The Politics of Annexation

OPEN ACCESS EDITION With a New Preface by Julian Maxwell Hayter OLIGARCHIC POWER IN A SOUTHERN CITY JOHN V. MOESER, RUTLEDGE M. DENNIS The PoliTics of Annexation The PoliTics of Annexation Oligarchic Power in a Southern City Open Access editiOn John V. Moeser & Rutledge M. Dennis WITH A NEW INTROdUctiOn BY tHe AUtHORs And A neW pRefAce by Julian Maxwell Hayter VCU LIBRARIES Richmond, Virginia 2020 The Politics of Annexation: Oligarchic Power in a Southern City (Open Access Edition) by John V. Moeser and Rutledge M. Dennis. Original text © 1982 John V. Moeser and Rutledge M. Dennis New Introduction © 2020 John V. Moeser and Rutledge M. Dennis Preface © 2020 Julian Maxwell Hayter Originally published in 1982 by Schenkman Publishing Company, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Open Access Edition published in 2020 by VCU Libraries, 901 Park Ave, Box 84203, Richmond, VA 23284 – 2033. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons [CC BY- NC 4.0] license. To view a copy of the license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc/4.0/. ISBN: 978-1-7341307-0-6 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-7341307-1-3 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-7341307-2-0 (mobi) ISBN: 978-1-7341307-3-7 (print) DOI: https://doi.org/10.21974/02y5- eq41 Cover design by Jeff Bland. conTenTs vii Publisher’s Note ix Preface xvii Fifty Years Later: The Richmond- Chesterfield Annexation and Its Implications Today xxxi Acknowledgments One 1 Introduction tWO 28 Post – World War II Richmond: Race, Politics, and City Expansionism three 49 Action/Reaction: Annexation and the Struggle for Power 49 Section 1. The Chesterfield Drama and the Role of the Commonwealth 108 Section 2. The Horner- Bagley Line four 141 Litigation and Its Aftermath: Curtis Holt versus the City 187 Notes 215 Bibliography 223 Index PUBLISHER’s noTe his Open Access Edition of The Politics of Annexation presents a newly formatted version of the original 1982 edition.Th e text itself has been Tedited only for non-substantive style changes and corrections. The Preface, the new Introduction (“Fifty Years Later”), and the index were prepared especially for this edition. The Open Access Edition was produced in cooperation with the Univer- sity of Richmond, especially with the assistance of Lucretia McCulley, Head, Scholarly Communications, University Libraries. The original edition is available through the UR Scholarship Repository at https://scholarship.richmond .edu/bookshelf/307/ Research materials used by the authors in writing this book are available at Special Collections and Archives, James Branch Cabell Library, Virginia Com- monwealth University. A description of the materials can be found at https:// archives.library.vcu.edu/repositories/5/resources/83 About the Authors John V. Moeser is Professor Emeritus of Urban Studies and Planning at Vir- ginia Commonwealth University. He was one of the founding members of the department in 1971. Following his 34 year career at VCU and shortly before his retirement in 2005, he was invited to become Senior Fellow in the Bon- ner Center for Civic Engagement at the University of Richmond. During his 12 years at UR, he continued his study of African American history in Rich- mond during the 20th Century and began a comprehensive analysis of poverty, race, and public policy that ultimately led to the creation of Richmond’s Anti- Poverty Commission. Rutledge M. Dennis is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociol- ogy and Anthropology at George Mason University, where he teaches and conducts research on W.E.B. Du Bois, the sociology of ideas, theoretical viii | The PoliTics of Annexation sociology, social stratification, and race and ethnic studies. He was the first Coordinator of African American Studies at Virginia Commonwealth Uni- versity in Richmond, Virginia, and it was there where he became a public sociologist and engaged in a variety of civic activities: a Commissioner with the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority, a member of the Board of Directors of H.O.M.E., and a member of Black Media, Inc. He has published numerous books, the last of which was The Field Notes of a Sociologist, produced as a part of the Black Middletown Project. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Reise-Melton Cross Cultural Award, the Joseph S. Himes Lifetime Achievement Award, the Du Bois-Johnson-Frazier Award, and the Alpha Phi Alpha Scholastic Achievement Award. He is cur- rently completing work on two major projects: the Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois and Black Middletown. Julian Maxwell Hayter is a historian and Associate Professor of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. His research focuses on modern U.S. history, American political development, African-American history, and the American civil rights movement. He is the author of The Dream is Lost: Voting Rights and the Politics of Race in Richmond, Virginia. PRefAce Julian Maxwell Hayter first readThe Politics of Annexation in 2005, during my time as a graduate student at the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History. By I that time, the book was