant and tourist home also saw many working professionals and students. 

“Several of my teachers stayed here at times, which was hard on me,” Gilbert said, laughing. 

Buses carrying students, athletic teams or band groups to and from Black colleges would stop by the restaurant, Gilbert remembers. 

He recalls Black lawyers staying at his home while litigating the 1949 Martinsville Seven trial, in which seven Black men were convicted and sentenced to death by all-white juries for the alleged rape of a white woman. They received a posthumous pardon by then-Gov. Ralph Northam in 2021. 

“[The lawyers] would sit around our dining room table, they made sure they had their coffee and they would discuss the case,” Gilbert said. 

And though it was a haven for the Black community and had a sign saying “For Coloreds” outside, white patrons also ate at the restaurant, he said. 

“They knew they could come in,” Gilbert said. “But we especially wanted Black folks to know they had a space they could go.”

Gilbert remembers growing up in Chatham during segregation, having to go to a side or rear window to order food from a restaurant, if it would serve him at all. 

It was also a time before most people had telephones in their homes, he said. People would come to the Gilbert family home, which did have a phone, to make calls. 

Gilbert’s father was a pastor at four local churches and worked as a builder to construct homes in the community, so he was a well-known figure in the area, Gilbert said. 

“He was a brilliant man. … He was pretty much a visionary,” he said. “According to my mom, he had about a fourth-grade education, but you’d never know it. His office is full of books, and he learned so much through self-study.”

Gilbert said he can still remember many of the sermons his father preached and recalls his passion for civic responsibility. 

The Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, ending voting barriers for African Americans. At the time, the legal voting age was 21, and Gilbert’s father made sure that his seven children registered to vote when they were of age. 

Gilbert took over the business in 1973 with his wife, Sandra, as his father’s health declined. The couple operated it primarily as a restaurant.

Sandra Gilbert often ran the business herself while Gilbert was working other jobs. She trained many of the employees and often hears Black residents of Chatham say their first job was at Gilbert’s Restaurant, she said. 

“We had fried chicken, spare ribs, mashed potatoes, potato salad, cornbread and all kinds of different desserts,” she said. “And chitlins, of course. We sold lots and lots of chitlins.”

Community groups, including the local chapter of the NAACP, also used the restaurant as a meeting space.

Decades after closing, historic value is recognized

The couple ran the restaurant until 1999, years after the death of Gilbert’s father in the 1980s. By that point, a bypass had been built that funneled travelers around Chatham, and fast-food restaurants had popped up around town, Robert Gilbert said. 

Plus, segregation was over.

“Blacks didn’t have to rely on us as much then,” he said. “They had choices. Shopping malls and fast food opened up, and everybody could go everywhere. We still had good business, but not as much traffic.”

The building still stands next to the home that housed so many travelers, where Gilbert still lives today.

For a while, he considered trying to fix up the restaurant building himself, but his plans were halted by Sandra Gilbert’s breast cancer diagnosis in 2017 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. 

During the pandemic, he decided he’d tear the building down, saying it had become “an eyesore.”

Gilbert said he told a few other Chatham residents about this decision, and they encouraged him to look into the state’s designations for historic landmarks instead. 

“I didn’t know it could have possible historic value,” he said. “When I was growing up, I didn’t realize I was living through this history.”

Finalizing the text for a state highway marker was the last step before erecting the marker. 

Gilbert and Dixon have been working with a local nonprofit, Chatham First, to pursue funding to stabilize the deteriorating building. 

Dixon said she hopes that the building’s listing on the state and national registers and the historic marker will galvanize community support for possible adaptive reuse of the structure.

The post Gilbert’s Restaurant in Chatham, once a safe haven for Black travelers, was almost torn down. Then it received national and state historic designations. appeared first on Cardinal News.

A wall-to-wall whiteboard in Todd Blake’s Lynchburg office tells the story of Park View Community Mission. 

Dry-erase smudges left behind from last week’s checklists peek through current updates printed in glossy black marker: 360 families served at the food pantry this week, 74 neighbors employed through the life skills institute this year, 1,000 students set to take backpacks of food home on the weekends. 

The truth is, Blake said, numbers that measure the demand for Park View’s services increase so quickly that it’s best to write them in a place where they can be erased and rewritten. 

In a time when the rising cost of living pushes more families toward Park View’s resources and the impact of federal funding cuts remains unknown, nothing can be marked in permanent ink, said Blake, the nonprofit’s executive director. 

The nonprofit has barely been able to keep up with demand at its food pantry in recent years, adapting its operations and budget where it can to meet local needs. Now, Blake fears that even higher demand prompted by federal changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program could push Park View past the tipping point of its capacity. 

“We pivot everyday,” Blake said. “Park View does that really well. But SNAP cuts will require more than a pivot. I can see it happening with my own eyes, what’s happening on the ground here.”

The true challenge is the uncertainty, Blake said. It’s impossible to plan when the numbers on your whiteboard change every day. 

More than two months after Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill, state and local leaders still have more questions than answers regarding how federal cuts will affect the Virginians who rely on SNAP to get food on the table.

One thing those leaders know for sure is that food is expensive, and the federal government is splitting the check with states for the first time in SNAP’s history. The legislation is expected to shift up to $352 million of costs from the federal government onto the state of Virginia by October 2027, according to an analysis conducted by Voices for Virginia’s Children. 

Local food bank and pantry leaders like Blake fear that they’ll be the ones actually footing the bill, as Virginians who lose their SNAP benefits or see them reduced will likely turn to charities for help.

“The charitable food distribution system was never prepared, nor are we prepared, to make up the difference. SNAP is supposed to be the first line of defense,” said Pamela Irvine, president and CEO of Feeding Southwest Virginia, a food bank based in Salem that distributes food to pantries across 26 counties. “But we’ll remain committed, and we want to provide hope, because we really believe there’s enough food, enough resources in this country that no one should go hungry.”

SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, is the country’s largest nutrition assistance program, according to a July report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The program provides low-income people with food assistance benefits that are calculated based on a person’s income, household composition and other factors. In fiscal year 2024, SNAP served 41.7 million people nationwide with an average benefit of $187 per month, according to the USDA’s report. 

In Virginia, about $1.76 billion in federal SNAP benefits were distributed to 874,000 people — that’s about 10% of the state’s population — in fiscal year 2024, according to the Office of the Governor. More than half of those Virginians are expected to lose all or some of their benefits under new federal rules.

The One Big Beautiful Bill will reduce how much federal funding is distributed and how many people are eligible to receive benefits. The timeline and true impact of such changes are still largely unknown as local leaders wait for guidance from state officials, who wait for guidance from national policymakers. Here’s what we know so far about the gaps the legislation is expected to leave in SNAP — and who’s expected to fill them. 

Federal legislation sets new rules for SNAP eligibility

The One Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law on July 4, will reduce federal spending for SNAP by $186 billion over the next 10 years, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. The cuts will affect the more than 40 million Americans who receive SNAP benefits in different ways, as they arise from eight different sections of the megabill.

One section of the legislation expands SNAP’s work requirements. To meet requirements, work can be for pay or on a volunteer basis, according to Food and Nutrition Service guidelines, and can include hours accumulated through federal, state and local work training programs.

SNAP participants must work 20 hours a week to receive benefits, unless they fall into certain categories of exemption from the work requirement. Before July 4, being older than 54 or having a child under the age of 18 counted as an exemption. 

Now, participants must be older than 64 or have a child under the age of 14 to qualify for work exemptions. 

The legislation also removes work exemptions for veterans, people experiencing homelessness and former foster youth aged 18 to 24, according to a July Virginia General Assembly memorandum. Some exemptions, such as having a disability, being a student or caring for incapacitated family members, remain in place.

The new work requirements technically took effect as soon as the bill was passed in July. But they are not being enforced yet, as local social service agencies wait for implementation instructions.

About 2.4 million people nationwide are expected to no longer qualify for SNAP benefits due to the new work requirements, according to an August report from the Congressional Budget Office. Nearly 447,000 Virginians will lose some or all SNAP benefits, according to the memorandum. 

It’s not that SNAP recipients don’t want to work, Irvine clarified. Instead, barriers stop some SNAP recipients from finding and keeping jobs. In rural areas like the Southwest Virginia region she serves, for example, a lack of public transportation, child care and job opportunities makes work requirements difficult to meet.

Work requirements have ripple effects beyond the person trying to meet them, said Preston Sellers, Lynchburg’s director of human services. Because SNAP benefits are calculated based on the number of eligible family members in a household, one person’s inability to meet work requirements could reduce the benefits for everyone in the home. 

The federal legislation also removes SNAP eligibility for several categories of immigrants with granted humanitarian protections, such as refugees, those granted asylum and survivors of human trafficking. In Virginia, roughly 14,000 SNAP recipients fall into these categories, according to the memorandum. 

Other sections of the new law change SNAP administrative processes, such as how work requirement waivers are granted and how often SNAP benefit amounts are reevaluated. 

As of Sept. 3, Sellers, who oversees Lynchburg’s social services department, had not received communication from state officials on when or how such changes should be enforced. 

In an emailed statement on Aug. 21, a spokesperson for the state Department of Social Services told Cardinal News that the agency is “currently awaiting further guidance from our federal partners and will be best positioned to provide specific details at that time.”

States pick up the pieces — and the tab

The One Big Beautiful Bill also changes who’s expected to pay for benefits once eligible recipients are determined. 

Starting Oct. 1, 2026, the federal government will reduce its share of SNAP administrative costs from 50% to 25% and require states to pay the difference. That will bump Virginia’s contribution to administrative costs from about $174 million to $262 million, according to the General Assembly memorandum.

Starting Oct. 1, 2027, some states will be expected to pay a portion of the benefit costs as well. The required state share will range from 0% to 15% and will be calculated based on error rates, or the accuracy of each state’s SNAP eligibility and benefit determinations as measured by overpayments and underpayments. According to the memorandum, states can choose whether to use their error rates from 2025 or 2026 to determine the initial cost shift. 

Based on Virginia’s 2024 error rate of 11.5%, the most recent data available, the state would have to pay the full 15% share, totaling $264.8 million per year for benefit costs, according to the memorandum. 

Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued Executive Directive 13 on Aug. 13 to launch an initiative to reduce SNAP error rates in local social service agencies. States that have a 6% or lower error rate do not have to contribute any money to SNAP benefits.

Virginia’s 11.5% error rate is slightly higher than the 2024 national average error rate of 10.9%, according to data from the Food and Nutrition Service. 

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s August report, it’s up to states to make ends meet when cost shifts take effect. 

“CBO expects that there will be a variety of state responses to the new requirement: some states will maintain current benefits and eligibility; others will modify benefits or eligibility or leave the program altogether,” the report states. 

Del. Sam Rasoul, D-Roanoke, sits on the House Appropriations Committee and said Virginia has no intention of leaving the SNAP system. Solutions to “plug the hole” will be explored when the state budgeting process picks up in January, he said. Until then, there are too many unknowns — ranging from who the governor will be to how much SNAP costs will actually be shifted onto the commonwealth — to have a productive conversation about the future of SNAP in Virginia. 

Rasoul said that, in the meantime, “the number one thing we can be doing is send a clear signal to all of our federal officials that they need to scale back some of the damage that was done.”

“There is no sideline warrior here,” he said. “We have to let our officials know the ramifications of what’s happening when we are filling the pockets of billionaires at the expense of people who need help the most.”

Del. Wendell Walker, R-Lynchburg, said Virginians should lean on each other instead.

“People have a tendency always to turn to government — call Richmond, call Washington — every time we have a little crisis moment. I think the smarter way is to turn to the people here that care about our communities and want to help.”

