New Books: The Making of 21st Century Richmond
Tune in to our discussion with co-authors Thad Williamson and Julian Hayter about their new book, The Making of Twenty-First-Century Richmond (2024). The book explores the fraught history of Richmond, VA, a mid-sized city working to emerge from the shadows of its early history as the capital of the Confederacy and the challenges of urban decline in recent decades. Drawing on multidisciplinary methods, The Making of Twenty-First-Century Richmond analyzes the root causes and internal dynamics that have shaped the city over time through close examinations of education policy, economic development, and housing.
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Julian Hayter
It's hard for people that weren't alive in the late 20th century to imagine what American cities look like. There's only so much that you can really understand watching Taxi Driver, what the Bronx looked like, or what Manhattan would have looked like, what downtown Philadelphia or downtown Richmond look like. So, all these things are kind of intertwined, the detritus of modernity that characterize many urban spaces in the late and early 20th century. fill the proverbial coffers because as whites left to the suburbs and middle-class African Americans, they took with it their tax bases. So, these local politicians are left to try to come up with these inventive strategies to save cities. These silver bullet strategies – if we could just have a skyscraper or a stadium, or if we could do something to entice businesses back into downtown, we could hopefully save the city. And I think it's a common occurrence or there are common occurrences that take place throughout the United States in many of the cities that mirror Richmond in some ways are probably more intense.
Emily
Hi, this is Emily Holloway. You’re listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by the journal Urban Affairs Review. That was Julian Hayter, who, along with Thad Williamson and Amy Howard, co-authored The Making of Twenty-First Century Richmond: Politics, Policy, and Governance, published last year by the University of North Carolina Press. I sat down with Thad and Julian to learn more about the complicated and misunderstood history of Richmond, Virginia – the former capital of the Confederacy, and an understudied mid-sized city caught in the contradictory demands of postwar urban development.
Julian Hayter
I'm Julian Maxwell Hayter. I'm a historian, professor of leadership of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond and my area of expertise is modern U.S. history, urban and political history.
Thad Williamson
I'm Thad Williamson. I'm a political scientist, and also professor of leadership studies and philosophy of politics, economics, and law at the University of Richmond. I work at the intersection of political theory and public policy and also have worked in public administration extensively in the city of Richmond.
Emily
Julian and Thad, thank you so much for joining us today. I’m really excited to share your book with our listeners – I don’t think many people outside of Virginia know very much about Richmond. I understand you both have been living and teaching here for some time, but I’d love to learn more about why you wrote this book, why you wanted to focus on Richmond – what makes it unique? And beyond that, what lessons can we draw from this city’s recent history to better understand urban politics in America?
Julian Hayter
The obvious is that Richmond was a former capital of the Confederacy. Not much had been written about Richmond's history other than the kind of colonial fascination with colonial history. And then, of course, slavery in the Civil War, that changes over time.
But a lot of this came from a void, if you will, of the history that we've chosen to focus on about, well, what happened to Richmond after the Civil War? And I think that is a much more fascinating story given its position as being central to the transatlantic slave trade, domestic slave trading, of course, the Confederacy, but even more importantly, just the large presence of African Americans who have been around in Virginia since the colonial period. So, it's always had a very unique place in American history, in terms of the establishment of the American Democratic experiment. So in studying Richmond is a good barometer to gauge the distinctions between our state of democratic claims and our actual practices.
Thad Williamson
I'm also an urbanist, one of the books that influenced me as a younger scholar was Clarence Stone's work on Atlanta and regime politics. And so I think when the study was initially conceptualized, we kind of want to do a power study of Richmond, partly because they had diverged so much from Atlanta and Charlotte. Richmond went from being a place that was considered a peer city to those places in the mid 20th century to -- I'm not going to say backwater, that's going way too strong -- but certainly perceived it's not a top tier city and we think that has a lot to do with the way people in Richmond and in Central Virginia responded to the civil rights movement, the challenges of desegregation, and basically more or less intentionally hampered the city itself for being successful and then turned it over to black leaders and said good luck.
So we're kind of tracking the aftermath of that story, which is very different than what played out other places.
Julian Hayter
This is generally referred to as the kind of hollow prize theory of cities with sizeable minority populations in the mid 20th century, after the rights revolution or at the height of the rights revolution, inherit these decaying cities and in many instances are blamed for the decay. Despite the kind of 65 years of neglect, dislocation and disaffection that generally characterized the communities that found themselves in control of these cities, in large part because whites and middle-class people kept moving into suburbs in the mid 20th century.
