Longtime professor and author John V. Moeser inspired legions of students and colleagues and helped Richmond carve a path toward racial justice.
John V. Moeser (Photo by Tina Griego)
Moeser came to Richmond in 1971 to begin his teaching career at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he would become professor and chairman in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. In the 1970s and ’80s, he and several other colleagues helped form this prestigious department and created one of the most highly sought degrees at the university. In his storied three-decade career at VCU, he taught over 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students. He then spent another dozen years at the University of Richmond as a senior fellow in the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement before retiring in 2017. Even in retirement, Moeser continued to write letters and opinion pieces, constantly strategizing about how to get Richmond to do more to confront injustice, racism and poverty.
On Monday, we received the sad news that Moeser died at the age of 79. Our deepest condolences go to his wife, Sharon; his sons, Jeremy and David; two grandchildren; and the entire Moeser family.
We all were fortunate to work with professor Moeser in the second half of his career in various capacities: Tom Shields as his graduate student and collaborator, Amy Howard as his close UR colleague and officemate, and Thad Williamson as his close collaborator on former Mayor Dwight Jones’ Anti-Poverty Commission, leading to the creation of the Office of Community Wealth Building. We believe the legacy of his important work and his example of a values-centered life will continue to inspire positive change in the Richmond region.
The most obvious thing about Moeser was that he was a kind man: unfailingly polite, patient beyond measure, generous of spirit, encouraging of others, always willing to say yes to requests for help. His kindness, along with his Texas drawl and calm, direct manner, invited trust and allowed him to build a wide variety of relationships across the city of Richmond and surrounding jurisdictions.
His kindness overlaid both an intensely rigorous intellect and a fierce anger at injustice, in particular racial injustice. Moeser was appalled at what he learned about Richmond’s practices of racism (at both the informal and the policy level) when he arrived in 1971. Five decades later, he was still appalled.
That anger and quest for justice translated into important scholarship and persistent activism.
In 1982, Moeser and Rutledge M. Dennis published “The Politics of Annexation: Oligarchic Power in a Southern City,” which remains the most detailed account of Richmond’s drive in the late 1960s to annex an overwhelmingly white section of Chesterfield County, which at the time included 44,000 residents.
The impact of the annexation was to ensure the city retained a majority white electorate in the 1970 local elections in the face of Richmond’s majority Black population. Court documents resulting from legal challenges to the annexation showed that this was not only the impact, but the intent. White leaders wished to retain control of City Hall, so they stacked the electorate by adding tens of thousands of white voters.
Moeser and Dennis tell this sordid tale in remarkable detail: both the run-up to the annexation decision and the lengthy fallout. Federal intervention led to a cessation of local elections between 1970 and 1977, before the imposition of a nine-district ward system designed to ensure adequate Black representation on City Council. The new system led directly to majority Black control of Council and subsequent election of the city’s first Black mayor, Henry L. Marsh.
Moeser’s work made clear that the subsequent restrictions on municipal annexations in Virginia, as well as the failure of the state to rectify past segregationist policies, left Richmond in an untenable place, with a high concentration of poverty and other social problems, and grossly insufficient resources to address them.
Due to the recent focus on regionalism and the changing demographics in suburban jurisdictions in Richmond, there has been a renewed interest in “The Politics of Annexation.” In April 2020, the libraries of VCU and the University of Richmond teamed up to publish an open-access edition of the book with a new forward by Moeser and Dennis and a preface by Dr. Julian Hayter.
In 1995, Moeser and Christopher Silver explored the racial politics of Atlanta; Memphis, Tennessee; and Richmond in “The Separate City: Black Communities in the Urban South, 1940-1968.” The book examined the changing Black leadership in these localities that would eventually change Southern urban politics and lay the foundation for the civil rights movement. This book became the basis for numerous studies examining the changing leadership in these cities, and eventually their surrounding suburbs.
In his later years at VCU and then the University of Richmond, as a beloved, strategic thought partner and senior fellow at the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, Moeser would become a voice for changing the structures of government and bringing attention to the most vulnerable in our communities.
Moeser lay ultimate responsibility for Richmond’s current challenges at the feet of the state, which permitted and facilitated its social and economic isolation. But he also argued strongly that city leaders themselves could do more to address Richmond’s chronic issues.
Moeser and Tom Shields helped break a deadlock on debates in the early 2000s about shifting to a directly elected mayor by proposing Richmond’s unique district system for mayoral elections, requiring candidates to win election in five of nine districts. Known as the Unity Amendment, this system assured that no candidate could be elected simply on the strength of high turnout in the city’s majority white, affluent districts. Adoption of this plan by a nongovernmental commission established by former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder and former U.S. Rep. Thomas J. Bliley led numerous Black grassroots leaders to drop their opposition to the elected mayor proposal, paving the way for its implementation in 2004.