Walker said the key is to turn a “sky-is-falling” mentality into a “roll-up-your-sleeves” mentality. He applauds the nonprofits already doing so. 

Walker said he hopes the federal SNAP changes made in the One Big Beautiful Bill will make the SNAP system more efficient and targeted toward the people who need help the most.

“I know that anytime you have large organizations with a lot of money like this, there’s a tendency to be some fraud and waste,” he said. “Let’s clean things up.”

Regional food banks feel the pressure of already high demand 

Virginians who fall through the cracks of the SNAP system are caught by the emergency food network, which consists of the food banks that act as regional warehouses and distribution centers and the food pantries that directly serve neighbors in need. 

SNAP provides nine meals for every one meal that the emergency food network provides, said Les Sinclair, communications manager for the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank based in the Augusta County community of Verona.

But as the cost of food, rent, utilities and other essentials rise, more and more people are turning to food banks and pantries to get the food they need, he said. Across the 25 counties in its service area, the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank provided food for an average of 171,200 guests per month in the 2025 fiscal year. That’s up from 103,500 in the 2019 fiscal year, he said, or a 65% increase. 

“We’re serving more people now than even at the height of the pandemic, which is incredible to think about. We’re not in an emergency situation,” he said. “It just means that more people are not able to make ends meet.”

Irvine said food pantries within Feeding Southwest Virginia’s 26-county region have also seen recent growth in monthly visits, averaging about 20% increases from last year to this year. 

Feeding Southwest Virginia doesn’t have the resources to keep up, she said. The organization feeds 114,000 people monthly, but estimates from Feeding America show that more than 170,000 people in the region face food insecurity, she said. The southwest’s food insecurity rate of about 19% is the highest in the state.

Right now, both Sinclair and Irvine said their organizations are purchasing food to keep up with the demand that each of their pantries faces — the organizations partner with about 400 pantries each, which help to distribute food to each nook and cranny of their coverage area. The system has historically operated solely on donations from grocery stores, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other large food producers, so purchasing food has been a new challenge, Irvine said.

Irvine said about $3 million of Feeding Southwest Virginia’s $40 million budget goes toward buying food today. The logistical stress of expanding supply and operations is unlike anything she’s experienced in her 44 years of leading the organization, she said. And that pressure will grow if Virginians who lose their SNAP benefits under new legislative changes turn to her organization for help.

“We just don’t know where we’re going to get all the resources to meet the need. The bottom line is that there’s fear and instability for everyone,” she said. “It’s very stressful on organizations that are trying to navigate through changes that we’ve never experienced.”

As demand grows, pantries will likely have to follow food banks’ lead, Sinclair said. 

“These small food pantries are going to need to lean into purchasing more food, and they simply don’t have the resources to do it,” he said. “And that poses the real challenge.”

Local nonprofits step up as last line of defense 

Lynchburg offers a case study of the situation Sinclair described. The city has a 15% food insecurity rate, slightly higher than its four surrounding counties, which have an average food insecurity rate of about 12%, according to Feeding America. 

The leaders of several food-focused nonprofits in the city say they’ve felt the pressure of increased demand, just like the food bank that passes supplies down to them. They’ve started to purchase food in recent years because donations can’t keep up.

In 2021, Park View Community Mission’s food pantry served 174 families a week. Now, average weekly visits are at about 360, Blake said. A few miles away, Lynchburg Daily Bread served about 300 lunches on busy days in 2021, said Director of Operations Laurel Hovey. Today, 800 meals per day feels average, if not a little slow. 

Hovey said SNAP already affects demand at her organization. At the end of the month, when benefits start to run out, she serves closer to 900 meals per day. If those same clients get their benefits reduced or lose them entirely, she expects the line at her door to grow longer. 

“If we start seeing that end-of-the-month number remain consistent throughout the month, we’re going to have to get really creative with budgeting to purchase more food,” she said. “The donations already don’t support what we do.”

Blake, whose organization operates out of a church that closed in 2007, said the walls seem to close in on Park View’s storage and shopping space every day. Stacks of nonperishables are now piled up along the walls of the community dining room — it’s the only overflow space he has.

“I can’t grow much more with our current staffing and space and logistics, not without a huge influx of cash,” he said. “We’re spending more money on food, and thankfully, we’ve been able to manage that so far. But all of those things — space, people, finances, all of them — have a tipping point, right?”

Even though SNAP work requirements haven’t taken effect yet, Blake said he’s felt the effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill cuts in another key way. The legislation defunded SNAP Ed, a nutrition education program that once hosted cooking classes and healthy eating information sessions at Park View. Lessons went a long way in helping clients find community and make smarter eating choices for their health needs.

“There was a real camaraderie that came with doing that together: ‘I’m not alone in this. I’m ready to take charge of my eating habits,’” he said. “But that’s gone. And this is the first impact of the Big Beautiful Bill that we’re really seeing in concrete ways.”

John Thompson, executive director of Red Truck Ministry, said he’ll keep his eyes on his mission regardless of what happens with SNAP cuts. He drives his refurbished Coca-Cola truck — now a mobile food pantry — to food deserts around town, helping about 14,000 visitors throughout the year.

“It is the responsibility of the community to look after our own,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere.”

The nonprofit leaders agree that they’ll never give up hope. The stakes are too high, Blake said, because they know that the work they do is about more than calories on a plate. 

Food is empowerment to thrive at work and school, Blake said. Food is medicine to keep bodies and minds healthy, Hovey said. Food is faith, Thompson said — a reminder that there’s hope for tomorrow. 

“We’re not going to stop, because we can see the good that we’re doing,” Hovey said. “You can look someone in the eye and know you made a difference in their day. That’s all we need to keep moving forward.”

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Robin Stocks is 69 and lives in Midlothian but grew up in Cumberland County. A Black Army veteran, she said her life wouldn’t be what it is today if it weren’t for the Pine Grove School she was allowed to attend during the era of Jim Crow segregation.