Emily
There are countless case studies of large American cities – Chicago and Los Angeles have their own respective theoretical traditions named after them, there are too many books about New York to count – but there’s still a dearth of analyses about smaller and mid-sized cities. Why should scholars focus on these places? What can we learn from them?
Thad Williamson
Well, I mean, first of all, a lot of people live in these cities. An individual personality is an individual organizations. The actions of specific agents can be more consequential. It can be a little bit easier to move the needle, also the difficult problems and things can be a little more fluid. So to me -- you can get your head around it. There's no way to write 300 pages about New York City or Los Angeles and do anything but capture some specific nuance. But we were able to do or try to do it in about that amount of space, to cover holistic story covering the entire cities development. Obviously we didn't go into every issue in Richmond, and some things we could have delved into more but if we thought there was a market for 1000-page book about Richmond, and maybe it will be someday. But we thought we could track the integration of policy and politics over decades in a reasonably sized volume. That another advantage just from a scholarly point of view, but we think they're inherently interesting and important places that people should pay more attention to.
Julian Hayter
In some cases, a lot of the first questions you asked about why Richmond, of course is you can make a case for Richmond’s exceptionalism, but the same things that were going on in Richmond during the mid 20th century are happening everywhere. The same is true for any mid-sized city with a sizable minority population: New York and Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dallas. They don't have a monopoly on the kinds of urban strategies. There are only a handful of urban planners and public policies in the mid 20th century, and they filtered out in a way that you can see a lot of similarities between cities like Richmond and other Southern cities. But even cities that aren't in the north, there's a kind of shockingly predictable similarity between the ways that people decided to modernize American cities, meet the challenges of the equality movements and social movements in the mid 20th century. So, while each city does have, of course, its own unique history and unique contribution to the history of urbanization, there are some strong similarities between a lot of American cities in the last 70 to 80 years.
Emily
I know this came up a few minutes ago, but Richmond’s historical association with the Confederacy is still a salient political issue – this has really been more visible over the last few years, as confederate monuments come down, streets have been renamed, and so on. But you also frame this history as persisting into Richmond’s present in other, more intractable and structural ways. How has the city and its administrations grappled with this legacy?
Julian Hayter
I mean until recently, it had been characterized by the sin of omission. you'd be hard pressed, reading older histories are looking at the way that Richmond imagined Its past to even know that Richmond was the second largest slave trading capital in the United States behind New Orleans. And large part that's the propaganda campaign in large part by organizations like the Daughters of the United Confederacy, who were in Richmond, so until very recently, Richmond struggled to deal with its History, I and I say that to say that African Americans that always keep kept the proverbial flame lit, if you will, and trying to tell the stories that have been somewhere swept under the rug. And what we've seen in in recent years is the kind of renaissance and the reimagination of how Richmond imagines its past a lot of that has to do with several things. Historians have been focused on the legacy of the Confederacy quite some time. People begin to read some of those stories. But then again, I think that contemporary Richmonders and Virginians began to hold, if you will, Confederate memorialization in content, in a way that people that kind of just resolve themselves, deal with over the course of the 20th century. It’s not just that people didn't see Confederate monuments, the lionization of the Confederacy as problematic, but these cities were struggling so acutely that and I've said this before that, the people who are inheriting them were doing political triage. They had to worry about schools, they had to worry about jobs, they had to worry about blight, they had to worry about decay, and those types of issues were first and foremost on the minds of the people who assume political power over these cities. In many ways, that's what we're studying is how they came to terms first with addressing the sin in the shadow of segregation, and then the kind of loftier questions about how to reimagine Richmond's past.
Thad Williamson
I think in 1977, after a 7-year period in which local elections were halted in Richmond because of a federal case in which it was basically shown that the annexation of Chesterfield County, adding the other 50,000 residents in 1970, was done for fundamentally racial reasons. In 1977, the city had adopted a 9 district system and elected a majority Black Council, who in turn elected the city's first Black Mayor, Henry Marsh, who recently passed away, but he had to reassure people and he talks about this in his memoir that he wasn't trying to take down the monuments. what he did to Julian’s point, was a little more consequential. Instead, after a period of time, they fired the white city manager had held over from the previous regime and that was an enormous deal and they got huge blowback from the white newspaper, white corporate leaders at the time, so fast-forwarding and our book actually picks up an era of in the late 80s, I think many black leaders didn't want to poke the elephant excessively and but there was work done in the 90s not to remove confederate iconography. But instead to focus on adding greater black representation, so famously adding Arthur Ashe, who's was a Richmond native to Donovan Ave. in the 1990s, where something that there was a huge undertaking that a lot of black political leaders, the former governor, that Doug Wilder and others put a lot of capital into and they got a lot of blowback against it. But they were able to get that done.
