Before Virginia Military Institute cadets were photographed in blackface in yearbooks, they fought to preserve slavery during the Civil War in the Battle of New Market. The 2015 film Field of Lost Shoes - produced with $1 million in Virginia public funds - chronicles that battle.

Oliver White Hill is among the country’s most important civil rights attorneys of the 20th century, known for pursuing cases to dismantle segregation in Virginia before and after serving in the army during World War II. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s file on Hill, however, offers its own remarkably skewed, racist, and paranoid view of Hill’s work, in keeping with Director J. Edgar Hoover’s deeply held suspicion of the Civil Rights movement.

As the Community Justice Films Series aired its final film in Richmond last February, the assembled individuals and groups began thinking about how to harness the energy and lessons learned from the two-year-long program. Public records provided part of the answer.

The Virginia Lottery says it gave $606 million to schools 2018 - a towering figure that apparently gives the agency enough clout to make Richmond’s skyline look like the back wall of a liquor store. But like many state-run lotteries across the country, casinos and sports betting are making the agency take a closer look at the odds of their continued dominance.

Last year, we filed a request for Corey Stewart’s various Confederate-related correspondence, and received it around the time Stewart voiced support for a white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia at the Robert E. Lee statue. Three months later, a much larger rally dubbed “Unite the Right” saw Heather Heyer killed by a neo-Nazi. MuckRock duplicated the original request for emails, with the addition of keywords related to the rally. We received 21 pages of emails, none written by Stewart.