An 18-Year-Old’s Family Restaurant Burned to the Ground. Supporters Are Pitching in to Rebuild It.

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It’s still only Tuesday? Okay, multiple Recharges. It’s gonna take a lot of boosts to get through this. Let’s stretch a triple:

More than material. When 18-year-old Hafsa Islam saw her family’s Bangladeshi Indian restaurant burned to the ground during protests in Minneapolis, she shared the news on Facebook and posted her father’s thoughts: “Let my building burn…Life is more valuable than anything else. We can rebuild a building, but we cannot give this man [George Floyd] back to his family.” Her posts were met with an outpouring of support so vast and news coverage so wide that solidarity turned into nationwide pledges to rebuild her restaurant.

Music of a moment. Saving lives is the country’s first order of business. But saving music is a collective project of its own, and encouraging news is in: The famed Bop Street Records announced that it would be forced to close by the pandemic, and 500,000 recordings flushed, but in the final hours, the Internet Archive came through to purchase the entire collection, sight unseen. The archive—a nonprofit library of free books, movies, music, and more—has collected more than 4.5 million audio recordings.

Unlocked. A small bail fund has raised a staggering $20 million in four days of donations to help protesters in Minnesota. A popular DJ, Marea Stamper, known as the Black Madonna, said that any followers who donate to bail funds and send her donation receipts would get added to her shows’ guest lists when touring resumes. “Everyone around the world is ready for justice,” Tonja Honsey, the fund’s executive director, said. “They’re ready for real change, and they’re supporting that.”

Send story ideas to recharge@motherjones.com, and swing by the daily blog at motherjones.com/recharge.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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