“Everything about the school molded us for the rest of our lives,” Stocks said. “We took care of ourselves. We cut wood. We went and got water from the spring at my uncle’s house. We had an outside toilet.”

Of course, there were also plays the kids put on, and “everything was there like in a normal big school,” when it came to learning, Stocks said, except that there was one teacher for the seven grades attending the school.

“I’m in the third grade, I could hear everything they’re talking about. So I had to focus on my work,” Stocks recalled. “I told the story once, there was no such thing as ADHD at Pine Grove. You had to concentrate.”

That school’s history — as well as that of the other schools, churches and homes the African American community relied on in the central Virginia rural community — is what several community members are pushing to preserve as an economic driver in the region instead of a proposed landfill: historical tourism.

“There’s so much,” said Muriel Branch, president emeritus of AMMD Pine Grove Project, a group working to preserve the school and turn it into a museum and cultural center.  

She’s promoting a “tourism not trash” campaign that can build off the natural, agricultural landscape comprising the county that also includes Bear Creek State Park along the James River, the state’s largest river, flowing from the western hills of the Shenandoah Valley east to the Chesapeake Bay.

“With a little imagination … I just think it’s workable,” Branch said. “Because the sites are there already.”

In total, there are over 80 churches, homes and road resources with African American historical significance within a state-recognized Pine Grove Rural Historic District designation in the county. The group has cataloged those resources as part of a preliminary information form compiled to apply for the designation with the National Register of Historic Places. 

But along with needing a $60,000 cultural resource survey to complete its application, the group is concerned with a proposal from GFL Environmental to build the Green Ridge landfill next to the school and several homes where descendants of the community still live.

“I want Cumberland to be a place that generations to come want to call home,” said Justin Reid, a cultural organizer and cofounder of Griffin Blvd Archives who is on the board of the Virginia Tourism Corporation. “Not this place that we’re fleeing.”

GFL has downsized its initial proposal to no longer move Pine Grove Road, which Black students walked down to get to the school, amid community pushback and difficulties with obtaining a U.S. Army Corps permit to mitigate harms to wetlands. 

The company offered AMMD Pine Grove $100,000 to help renovate the school, Branch said, but those offers were turned down out of fear the money would come with stipulations to no longer oppose the project. The company has since maintained it “will not inhibit any future plans that may be planned for the area,” according to a project spokesperson.

Preservation Virginia, a historic preservation group, has spoken up against the landfill project, citing the need to preserve the area that has “important historic value” for the state, particularly as the country nears its 250th anniversary next year.

“It’s an important chapter in American civil rights,” said CEO Will Glasco.

The state’s Department of Historic Resources, while not commenting on the project, noted that “Black history is, of course, incredibly significant in Cumberland County and in the Commonwealth. 

“DHR is committed to fostering the stewardship of important resources, like the Pine Grove School and the historical marker for John Robinson that was unveiled in February, so that residents and visitors alike can gain a deeper understanding of the county’s history and its role in the history of Virginia,” an agency spokesperson said.

Cumberland County Administrator Derek Stamey said the county created a New Business Task Force under the Economic Development Authority as part of a broader grant-funded economic development strategic plan looking to be wrapped up in about two months.

“A lot of these efforts have a lot of synergy,” Stamey said. “It’s definitely something that we are looking at hard and we’re embracing long-term for the county.”

Asked how the landfill proposal may conflict with economic development goals, “we don’t know what that impact would be. … I’d have to see some studies and some figures as it relates to that.”

A rich history

The events that happened throughout the years of Cumberland’s existence are as rich as the soil in the county that has produced its agricultural industry.

The original inhabitants of the region can be dated back to the Monacan Indian tribes, who descended from the Siouan Indians living in the central Piedmont region of the state.

Flash forward to when Colonists arrived. Cumberland County was founded in 1749 and became known as the place for the “First Call for Independence”: Outside the Effingham Tavern on April 22, 1776, Carter Henry Harrison read resolutions and was instructed “Positively to Declare of an Independency” at the Virginia Convention, making such a first call for independence from Great Britain.

There’s also Cartersville, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with its 18th-century to early 1900s architecture. And Lucyville, another community founded by a freed slave. 

The preservation of that Black history, which includes enslaved boatmen who used bateaus on the James River delivering goods to and from Richmond, is a focus of community members. The Black community came to be after slaves, mostly men, honed their craft and tobacco yields to buy their freedom, said Lakshmi Fjord, a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia and board member for AMMD Pine Grove. Some slaves were freed following the Confederacy’s Civil War surrender in Appomattox, just west of the region beyond Buckingham.

“It’s really a fascinating tale of the earliest days of emancipation,” said Fjord. “Not the Emancipation Proclamation, but of forced emancipation by Union soldiers at the plantations themselves.”

The community grew around churches, of which there are 16 still active in Cumberland County, Branch said. Within the historical district area are four, under the Baptist denomination — Bethlehem, built in 1861; New Hope, built in 1868; Mt. Calvary, founded in 1905; and Rising Zion Baptist Church, founded in 1911 — that stand out to Fjord.

The churches were of a “brush arbor” construct, meaning they had four wooden poles forming a box with a brush roof. Such construction typically led to the building burning down, making the concentration of standing resources “just unheard of,” said Fjord. 

“I’ve never heard of a place that has this much cultural history in its standing resources, which is why the idea of a tour came up,” Fjord said.

The places of worship also provided burial grounds and schools in one form or another. Education for Black people eventually came by way of three Rosenwald-built schools: Pine Grove School, New Hope School and Turkey Cock School.

Those schools were built during the Jim Crow era of segregation by Julius Rosenwald, former president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., and Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute, to give Black people an education.

AMMD Pine Grove Project has used $290,000 from National Park Service funding to stabilize the school built in 1917 and is planning its next steps to create the community center. Glasco, of Preservation Virginia, noted that only a third of about 380 of the Rosenwald schools in the state are still standing today after two-thirds had been demolished or lost.

