I was working from home in June when I took a break, walked upstairs to the kitchen and opened Twitter. I saw that @PulitzerPrizes was live-tweeting the winners of its 2021 awards, and I decided to follow along for a few minutes while I enjoyed a cold drink. When the slide announcing “Michael Paul Williams of the Richmond Times-Dispatch has been awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary” appeared on my screen, I yelped. My husband came running to make sure I was OK, and I shared the good news with him.
Having worked for a few years at the RTD with Williams in the early 1990s, not long after he started writing his column, and continuing to read his work since, I could only imagine how he must have felt when he learned the news that he had won the highest honor in U.S. journalism — via a phone call from one of his editors, it turns out. In Rich Griset’s profile of Williams on Page 86, he shares that when the call came, he thought at first that he was being fired, then he thought he was being punked. When he realized he really had won a Pulitzer, he burst into tears.
Williams received the prize for his “penetrating and historically insightful columns that led Richmond, a former capital of the Confederacy, through the painful and complicated process of dismantling the city’s monuments to white supremacy.”
It seemed fitting, then, that as we were wrapping up this issue, we watched as the Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue was removed from its pedestal on Sept. 8. (See one of Jay Paul’s photos of the occasion on Page 112.)
To some, it may seem as if the city has gone through a lot of changes quickly over the past year, but Williams’ decades of columns likely helped to slowly erode the foundations of those monuments as well as the mindset that erected them in the first place. “Change happens incrementally but all at once,” he says. “The monuments came down in blinding speed in a way I never could have predicted, but in hindsight we were chipping away.”
Another big change we’ve experienced this year is the legalization of recreational marijuana on July 1. On Page 70, Tharon Giddens takes a look at how some seniors are embracing pot, both as a way to unwind and for medicinal reasons, and at some of the benefits and risks of its use in this population.
And on Page 78, writer Nicole Cohen looks at the changing face of our region. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, there were more than 90,000 people who identify as Hispanic or Latino living in Richmond, Henrico, Hanover and Chesterfield — and that number is growing. In honor of Hispanic Heritage month, Cohen, whose mother is of Mexican descent, interviewed six Richmonders who share what it’s like to be Latino in Richmond and what we all can do to create a more inclusive and equitable future.
