Richmond, Virginia

Located on the James River in central Virginia, Richmond has played an important role in the history of the state and the nation. Settled in the mid-18th century, the city known as Richmond was laid out in [Page 683]1733 and became a capital city in 1782. By the mid-19th century, the city's tobacco, flour, and iron industries flourished and Richmond gained prominence as the second largest slave market in the South. These enterprises aided the city in becoming the capital of the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865. The legacy of the war and its mythology, as well as the entrenched racism nurtured by centuries under the slave system, shaped the physical and social landscape of Richmond into the 20th century.

In the decades after the Civil War, Richmond worked to reclaim its former industrial strength and began laying foundations to become a modern, New South city. While Richmonders looked forward to the future, they simultaneously celebrated their Old South past. As citizens helped rebuild the city, burned at the end of the war, and businesses started to recover, Richmond became the center of Confederate commemoration spurred by the Lost Cause Movement. Between 1875 and 1919, large monuments to Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and General Lee were erected. These public memorials to the past coincided with the emergence of the modern city. In 1888, Richmond completed the nation's first electric streetcar system that incorporated both the downtown and growing suburban areas. Along with the city's industrial recovery and growth came a continued resistance to racial equality codified under Jim Crow laws.

Racial segregation influenced city politics and planning in the 20th century. In 1911, the city council passed a racial zoning ordinance designating neighborhoods as either black or white. The law, overturned in 1917, prohibited occupancy by new residents of the opposite race. These practices, later continued through redlining and block booking, resulted in rigidly segregated neighborhoods across Richmond. During World War II, Richmond, like other Southern cities, grew rapidly, with a population increase of 20 percent to 230,000 by 1950. Despite this growth, African Americans continued to face social and spatial segregation and were limited to living in a few urban neighborhoods, many with substandard housing. Faced with an inner city population of African Americans and the loss of white residents to the suburban counties—which in Virginia are independent of cities—city leaders struggled to control the growth of the municipality. In 1942, the city council annexed a portion of an adjacent county, adding 20,000 residents to the city, almost all of whom were white, thus reducing the proportion of Richmond's black citizenry to one quarter of the total population.

As Richmond continued to lag behind Northern cities during the postwar period in per capita income and funding for public projects, city leaders looked to urban planning and a new city government structure as ways to catch up and compete. The city adopted the Bartholomew Plan in 1946. The plan called for zoning laws to dismantle mixed-use neighborhoods by separating industrial, residential, and commercial functions, building highways through the black neighborhood of Jackson Ward, and building a civic center along with other public improvements. By the 1950s, the implementation of the plan and the construction of public housing, with its slum clearance mandate, destroyed black communities, displaced residents, and relocated many African Americans into segregated housing projects. Despite the physical segregation of Richmond, the new city government structure provided the African American community with an opportunity to have a limited voice. In an effort to reduce political corruption and increase efficiency, Richmond approved a new city charter in 1948 that replaced the strong mayor and twocouncil system used since 1918 with a city manager and a single council made up of nine members. Noted civil rights attorney Oliver Hill became the first black city council member since 1896 under the new system.

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