“We have three,” Branch said. “Those schools are now nationally recognized.”

Taking advantage of a tourism opportunity

Cumberland could enjoy the fruits of some vision and planning for a tourism industry, Branch said.

Tourism in Virginia is an “integral part” of the state’s economy, according to a Virginia Tourism Corporation report from Tourism Economics, supporting about 5% of all jobs in Virginia in 2023.

In Virginia last August, Gov. Glenn Youngkin touted the $33.3 billion in visitor spending as playing an “essential role” in the economy. The Virginia Tourism Corporation, created by the General Assembly in 1999 “to stimulate the tourism segment of the economy,” in 2019 released its Drive 2.0 plan, a statewide strategic tourism plan last updated in 2013. 

Within it, the plan states, “The Commonwealth’s primary lure is history,” while highlighting efforts of community leaders in Farmville of Prince Edward County, just north of Cumberland County, to renovate an old building into Hotel Weyanoke in 2018. The year prior, Sandy River Outdoor Adventures added glamping tipis and cabins.

Prince Edward County saw tourism-related expenditures increase from $17.6 million in 2007 to $25.9 million in 2018, though that was prior to COVID. The spending in 2018 increased by 12.7% from 2017, compared to the statewide increase of 4.4% over the same time period.

“Cumberland County’s rich African American history, including sites such as Pine Grove School and other historic Black schools and churches, presents a compelling opportunity for cultural tourism development,” said Juliana Thomas, director of communications at VTC. “An investment in heritage tourism could offer long-term benefits through increased visitation, community pride, and increased economic activity.”

Reid suggested that tourism could be accomplished with a regional partnership with Buckingham County and Prince Edward County. He pointed to the Alabama Black Belt National Heritage Area, which draws in tourism to tell the story of farming communities that capitalized on slavery and extends all the way into Virginia, as an example. There’s a “long history,” Reid said, of tobacco cultivation in Southside.

“There’s a lot of untapped potential for a regionwide plan,” Reid said. “My biggest fear is that there’s a lack of imagination and we’re preventing ourselves from taking advantage of future opportunities that aren’t even being discussed.”

Additional research from Preservation Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University in 2017 points to the economic vitality of historical tourism, leading to an average of tourists staying at least one night in an area spending $458 per household and day-trippers spending about $380. The spending by international travelers increases to $1,134.

“There are a lot of people coming to Virginia to see history like this,” said Glasco. “If it’s destroyed or negatively impacted by industrial development, then we might lose a lot of that tourism industry.”

Job creation as a goal

Tourism advocates believe that the use of cultural and natural resources in Cumberland can more easily create jobs than constructing a new landfill, which could also lead to irreparable harm, despite the cash windfall for the locality, they say.

GFL said it has environmental protections in place and that it will generate $1.5 million annually for the county through host fees and waste disposal savings for residents. In 2021, the company referenced an economic analysis report stating “ongoing operations and cell expansion construction at Green Ridge will support 34 full-time employees and support 17 jobs through indirect and induced economic activity in Cumberland County.”

It’s not clear just how many jobs could be created through the tourism initiative, but proponents say that workers would likely be needed to drive the buses used to visit perhaps different themes of the county: the schools, the churches, Cartersville, the boatmen, the calls for independence. Workers would be needed for potential reenactments, at the sites to explain the location’s significance and to maintain the facilities. 

Currently, Curtis James, 84, who went to Pine Grove School, has done work at the school to remove downed trees and get water out of the ground in the area that relies on wells.

“I put the pump in the well,” James said. “Got that part, got water.”

While data centers are increasingly being proposed in rural areas, Reid said, preserving the natural landscape can be a draw for other industries that could include skilled manufacturers, who seek quality-of-life recreational opportunities in a locality. The tourism effort could fall under the work of economic development and be non-exploitative of the environment or underpaying workers, Reid added.

“It’s hard to imagine what else is coming,” said Reid, “We’re not working to explore what’s possible.”

Stamey, the county administrator, said the idea for the strategic plan is to clearly lay out action steps and a timeline that could help with seeking funding.

“As it relates to tourism, it makes any type of grant application much more attractive and more likely to be awarded,” Stamey said.

______________________

Correction 11 a.m. July 10: Muriel Branch is president emeritus of AMMD Pine Grove Project, which is working to preserve the Pine Grove school and turn it into a museum and cultural center. Will Glasco is CEO of Preservation Virginia.

The post Residents look to historical tourism to preserve Cumberland County’s past and create economic opportunities for its future appeared first on Cardinal News.

Content warning: Some of the historical content in this story includes racial slurs and racist language.

The group of Danville City Council members, all white and all men, gathered in the municipal building meeting room, with its high ceilings and dark wooden columns and pew-like bench seating.

Mayor Julian Stinson, a middle-aged man who wore a suit and had his dark, short hair slicked back, presided over the June 10, 1963, meeting, which began ordinarily enough.

The council approved a budget appropriation for a capital improvement project and OK’d the continued operation of city kindergarten classes. It approved another project to acquire property that would allow for the widening of North Ridge Street, and deferred a few other items to a later date. 

Then, something more unusual happened: One council member made a motion to censure another.

Councilman John Carter said Charles Womack had debased the city circuit court by meeting with several local civil rights leaders.

The Thursday before, Womack had spent two and a half hours meeting with movement leaders the Rev. Lawrence Campbell, the Rev. L.W. Chase and the Rev. A.I. Dunlap.

The ministers also brought demonstrators Julius Adams, Arthur Pinchback and Harry Wood to help them plead their case. The men were hopeful that the sit-down with city leaders would lead to integration and fair hiring practices. 

Most city officials refused to negotiate with movement leaders until the demonstrations stopped. 

Womack was the only city leader receptive to such a meeting. He convinced Stinson to attend, and the city manager, city attorney, police chief and fire chief also agreed. 

