University of Richmond Professor Julian Hayter (Photo by Jay Paul)
Editor’s Note: On Tuesday evening, The Valentine will kick off its “Controversy History” series. The first will begin with stories about Richmonders who supported and opposed women’s suffrage, and then we’ll delve into on-the-ground data concerning voting rights and redistricting today from experts at the University of Richmond School of Law. For today’s Sunday Story, we explore the topic through Julian Maxwell Hayter’s new book on Richmond, “The Dream is Lost.” Look for a Q&A transcript to be posted later this week.
Julian Maxwell Hayter, a University of Richmond history professor, spent a lot of time in City Stadium over the past five years, but he wasn’t cheering on the Kickers. He used the stadium — the former home of the Richmond Rebels in the mid 1960s — as an office in which to write much of his first book.
An outdoor office in what was the predominantly African-American Byrd Park neighborhood until it was split in two by the Downtown Expressway.
A neighborhood like so many others — Jackson Ward, Randolph, Fulton — ripped apart by business and governmental schemes that were purposely designed to separate blacks and whites.
And that is exactly what Hayter’s new book is about. “The Dream is Lost: Voting Rights and the Politics of Race in Richmond, Virginia” tells a story that is both triumphant and achingly dispiriting.
“[Those in their 40s] are starting to think about the civil rights movement,” says Hayter, who was born in 1975.
It’s hard for his generation — a generation that has seen so much violence and the crack epidemic — “to reconcile [an older generation’s] stories with a triumphalist narrative.” While Hayter says that he’d be a fool not to admit that there was some profound progress made, “it didn’t materialize in the ways that people thought it would and the story of Richmond bears that out."
Hayter’s book will also serve as a stepping stone to several history pieces that Richmond magazine will write in 2018, and it is that history that residents, old and new, need to know to unravel and repair what remains, Hayter says.
Upon a wishful suggestion by Hayter, we also are planning a free, mini-course on 20th-century urban history at the end of 2018. In other words, there was just too much to explore properly in this one Sunday Story.
“People say we are building community [when they move into a city neighborhood] as if there was no community there before,” Hayter says. “In this great inversion of people moving back into the city, we are not doing enough excavating of the past in this rush to appropriate land. … Urban history is shaping everything today. The forces that shaped cities were not organic.”
Hayter’s book toggles between introducing us to pivotal African-American residents who pushed for their rights long before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the granular, but needed, stats on income, employment and voting patterns in our city’s voting districts over 70 years.
We meet men —and a whole lot of women — who organized and made it their work to register black voters, despite poll-tax barriers, long before Selma and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
These men and women — the Richmond Civic Council, a precursor to the Richmond Crusade for Voters — paved the way for Oliver Hill’s election to City Council in 1949, when residents elected nine at-large members. Our current, court-ordered nine-district system came after a lawsuit filed by resident Curtis Holt Sr., who understood the city had annexed a huge, very white swath of Chesterfield County and purposely diluted black voting strength.
Hayter’s book is an essential read on Richmond, and should go on your bookshelf along with Gregg Kimball’s “American City, Southern Place” and the Rev. Ben Campbell’s book, “ Richmond’s Unhealed History.”
“Cities are never blank slates,“ Hayter writes. “Slavery may have made Richmond, but our fascination with the peculiar institution often overshadows just how destructive the grind of the 20th-century urban history was to black Americans' upwardly mobile aspirations. Reconciliation is next to impossible without recognition.”
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