One of my favorite bloggers (from Brooklyn) recently mentioned little ol’ Richmond in her blog. I’ve been religiously following her blog since before I’d moved here, so it was a surprise. Also, I’m embarrassed that she knew the story behind the tent city and I didn’t.

“Yesterday I met some really awesome people from Richmond, VA and they told me a story that I found very moving for a couple of reasons. For one, the story itself was interesting and inspiring, and for two (for two?), it made me think about how many things are happening out there in the world of which we are unaware. 

In short, there is a public park in Richmond, Monroe Park, which is located right by the VCU campus.  The city plans to redo the park (using something like 6.2 million dollars), and, while it is under construction, fence off the park entirely from public use. With this move, not only will the park be inaccessible, but many of the programs that run in the park (such as “Food Not Bombs,” which feeds hundreds of homeless people) will be entirely disabled. 

In response to this, a group of anarchists set up a “tent-city” of sorts, in an effort to force the park revamp to occur in quarters, and enable the programs to continue their operation. On Thursday morning, while all the VCU kids were on Spring Break, the tent city was surrounded by about 20 police cruisers, 2 firetrucks and a police plane and the protesters (of which there were only about 20) were ordered to evacuate or face arrest. 

The tent city is now gone. 

Obviously there are details to both sides of this story that are not present in my retelling…but I think it is important to know that there are people out here that are fighting a really good fight for what they believe in, and that they take it past a simple Internet-reblog and actually LIVE the fight. 

We should all strive for such action.”