Carter said that Womack’s organization of “the bi-racial committee” had undermined the Danville court, which had issued an injunction against these demonstrations. 

Womack had explained his decision in an editorial in that morning’s edition of the Commercial Appeal.

“It is obvious that I was approached on the matter of existing racial differences with the view to a solution,” Womack wrote. “As a duly elected servant of the people, I felt it incumbent upon me to do no less than bring the matter before city council and city officials. I feel that no other responsible city official could have done differently than I did under the circumstances.”

Carter’s censure motion failed to gain a second. Instead, council members adopted a resolution naming the mayor, who referred to demonstrators as “criminals,” as the sole spokesperson for the city when it came to the protests. 

This would not be the last time that Womack was targeted for his views and actions on the civil rights movement. 

He continued to come under fire for the Commercial Appeal’s reporting.

In addition to the editorials by Charles Crowder and Womack, the June 10 edition of the Commercial Appeal also reported on the indictment of the movement leaders. 

It named the leaders, the charges and the bond amounts, saying that “the charges are a result of recent racial demonstrations.”

The reporting does not seem particularly inflammatory. Much of the Commercial Appeal’s coverage of the movement is similarly straightforward. 

It was meaningful enough for Black readers to regard it as “the truth” — and for the white community to alienate Womack. 

“[The Commercial Appeal] quoted us much better than the Bee,” former protester Dorothy Moore-Batson recalled. “They would print what we actually said. They would interview the ministers leading the movement and actually print what was said.”

Treating the civil rights movement with ordinary respect was a daring thing to do, said Gwyn Mellinger, a professor at James Madison University and an expert on civil-rights era Southern press.

“Regardless of their own feelings, newspaper owners in the South understood that if they treated Black people as if they were normal citizens, a large portion of their readership would feel betrayed,” Mellinger said. 

Many of Womack’s friends and peers distanced themselves because of the Commercial Appeal’s coverage, though he gained respect in Danville’s Black communities.

“Mr. Womack, he knew he was welcome wherever,” Moore-Batson said. “We would always see him around High Street [Baptist Church], which was the center of the movement. … At the time, I don’t even remember if I knew his name. I just knew this was a white man who came from the Commercial Appeal.”

Womack’s own support of the movement was the primary reason for the Commercial Appeal’s fair coverage. 

A newspaper’s ownership was very important to its journalistic content in the 1960s, said Mellinger. Owners would have been calling the shots about what to cover and how to cover it.

“I haven’t found many cases in this time period … of news reporting that isn’t in lockstep with what’s on the editorial page,” Mellinger said. “What owners did was essentially filter what news was covered, and they may have had strong feelings about race themselves.”

The owner and editor of the Register and the Bee in 1963 was a woman named Elizabeth Stuart Grant, who went by her middle name and inherited the papers at the age of 17 when her father died. She owned and published the Register and Bee for 53 years. 

“The speculation is that Stuart Grant just kept out of a lot of things that she didn’t want to cover,” said Joe Scott, former archivist with the Danville Historical Society.

The daily coverage hardly ever mentions the purpose of the movement — the Black community’s effort to end segregation and discrimination. 

“They focused on the businesses, the police department, the mayor and the city government, as opposed to printing stuff that happened to us,” Moore-Batson recalled. 

Despite the backlash, Womack spent the rest of his council term calling for “racial harmony,” proposing a fair employment practices bill and continuing to publish unbiased coverage about race relations in Danville.

He did not run for reelection in 1966, announcing this decision in an editorial in the Commercial Appeal. 

Womack expressed his “personal desire to retire from the political arena” after four years of “attempted intimidation, continued public ridicule, continued attempts to distort my motives, inaccurate news stories and uncalled for tongue-lashings on city council floor…not to mention the possibility of one of the dirtiest campaigns in Danville history as my antagonist seeks to have me defeated.”

* * *

After the city council meeting on June 10, demonstrators gathered outside the jail to hold a prayer vigil for the protesters that had been arrested that day. 

A night that began with prayer ended with at least 47 people injured. 

The police department deputized municipal workers to help break up the crowd using nightsticks and fire hoses, and this became the first violent clash of the summer.

The next day’s edition of the Bee described a “wild night” and focused primarily on the city’s response to the situation — considering a curfew, calling in state troopers and arresting demonstrators under the injunction that limited protests.

The article also included lengthy descriptions of court proceeding logistics and a list of the names, ages and addresses of over 70 protesters who had been arrested, further characterizing the demonstrations as criminal.

A June 17 article published a similar list of names, this time of demonstrators scheduled to appear in corporation court. The list encompasses almost an entire column of text on the page.

The Bee published photos of fire hoses aimed at protesters with a caption that downplays and justifies the police brutality. 

“Some of the demonstrators obviously thought it was fun when their legs were doused with the first sweeps of the hose,” the caption reads. “When the demonstrators didn’t clear out the hose was turned on full force, sending them falling and scrambling between parked cars.”

Because an edition of the Commercial Appeal published the morning of June 10 and the next issue would not be for another week, there was no immediate coverage of Bloody Monday in that publication. 

“With a [weekly publication], you lose timeliness,” Mellinger said. “You’re not going to be able to pivot and cover breaking news.”

The Commercial Appeal’s next edition after Bloody Monday was published June 17. It included a front page article that recapped the week of ongoing demonstrations. 

The article described a visit to Danville by two national civil rights activists: the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, chief lieutenant to Martin Luther King Jr., and William Kuntsler, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer. 

This article included viewpoints and quotes from the national activists, voicing their encouragement to Danville’s protesters. 

The Register and the Bee covered Walker and Kuntsler’s visit, but did not quote their support of the local movement. The daily papers rarely quoted even the local civil rights leaders. 

“I cannot remember them [Register and Bee reporters] interviewing anyone,” Moore-Batson said. “You would just see them snapping pictures with their little notebooks in front of them, writing this and that, but I never saw them talk with anyone.”