Now, fast forwarding 20 years, Mayor Dwight Jones, who's the last mayor we talk about in our book, at the end of his tenure the question came up about the Confederate monuments, and his response was the monuments I want to take down are the monuments to poverty that that are public housing in the city's East End.
Over the period of study most black leaders, and obviously there are exceptions, but most black leaders were more focused on the material consequences of segregation and focusing on that first. Now that discourse, as we talked about in the conclusion of the book, changed very rapidly from 2017 onward. And I think after the events in Charlottesville, a consensus shifted that these things need to come down and then became a matter of enabling state law and literally the first day the law was in effect, Richmond starts to take down monuments in 2020.
Julian Hayter
I think one of the things that I want to emphasize is Richmonders have kind of always known that the monuments weren't the only relics to the segregated system. And there's still all these things left over from Jim Crow that still need to be addressed.
Emily
Yes, and you select a few institutions and systems in Richmond to analyze these legacies of Jim Crow – the public school system being a major one, and one that intersects with population dynamics, with the boundaries of the city, with economic decline.
Julian Hayter
I think the public education system in Richmond is probably one of those glaring examples of this kind of idea that the things that made segregation possible, there are ideas that made segregation possible, that survived the segregated system. And one of those is the approach that they took to education or the failure to integrate or attempts to integrate resistance to that integration.
And I think over time, the story of Richmond public schools belies the triumph narrative of the civil rights movement. It's still overwhelmingly segregated, less so in recent years than it has been recently. But there are points in the twilight of the 20th century where Richmond public schools is upwards to 80 to 90% African American, which in some ways tells a completely different story from the one that's often told about the story of Brown versus Board of Education.
Thad Williamson
Well, I think it's essential to know the back story from the early 70s where a federal judge had actually ordered Richmond schools to merge with the surrounding counties and that got overturned in a federal appeals court and then. The appeal got upheld by the Supreme Court. So basically, because Richmond’s a relatively small city geographically, about 62 square miles, families, white families and increasingly middle-class black families could simply move and get into a completely different school system. So over time, the school system does become overwhelmingly black, which was not the case in the 50s and 60s, overwhelmingly black and let's say a high degree of economic disadvantaged students. And so the leaders who remain behind, many of them which were exceptional educators and committed themselves, had kind of a dual strategic challenge. There was in some ways contradictory: on the one hand it was how can we best educate the students we actually have, many of whom may be living in public housing, living in relatively violent neighborhoods and have lots of challenges at home? How do we do the best we can? Because those are our students. And at the same time, how do we make the system as a whole palatable or marketable to middle class folks, because I think the presumption was that the school system needed to increase the enrollment of middle class folks, including white folks, in order to get the resources and the attention needed to be able to help everybody. So there's some stories about the degrees to which the school system bent over backwards to accommodate white parents and their preferences, whether through, at one point, there's a controversy in the early 90s over pupil assignment policies within specific classrooms where white kids were basically being clustered together within majority black schools for “social reasons.” And then later on, and this continues into quite recently and arguably to the present day, the zoning of schools and the policy of zoning schools and the things that are done to try and accommodate the demands of white parents. So that that's like one through line, a second through line is certainly administrative instability and the way the policy education intersects with other political conflicts in the city, and we have several examples of that, probably the most recent or telling one was we get to the 2000s and RPS had a superintendent who was really moving the needle on academics, Deborah Sherman, who later became a professor at Harvard but just at the moment, she's getting it together and has got school board on board. And this consensus making progress. Then Richmond shifts to this strong mayor system with Doug Wilder becoming the first mayor and Doug Wilder basically says what the schools are doing is not good enough.
And there's in a protracted conflict with RPS that characterized his entire four years, and Deborah Sherman basically just left. In retrospect that could be seen as a missed opportunity. Although at the time, many people thought Mayor Wilder had a point. So I think it's the challenges of getting all the governance things in peace to align on a common, sustained strategy to actually make an impact is one of the things I think we detail in the book. Part of is the governance issues made it really, really hard even for a strong educator and a strong educational leader to sustain progress.
