🚨 WE HAVE A NEW CITY HALL REPORTER 🚨
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Hey y'all,
Please join me in welcoming Hanna Holthaus to the TU ranks! Hanna will be covering Jacksonville politics alongside David Bauerlein and Nate Monroe. We welcomed her last week. Make sure to follow her on Twitter for the latest.
Here are some of last week's headlines you should know:
Another LGBTQ resource disappears in Duval Schools
Duval County Public Schools has taken down a 12-minute anti-bullying video that taught middle and high school students how to support their gay and transgender peers, the latest in a string of vanishing LGBTQ resources in the district.
A Duval Schools federal grant coordinator raised questions about removing the anti-bullying video, according to a Jacksonville Today review of internal district emails. “Here is what the students have access to for training,” the grant coordinator wrote to the district’s policy team on April 5, 2022. The email was marked “high importance.” (WJCT)
More on LGBTQ+ visibility in Duval Schools
Jacksonville veteran opening bookstore to highlight books by women, people of color
When 28-year-old Vanessa Nicolle started her online bookstore, Femme Fire Books, she wanted to build a community for readers who didn’t have much representation in the literary world.
Two years later, Nicolle, of Jacksonville, will soon see the opening of her first brick and mortar store.
Nicolle said her customers appreciate that she focuses on women authors and that the store is Asian American-owned and that support from the community — both online and in Jacksonville — has been exceptional.
Read more about Femme Fire Books
Statue of trailblazing educator and civil rights activist Bethune unveiled in U.S. Capitol
On a July day in 1875, Mary McLeod Bethune came into the world in a small log cabin on a South Carolina rice and cotton farm. Slavery and the Civil War had just ended 10 years earlier. Her parents were former slaves, and she was their 15th child.
Nothing about her beginnings formed a launching pad for achievement and greatness, yet Bethune soared. And now her tenacious, unrelenting quest to help others has taken her somewhere probably unimaginable to her and her parents when she was growing up in a tiny rural town 140 years ago.
On Wednesday morning, an 11-foot-tall marble statue depicting Bethune was unveiled inside the U.S. Capitol building's National Statuary Hall, which is built in the shape of an ancient amphitheater and has colossal columns formed out of variegated Breccia marble quarried along the Potomac River.
At the unveiling was U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, (R-FL), who during his years as Florida's governor signed a bill to commission the statue of Bethune to represent Florida in the U.S. Capitol. Scott was Florida's governor from 2011-2019. It was in 2016 that the Florida legislature passed statue replacement legislation, and in 2018 Bethune was chosen for one of the two spots to represent Florida in Statuary Hall.
Emily Bloch is a youth culture and education reporter for The Florida Times-Union. Follow her on Twitter or email her. Sign up for her newsletter.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: 🚨 WE HAVE A NEW CITY HALL REPORTER 🚨