Instead, the Register and the Bee deferred to police chief Eugene McCain, the mayor and other city officials for information. 

This was a common journalism practice at the time, said Patrick Walters, a journalism historian.

“One of the things that journalists have relied on for so long is tilting towards and favoring official sources much more than quote-unquote non-official sources,” Walters said. “The longtime journalistic perspective is, ‘We’ve got to rely on the police, we’ve got to talk to the elected person.’”

Published quotes supporting the movement were subversive for the time. 

“‘I think everything you have done is lawful and legal. … Keep doing the demonstrating. Keep going on,’” the ACLU’s Kuntsler said in the June 17 Commercial Appeal.

The article also reported that Kuntsler planned to “ask for a federal court injunction to halt alleged police brutality.”

The June 17 edition of the Commercial Appeal detailed charges and the trial process, though without publishing the names and addresses of those arrested, as seen in the daily publications. 

On many days, articles about the ongoing court cases made the front page of the Register or the Bee rather than coverage of the demonstrations themselves. Front page headlines reported “Corporation Court List has 205 Cases,” “Court Actions and Conferences Come in Wake of Race Trouble,” and “New Demonstrations Not Held; Court Actions Continue.” 

Smaller articles kept track of total bond amounts for arrested demonstrators and the outcomes of specific trials. 

The Register and the Bee published editorials praising the segregationist judge who presided over the trials, Judge Archibald Aiken, and a statement in his support written by the Danville Bar Association.

Meanwhile, over the course of the entire summer, there is not a single front page article in the Commercial Appeal that mentions local court cases in its headline. 

There, front page headlines said “City Remains Quiet as Negroes Mass March and Rally Wednesday,” “Hope Rises with Meeting on Racial Crisis Here” and “City Streets are Quiet but Racial Developments Unfold Behind Scenes.”

By mid-June just a few weeks after the demonstrations began, the Register and the Bee described the movement as petering out. Moore-Batson and fellow protesters like Connie Chaney Carter recall daily, well-attended protests throughout the summer.

“Demonstrations which had kept Danville in the grip of racial unrest seem to be weakening today as only a few demonstrators showed up for a scheduled mass meeting,” reported a June 15 article in the Bee. 

“Things didn’t really die down until after the March on Washington” in August of that summer, Moore-Batson said. “On June 15, things were still heating up.”

Womack would come under more fire as the summer went on, the fallout reaching his family of seven. Black residents would continue to rely on the Commercial Appeal for their news about the movement. And the Register and the Bee would continue to mischaracterize it.

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Stacks of boxes, each containing nonperishable food items, are piled high in the small storeroom at Martinsville’s Uptown Ministries. Pastor Faith Weedling, along with a handful of others in her ministry, prepare between 140 and 210 boxes of assorted groceries that guests take home every third Saturday. 

Despite the stacks of food-filled boxes, Weedling and others worry that these might be their last days of maintaining a storeroom-filling surplus. She isn’t alone. 

As the U.S. Department of Agriculture grapples with possible decreases in funding, Uptown Ministries, which gets half of its food supply from the USDA, and other local food pantries that rely on the federal agency are bracing for the worst, according to Pamela Irvine, president and CEO of Feeding Southwest Virginia. 

The Salem-based organization distributes food to around 360 pantries and nonprofit feeding programs throughout the region.

Irvine said that while the reduction in USDA funding will trickle down to a wide range of local agencies, communities like the ones Feeding Southwest Virginia serves will be particularly impacted. She said the nonprofit’s service region has historically depended on a handful of industries such as textiles, furniture and tobacco. 

In March, the USDA was subject to a freeze of around $1 billion as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to cut government spending. 

Food banks throughout Virginia and the country have been affected, and lawmakers have taken notice. Most recently, in an open letter to USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, some members of Virginia’s congressional delegation — including Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine and Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem — expressed concern about the impact that rolling back food bank support would have. 

“More than 400 local pantries, including many faith-based partners from Hampton Roads to Southwest Virginia, distribute the food to eligible low-income recipients who typically do not qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and have few alternatives to turn to for help,” reads the open letter. “In Virginia, approximately 10 percent of households are ‘food insecure,’ meaning their access to adequate food is limited by a lack of money and other resources. On average, food pantry visits increased more than 20 percent in Virginia last year and Virginia food banks are spending five times more money now than in 2019 due to greater demand and higher food prices.”

Regional impact 

The USDA works with organizations like Feeding Southwest Virginia to bridge the gap between the federal agency and the local food pantries that serve communities. The USDA and Feeding Southwest Virginia have worked together since the early 1990s. 

“It has been an extremely important partnership,” Irvine said, adding that the USDA is useful for pantries that don’t have access to local food sources. “We don’t have many food manufacturers in Southwest Virginia, therefore I had to look for additional resources to be able to provide enough food to feed individuals in that 26-county area.” 

USDA accounts for around 31% of Feeding Southwest Virginia’s food supply. Irvine said this translates to $513,000 worth of food that her agency receives from the USDA every quarter. 

In a worst-case scenario, one in which the USDA is no longer able to contribute, Irvine’s agency would have to fundraise that amount and find vendors to fill in the gap. Even if successful, it wouldn’t completely supplement the USDA’s contribution. Irvine said a dollar spent at a non-USDA source wouldn’t return as much product compared to what the USDA gives to its regional partners. 

Their most recent food order for the upcoming quarter has been put on pause. Irvine said she doesn’t know what this pause might entail over the coming weeks. 

She said that while the situation is concerning, it isn’t unprecedented. She said that there have been instances in the past that threatened her agency’s supply of food. Economic hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic reduced donations, another important source for the agency’s food supply. 

Local impact 

Uptown Ministries Center Food Bank operates in Martinsville and serves between 140 and 210 households every month. A portion of its food supply comes from the USDA by way of Feeding Southwest Virginia. 

