october 2025 Express issue
We look forward to sharing some new in-depth reporting in the November issue of the ACRP newsletter, but for this month, we are forgoing our feature story to alert you to some very important events. We are also sharing our In The News and Upcoming Meetings information. Keep an eye out for the November issue - coming soon!
Upcoming Events
November’s Tables of Conscience Dinners
The Oct. 14 Tables of Conscience book-themed dinner sold out! We hope to do the same with our two scheduled November fundraising dinners. These are the last two in this series that feature books or authors who have been banned by the government! Join us in this act of defiance while supporting Alexandria’s Memorial Scholarship Program that honors the lives of Joseph McCoy and Benjamin Thomas, who were lynched in this city in 1897 and 1899, respectively. Tickets cost $125 per person, and each of this Fall’s dinners can accommodate up to eight guests.
Please pick a book you want to read and reserve a space to attend the dinner before they are booked up. The location of the dinner is revealed along with the host a week before the dinner.
A Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America, Michael Eric Dyson
Friday, Nov. 14
6-9 p.m.
3 Tickets Left!
The Department of Defense was so concerned about Americans finally starting to grapple with racism that they banned Michael Eric Dyson’s book, Long Time Coming. In a collection of letters written to recent victims of racial violence: Elijah McClain, Emmett Till, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Hadiya Pendleton, Sandra Bland, and the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Dyson exposed the anti-Blackness that infiltrates our culture, feeds police violence and injustice. The award-winning author, a professor at Georgetown University and an ordained Baptist minister, shares a way toward healing by the end of the book. The Equal Justice Initiative’s Bryan Stevenson has called the book both formidable and compelling, with “much to offer on our nation’s crucial need for racial reckoning and the way forward.
Reserve a space here for free, then pay $125 per ticket by donating on our campaign page with the Scholarship Fund of Alexandria.
The Origin of Others, Toni Morrison
Saturday, Nov. 15
6-9 p.m.
8 Tickets Left!
This short, impactful book by Toni Morrison draws on a series of lectures she gave at Harvard University about fear of the other. Morrison reflects on the desire to belong and the impact race, fear, borders, and immigration have on this essential human need. She includes her own work when she examines how literature has played a role, both negative and positive, in such constructions. While this book has not yet been banned, the author has been and that’s why we believe it fits this series of Tables of Conscience.
Reserve a space here for free, then pay $125 per ticket by donating on our campaign page with the Scholarship Fund of Alexandria.
Freedom House Museum Reopening Ribbon Cutting
Sat. Nov. 8
1-3 p.m.
Freedom House, 1315 Duke Street
The exterior rehabilitation of the Freedom House Museum at 1315 Duke Street is now complete with the facade restored to its pre-Civil War appearance. The museum that shares the history of Alexandria’s involvement in the domestic slave trade will officially reopen on Nov. 6, 2025. Please join us for the ribbon cutting on Nov. 8 at 1 p.m. Tours will be held from 1:30 to 3 p.m.
Discussion: Addressing Our Housing Shortage: History, Policy, and Solutions
Mon. Dec. 8
6:30-8 p.m.
The Alexandria History Museum at The Lyceum, 201 S. Washington Street
Mayor Alyia Gaskins will be joined by Yoni Appelbaum, Deputy Executive Editor of the Atlantic and Laura Dobbs, Director of Policy, Housing Opportunities Made Equal of VA to talk about ways to explore the historical roots of our current housing shortage and consider policy solutions.
In The News
Robert P. Jones, author of White Too Long and founder of Public Religion Research Institute, who spoke at the McCoy Remembrance in April, has a new poll out. PRRI released its 16th annual American Values Survey, conducted in partnership. Their research shows that the polarization occurring in America is not about two parties driving apart equally, but a faction of the Republican Party and white evangelical Christians who are moving away from most Americans. The survey highlights the ethno-religious aspects of the divides in our culture and politics.