Julian Hayter
I think that even more broadly what you find with the kind of administrative discontinuity and then of course, these strategies to deal with or accommodate white parents as part of this broader issue of the kind of ways that people pathologized the "inner city.” So a lot of the strategies that people have come up with have been a way to... The old saying is that, in the United States, people have very rarely resolved to deal with poverty, you'd rather just move away from it. And that's part of the problem. I think that's another leftover problem from the segregated system, is these deep concentrations of poverty in the city of Richmond that are, of course, implicated in the public school system and people's movement around and negotiating under and inside and beneath it without actually addressing it.
Emily
Yeah, this pathology is so pervasive in studies of postwar urban America – at one point in your book, you point out that anti-urbanism shaped modern Richmond.
Julian Hayter
It shaped America. It's impossible not to recognize that for most of the late 20th century, the federal, state, and local governments' strategy for the large part was suburban. And cities had been left in many instances, hollowed out.
Emily
Absolutely! And so in my reading of your book, at least, you’re drawing together these sort of overlapping, linked principles of anti-urbanism and racism and segregation that really shaped not just the various social and political systems in Richmond – education, housing, and so on – but also the built environment, with deteriorating infrastructure, blight, that sort of thing.
Julian Hayter
It's hard for people that weren't alive in the late 20th century to imagine what American cities look like. There's only so much that you can really understand watching Taxi Driver, what the Bronx looked like, or what Manhattan would have looked like, what downtown Philadelphia or downtown Richmond look like. So, all these things are kind of intertwined, the detritus of modernity, that characterize many urban spaces in the late and early 20th century. So what you would have seen in some ways was a hollowed out downtown, a public school system that had been abandoned, the compression of African Americans in Richmond's case to public housing, there are any number of issues, but there are issues of universities saving the city or the downtown area in large part because they're one of the few institutions that had resolved to invest in the development of these places that have been abandoned. There are these issues with institutions and the continuity of problems of the city that have been left behind, that in some ways are unique to Richmond, but they're not specifically unique to Richmond. So, we talked about Virginia Commonwealth University, for instance, and it's the same with Temple University or Yale in New Haven or USC in Los Angeles. So, we see these cities struggling to, , fill the proverbial coffers because as whites left to the suburbs and middle-class African Americans, they took with it their tax bases. So, these local politicians are left to try to come up with these inventive strategies to save cities. These silver bullet strategies – if we could just have a skyscraper or a stadium, or if we could do any if something to entice businesses back into downtown, we could hopefully save the city. And some of it was successful. A lot of it, unfortunately, was not, and we see this in Richmond with the 6th Street market. We see it with Virginia Commonwealth University. In large part, these people are trying to reimagine strategies to pay the bills in cities that have been effectively abandoned and hollowed out. And I think it's a thing occurrence or there are common occurrences that take place throughout the United States in many of the cities that mirror Richmond in some ways are probably more intense.
Thad Williamson
And just add that just as related to the advent of school desegregation and the failure of regional integration schools the population in 1970, the city of Richmond was about 250,000, and by the mid 2000s it declined intolow 190s. And now, interestingly now it's above 230,000, and so part of our book tracks is the transition between Richmond from being a place that people were leaving to being a place that people were coming back to. And so certainly some of the big-ticket home run things that mayors and political leaders attempted, either they failed, or they simply were rejected. They couldn't pass them, but other things had more staying power. Historic tax credits to rehabilitate housing, commercial units.
By most accounts, tremendously impactful in lowering development dollars back into the city; there was a push that we document to try to create a more robust regional transit system. The stalled in the 90s, 2000s and the 2010s was finally a breakthrough, and now the counties are scrambling to build more work. And so, some of the policies were quite innovative. There is an attempt to sort of concentrate, federal resources and select neighborhoods through a neighborhood and blooms program, and then later towards the end of the book, Mayor Jones establishing an office of community wealth-building that was part of to try to institutionalized anti-poverty strategy within City Hall to have a lasting impact and subsequent to that poverty over the last 10 years in Richmond has actually declined by about 25% or 30%.
Julian Hayter
It's one of the things I think that's happening throughout the United States. That's not really being discussed. I think when we see the kind of revitalization of many of these cities that have been left behind in the mid 20th century, the assumption is that these cities are moving in a different direction, perhaps even in a positive direction because white folks are showing up. Some might call this gentrification but there were things that politicians did, many of them African American cities such as Richmond, that built the types of infrastructure that were necessary for the renaissance that's taking place in many of these cities. They've been given no credit for it, by the way. It's a fancy way of saying, by the way, that in some instances African American politicians laid the groundwork for what we call gentrification, in doing all the things that Thad just delineated, they paved or created a foundation that allowed for the 21st century redevelopment of these forgotten spaces. And the assumption is that there's just been some kind of organic movement toward progress, simply brought on by the fact that people are moving there, that hadn't been there before. And I think nothing could be further from the truth. We've seen any number of things in Richmond and throughout the United States. These negotiations between the built and natural environment, the reclamation of the James River in Richmond, which have been a dumping ground for industrial waste for most of the 20th century, is now a place that is used as a recreational space. The people are showing up to use it as a recreational space, in large part because politicians had the foresight to reclaim that place when that space from the clutches of industrialism and abandonment. And I think these things aren't necessarily given credit for, when we talk about the redevelopment of American urban spaces in the 21st century is as if they are moving forward simply because folks are just there rather than the kind of infrastructural framework that it took for these invented strategies of people that had to make forgive me a chicken salad out of chicken shit.