Linda Adams, a volunteer, said she is afraid that what is going on at the federal level will trickle down to Martinsville. 

“I feel like if they cut back on the USDA’s budget it will affect all food banks, probably,” Adams said. “I hope that doesn’t happen, but we don’t have anything to keep it from happening.” 

Adams said that the USDA gives her organization an assortment of essentials, from meat to vegetables. What the food pantry doesn’t get from the USDA, it supplements with donations and food purchased with grant funding. 

Adams said that while donations may vary from organization to organization, the USDA is a reliable source.  

“I don’t want to say that they give us all our food, because they definitely don’t,” Adams said. 

While pantries continue to monitor the situation at USDA, organizations like the Grace Network show that this kind of community work is possible without USDA assistance. 

The faith-based Grace Network has served Martinsville and Henry County for about 19 years, said director Tracy Hinchcliff. Grace Network is supported by a network of churches throughout the community and serves about 1,400 households annually. 

“When we started Grace Network, it was a startup from the faith community, churches from across the community and now we are supported by over 100 churches,” Hinchcliff said. The pantry doesn’t accept any government grants or funds from the government, she said. 

On March 22, the Harvest Foundation held a community conversation at Grace Presbyterian Church in Martinsville to talk about food insecurity. Organizers titled the event “Healthy Futures: A Community Conversation on Food Access.”

Last year’s closure of a Family Dollar that served this part of the city prompted the conversation. Participants discussed ways to combat food insecurity and what impact it has had in their own neighborhoods. 

“All organizations aren’t able to provide for everyone in need,” said Jean Hairston, a member of Grace Presbyterian who participated in the event. “If you don’t have a car or if you can’t get on the bus, you have to find a ride or you’re in trouble. From Fayette Street to [U.S.] 220, there are only two stores that residents can go to if they have transportation — Walmart and Kroger. This doesn’t mean that we don’t need the support organizations because we do, it means that [they alone] will not solve the food desert issue.” 

Solutions event participants suggested included year-round farmers’ markets and community gardens. 

As local pantries monitor the funding situation, they hope the USDA will continue to be a factor in their efforts to combat food insecurity in their respective communities. 

“We’re hoping as they evaluate … they see the value of this program that helps our neighbors,” Irvine said.

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A major disaster declaration for the Southwest Virginia counties affected by catastrophic flooding in February has been approved by President Donald Trump, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Friday afternoon.

The disaster declaration, which opens up federal aid, was for public assistance only, while a final determination on individual assistance has not been made, according to the governor.

Individual assistance provides funding to eligible individuals and households that have sustained losses in a disaster. Public assistance can pay for repairing and replacing public facilities and infrastructure. 

Additional funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and new state funding agreed to by the governor and the General Assembly this week will also be available for ongoing recovery efforts, according to Youngkin. 

“I am grateful to President Trump and the entire Administration for moving forward in their approval of the major disaster declaration,” Youngkin said in a news release. “We will continue to seek every recovery resource necessary to support Virginians that have been adversely impacted by these storms. I committed to assist those with immediate needs to ensure the health and safety of survivors and we will continue our efforts to seek opportunities to rebuild these communities.”  

Following several days of heavy rain, storms hit over the weekend of Feb. 15-16, destroying and damaging homes, washing out roads and leaving thousands without power. The community of Hurley in Buchanan County and parts of Dickenson and Tazewell counties were particularly hit hard.

As much as 7 inches of rain fell over some parts of Southwest Virginia, resulting in flash flooding, closed roads and mudslides. One man died after being swept away by the high water in Bland County. Ninety homes had major damage, and 18 houses were destroyed, according to preliminary estimates from the Virginia Department of Emergency Management and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Originally, the disaster declaration request was for Buchanan, Dickenson and Russell counties, but the governor later expanded it to include Bland, Giles, Lee, Pulaski, Russell, Scott, Smyth and Wise counties.

“President Trump’s approval of this request is a major step in securing federal resources to help Southwest Virginia recover from historic flooding,” Sen. Todd Pillion, R-Washington County, said via text message Friday. 

The General Assembly approved $50 million in the state budget to help communities rebuild after the remnants of Hurricane Helene swept through the region last fall. This week, lawmakers approved an amendment by Youngkin to extend that relief to assist victims of the February flooding. 

“It’s important that we continue to collaborate at all levels of government to ensure that resources are deployed effectively and efficiently,” Pillion added.

Sen. Travis Hackworth, R-Tazewell County, said he is grateful to the Trump administration for the approval of the disaster declaration. 

“I’m also grateful to Governor Glenn Youngkin and our entire Southwest Virginia legislative delegation for working with our federal partners to see this funding through to approval,” he said via email Friday. “So many homes and businesses were damaged in both Hurricane Helene and the February 2025 flood. Now we have access to these desperately needed funds.” 

Del. William Morefield, R-Tazewell County, said the news of the approval is encouraging. He said he remains hopeful that individual assistance will be approved eventually, as well. 

“In the event that individual assistance is not approved, the flood victims can rest assured knowing the commonwealth will be there to provide individual assistance as proposed in the state budget,” he said.

Morefield added that the federal assistance formulas for determining disaster aid are flawed, and he called on Congress to consider revising them. 

“I have heard some members of Congress speak about this on several occasions but I have yet to see any meaningful effort being made,” he said. “I commend President Trump, Governor Youngkin and our colleagues in the General Assembly for making every effort to help so many individuals with few resources help rebuild their lives.”

Tazewell County Administrator Eric Young said Friday that he’s grateful for any federal or state assistance.

“The one-two punch of the hurricane at the end of September and floods in early February truly taxed our resources and our energy,” he said.

The flooding and storms also affected neighboring states, particularly Kentucky and West Virginia. Kentucky’s disaster declaration was for public and individual assistance and was approved Feb. 24. West Virginia’s, for public assistance only, was approved Feb. 26.

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