John Murden

Founder of Church Hill People’s News
B. 1972

I went to VCU for art school back in the day and then Mary Baldwin [College].  I had a teaching degree and was a middle school teacher up here at MLK [Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School] for almost ten years. I taught sixth grade history, but when we had the baby I stopped teaching, so I could stay home.  

I had this all-girl class—this fierce little cadre of girls—and I grew to love them as a group, even though they just fought amongst themselves and pulled each other’s hair out.  And then we came back the next year for seventh grade, and I was so excited to see them.  I’ve always loved when the kids come back and say hi. But then two of those girls came back pregnant in seventh grade, and that just broke my heart a little bit. A girl was showing her sonograms on her phone.  She was like, “look at my baby.”  And I was like, “you all are trying to kill me.”

I feel like the neighborhood turned a corner over the past ten years.  New businesses that we’ve set up will last.  We’re echoing the history that was there 50 or 60 years ago when things were more solid, but also built on false premises.  The neighborhood back in the ‘20s would have been so segregated.  The schools were segregated.  Now as we’re rebuilding the neighborhood after all this stuff, maybe it’s a sign that we’re past some of this.