How Trump Upended 60 Years of Civil Rights, The Daily Podcast, Oct. 21, 2025
Host Michael Barbaro interviews Nicol Hannah-Jones
In this 40-minute podcast, Hannah-Jones urgently sounds the alarm about the quick erosion of civil rights, especially for people of color in America. She argues that the Trump Administration has conflated Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives with Civil Rights, allowing them to make it increasingly difficult to defend civil rights. In Executive Orders and through agency actions, Hannah-Jones said, “he is using DEI to attack Civil Rights.” Hannah-Jones defined Civil Rights as laws and legal protections put in place in the 1960s to protect minorities and ensure basic human rights. DEI, she said, is an ideology that grew out of the civil rights movement, became a thing in 2010, and started gaining steam after George Floyd was murdered. DEI is everything from corporate training to hiring strategies, she said, criticizing it as too often performative. She said that while people are “rolling their eyes” at DEI, “something more essential and dangerous is happening…agency by agency, this entire civil rights infrastructure that had been set up over decades is being dismantled..at a pace and a rate and a sophistication” not seen before. Hannah-Jones quoted polls that show most Republicans think we are post racism and it is now the white people who are “suffering racism more than any other group.” What is more concerning to her, though, since 2024, the percentage of Democrats who believe white Americans benefit a great deal from advantages in society not available to Black Americans has plummeted. “I think there is a significant constituency that doesn’t want to talk about race anymore, and while they may not agree with other Trump’s policies, they don’t actually disagree that much.”
Hannah-Jones compared what is currently happening to the demise of Black Americans’ rights after Reconstruction - there was a “great expansion of rights and then just as quickly those rights are one-by-one removed… Those rights remained on paper, but they lost any ability to actually access them…So we know this country is capable of doing that.” She was concerned that companies and higher education could face penalties if they do pursue diversity. Law firms are being penalized, and that “could lead to a scenario where we have almost no Black lawyers.” The conservative legal group founded by Steven Miller is filing complaints against Medical Schools, possibly leading to fewer Black doctors. The Ivys have been asked to share the test scores for all the students they admit and resumes for everyone they hire. It is easy then to “quickly imagine a world exceedingly different for Black Americans.” The same thing happened in Ida B. Wells' day, according to Hannah Jones, “if we look at that timeline, Black Americans would not regain access to the ballot for nearly a century.”
“All of the ingredients to once again see a disappearance of Black Americans from elite institutions, from prominent jobs and professions, and even from the halls of Congress, is possible in this moment. I don’t know if it will happen, but all the ingredients are there, and that is very frightening to me because again, I and you … have never lived in that America, but what we do know is that we can live in that America again.”
On Point, National Public Radio, Oct. 9, 2025
Guest, Col. Larry Wilkerson, (Ret.), who was Chief of Staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell during the George W. Bush administration, was asked to speak to the growing use of the military in U.S. cities, and that led him to state that America has to deal with racism.
“The Republican Party is a big part of this. I won’t spare the Democrats either. We’ve not solved the issue of race in America. We have not solved it. And what we’ve done with desegregation in many respects is to resegregate, but under the covers, as it were, and to destroy the ethics and family values that existed in the Black communities before we did it. Alma Powell used to tell me all about how she thought Blacks had a better situation in cities, in particular when they were segregated, than after desegregation. So this is a much bigger problem than crime and the kinds of things that my political party is always citing. It’s a problem of race, and it is very much still a problem of race.”
Upcoming Meetings
The Alexandria Community Remembrance Students met on Oct. 30 to review the context film for the Nov. 1 Banned Truth Tour that covers the years 1749-1860. We are still in need of funds for the Banned Truth Tour for our high school students. Please consider donating - learn more and donate on our campaign page.
The next Clergy Coffee will be on Nov. 12 at 9 a.m. at Alexandria’s Black History Museum. Please stop by between 9 and 10:30 to meet other clergy and join the conversation. Guest speaker
The Steering Committee will next meet on Nov. 13 at 5:30 at Alexandria’s Black History Museum.
Alexandria Community Remembrance Project
The Alexandria Community Remembrance Project (ACRP) is a city-wide initiative dedicated to helping Alexandria understand its history of racial terror hate crimes and to work toward creating a welcoming community bound by equity and inclusion.
In Memoriam
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Office of Historic Alexandria
City of Alexandria, Virginia
ACRP@alexandriava.gov