Thad Williamson
The other piece that that's related that that we give some attention to in the book is that, one of the through lines, which is crime in Richmond, with a crack hit hard in Richmond and in the early 90s it was at one point being described as the murder capital of the United States.
Julian Hayter
Second highest murder capital in America in 1985.
Thad Williamson
And so, for the contemporary perspective it's literally tragic to read because you would see leaders obviously trying to respond they have summits, efforts, so then something terrible would happen right after that. So in the mid 90s that I think the contemporary perception was the city was pushing and pushing and just wasn't getting anywhere. But then the worm started to turn a little bit in the late 90s, it started to get a little bit more under control and then probably most people would say the most lasting benefit from Doug Wilder's term as mayor was that the homicide rate fell to a low of about 31 or 32. In 2008 his last year in office and that's in comparison to having been 160. Like 14 or 15 years before. It's that the perception as well as reality of Richmond being a safer place also is part of the story about why people start coming back. But the irony though is as Julian said is black leaders played a large role in saving the city, but they did not succeed or less successful in creating a just city, which what they set out to do. People like Henry Marsh, Dwight Jones. Most of the African American leaders who are on council at the time, they have strong social justice motivations. They wanted to reduce poverty. They wanted to have greater equality of opportunity, they wanted to have more black businesses, all those things. And those are things have been the slowest to realize. And so that's that. That's what the unfinished work is ahead.
Julian Hayter
What happens in many instances is many of the African American politicians and women and people of color that assumed control over American cities after the 1960s, that their civil rights optimism was washed away right by the leftover detritus of bigotry, and I think all of that optimism becomes is eclipsed by this kind of economic pragmatism in the 1980s and the 1990s. The first thing we have to do is save this city before we can get back to the agenda that Thad just outlined.
Emily
So, what do you hope that readers will take away from this book? Who did you write this for?
Julian Hayter
I think there are people who are moving into American cities right now that have no idea about the history that we've spoken about over the last several minutes, and unfortunately for them and for the people who live in these cities, I think there's a possibility of recreating many of these problematic strategies that defined urban development without that you can't have reconciliation without recognition. So in some ways, this book is the way to kind of shine the light on the kind of problematic policies that came to define cities such as Richmond and how people, despite all of these forces to the contrary, they did the best they could to make these places livable, and in some ways, I think if people aren't familiar with that history, the possibility of doing the wrong thing is much higher than it needs to be.
Thad Williamson
Yeah, it turns out who the audience is and certainly we hope people in Richmond will read it and for older folks who have been here a long time, they know the stuff already. But in some ways, it's kind of a legitimation. It's a recognition of the effort that the past leaders and citizens have put into the city, and while also recognition, that was also it was not a smooth ride to say the least, but in some ways it could be even more useful for newer residents who -- it is probably true in other cities too, who are just completely ignorant of this history, of this past, and they're they can't really make sense of what's going on and I say that because when I came to Richmond as a newcomer 20 years ago, you spent your first couple of years like, what the heck is going on? And it took a little bit of time and getting involved to realize that leaders were in fact working on what seemed like the most glaring issues, which are like racial inequality, the quality of schools, poverty. It was not true that no one cared. It's just that the structural obstacles were so intense that it takes more than just a couple of council members to move the needle. So our opinion is that hopefully people in our cities will see this as interesting study of governance and but also maybe getting inspired to take a deeper look at the cities in which they live.
Emily
My thanks to Julian Hayter and Thad Williamson, co-authors, along with Amy Howard, of The Making of twenty-first century Richmond, from UNC Press. You can find a link to the book in our show notes.
You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to Drexel University and the editors at UAR. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was mixed and produced by Aidan McLaughlin and written and produced by me, Emily Holloway. You can find us on Bluesky at @urbanaffairsreview.bsky.social for updates on the journal and the show. Please rate, review, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.