over thirty years old. Since 1982, much had been made of Richmond, Virginia’s role in slavery, industrial tobacco production, the American Civil War, and the Confederacy. Until very recently, the history of twentieth- century Richmond was anemic by comparison. Even less had been written about modern Richmond: namely, twentieth- century black Richmonders and their struggle for civil rights. Of the small, yet sound scholarship that existed on modern Richmond, three names dominated the litera- ture: Rutledge Dennis, John Moeser, and Christopher Silver. Few of us knew it in 2005, but a handful of historians were endeavoring toward a new political and urban history. We were not alone. Nor were we the first scholars to foray into the affairs of urban political history. Moeser and Dennis had already me- thodically excavated mid- century Richmond history. In doing so, they un- earthed something in The Politics of Annexation that urban and political historians were just beginning to understand in 2005 — local politics matters. The Politics of Annexation was not merely ahead of its time; it has stood the test of time. In 1982, modern urban history was relatively unchartered scholarly territory. Experts still did not quite fully understand how mid- twentieth- century demographic trends and urban redevelopment had actually shaped America’s cities. During the twilight of the twentieth century, de jure segre- gation still cast a considerable shadow over Richmond (and the South gen- erally). Historians now have a more robust understanding of what these two authors thoroughly described in the early 1980s. By the 1960s, American cities began to suffer from suburbanization, deindustrialization, and weakening economies. The suburbanization of jobs, income, and taxable revenue fol- lowed the out- migration of white people. Not only was this movement into America’s suburbs one of the greatest migrations of human beings in the history of humanity, it was largely subsidized by the federal government. As x | The PoliTics of Annexation African Americans moved in and whites moved away, cities such as Richmond did not simply struggle financially; local, state, and national officials used the power vested in segregated governing bodies to perpetuate African American second- class citizenship. Schools failed. Freeways purposefully destroyed vul- nerable neighborhoods. Bankers jacked up interest rates on middle-income homeowners or denied loans to inner- city residents all together. Restrictive covenants also precluded residential integration. All of this made the compres- sion of impoverished African Americans into poorly funded public housing projects even worse. These designs had grave consequences for cities such as Richmond. After eight years of failed border expansions, the City of Rich- mond, on January 1, 1970, annexed twenty- three square miles and 47,000 people from Chesterfield County. On its face, Richmond annexed portions of Chesterfield County to meet these urban challenges. Rutledge Dennis and John Moeser were unconvinced. We should be thankful for their doubt. Their skepticism, which culminated in this book, broadened our understanding of not just Richmond’s history, but also urban history as well. It cannot be understated that this book was and is only nominally about the annexation of Chesterfield County. It does not merely depict the small handful of well- heeled whites that dominated Virginia politics before and immedi- ately after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). It also explains how African Americans activated the machinery of intensely organized, yet increasingly segregated communities to contend with these oligarchs. In analyzing how and why the annexation of Chesterfield County occurred, this work not only en- riched our understanding of municipal- and state- level politics during the end of the Jim Crow era; it also emphasized the age- old dialectic between vested white interests and the black freedom struggle. These power struggles were a defining feature of the segregated system. If paternalism and poll taxes helped a small handful of white elites disproportionately control Virginia politics for most of the twentieth century, these forces also made it possible for whites to “hold the line against attempts by blacks to force wide- scale political and economic changes” after 1965. But African Americans, the following pages es- tablish, had their own plans. The Politics of Annexation is one of the first scholarly attempts to explain the uniqueness of civil rights activism in Richmond. In fact, much of what experts initially knew about the Richmond Crusade for Voters, its founders, and the politicized nature of black activism in Richmond originated within these pages. To this day, popular fascination with civil disobedience often Preface | xi overshadows just how thoroughly organized black communities were before and during the American civil rights movement. In drawing attention to orga- nizations such as the Crusade for Voters, these two authors underscored two things that contemporary activists would be wise to study — the strategies of civil rights activists were more varied than often told.

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