Later, Moeser played an integral role in pushing the reformed system to address the city’s most entrenched systemic problem: its high poverty rate, which rose to catastrophic levels in the wake of the 2008-09 recession. He urged then-Mayor Jones to move forward with establishing the Anti-Poverty Commission in 2011, then served with distinction on the commission. Moeser wrote the final report’s historical section and reviewed the draft written by primary author Thad Williamson in 2012.
That draft report sat in limbo for months until Moeser and Williamson urged Mayor Jones’ staff to move forward with releasing the report in late 2012. In one critical meeting, Moeser told the mayor’s team that the commission would publish the report itself if things didn’t get moving.
After the report was at last published in January 2013, Moeser remained highly engaged in the detailed planning process that led to the city’s creation in 2014 of the Office of Community Wealth Building. The OCWB is a first-of-its-kind municipal office created to lead the coordination of anti-poverty initiatives in the city, with the goal of putting as many Richmonders as possible on a path to building wealth, starting with intensive support for job seekers.
In part because of these efforts, Richmond’s poverty rate declined between 2016 and 2020, from 26.2% to 17.9%, its lowest level in nearly 20 years. Even so, in recent years Moeser was emphatically clear that these efforts were insufficient, and that Richmond must do much more to break its patterns of entrenched racial inequality.
In conjunction with the launch of the Anti-Poverty Commission, Moeser, as CCE senior fellow, partnered with Jonathan Zur, president and chief executive of the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities, and Initiatives of Change/Hope in the Cities to help educate Richmonders about the reality of poverty and race in the metro region through the creation of “Unpacking the Census.” Using graphic information system maps, diagrams and videos that depicted the stark demographic changes occurring in the metropolitan area, Moeser and Zur trained advocates to present the data across the region. The maps and easy-to-understand charts and diagrams helped initiate a well-needed dialogue in Central Virginia about our increasingly diverse jurisdictions. Using the American Community Survey data from the U.S. Census, Moeser began to work with undergraduate students in the UR’s Spatial Analysis Lab. Under his thoughtful guidance, the students created maps profiling the rapidly changing demographics in the region that are available on the Unpacking the Census website. In honor of Moeser’s work and impact on students, there is now a student designated as the John V. Moeser Fellow to continue this GIS Census mapping and other projects with the Spatial Analysis Lab.
In spring 2013, Moeser partnered with Shields and VCU professors Genevieve Siegel-Hawley and Kim Bridges in the creation of a conference titled, “Looking Back, Moving Forward.” That joint VCU-UR conference examined the history of educational segregation in the region and profiled policies and actions across the United States that could ameliorate the racial and economic isolation in our region’s local school systems. That partnership, formed by Moeser’s connections and his strong desire to highlight this deepening separateness, spurred several reports examining segregation in schools in the region.
Moeser’s interest in housing led him to serve on the boards of several prominent advocacy groups in the Richmond region, including Housing Opportunities Made Equal and Habitat for Humanity. Moeser encouraged Shields, Siegel-Hawley and Bridges to work with housing advocate Brian Koziol in understanding the pernicious problem of housing segregation and its impact on schools. In 2017, the group issued a report, “Confronting School and Housing Segregation in the Richmond Region: Can We Learn and Live Together?” that examined the nexus between housing and school segregation. In the preface to that report, Moeser asked, “Is there a lesson for all of us as we call attention to the plight of our children in the public schools they attend and the neighborhoods in which they live?” Fittingly, in honor of Moeser’s years of dedication to housing, the Virginia Housing Alliance honored him with the Hall of Fame Award in September. This was one of many well-deserved awards and honors Moeser received over his lifetime.
In addition to his scholarly and numerous other civic endeavors, Moeser was a wise and generous adviser, teacher and mentor. He lent each of us personal support and advice, and he made us believe we could do things that perhaps we hadn’t thought we could. He did the same for literally thousands of other students and colleagues over the years at VCU and UR, as well as his sprawling network of friends across the city and region.
Moeser was in some ways too good to be true, but he was not a naive do-gooder. He acted thoughtfully and strategically to push and create possibilities for change. He did not court the favor of the powers that be, either within his institutions or in the urban and suburban seats of government. He identified morally not with the region’s well-resourced elites, but with its poor and downtrodden. For this, many leaders worried what Moeser would say when he showed up at a meeting with his detailed historical notes and precise forceful language focused on social justice.
We are grateful he lived long enough to see significant change come to the Richmond region — not only the monuments coming down, or even the greater awareness of and policy attention to poverty, but the growing number of residents from across our metropolitan area who hunger for even more dramatic and meaningful change and who are ready for a full reckoning with our tortured racial history.
Moeser loved this city and region and was desperate to see long-overdue change come to fruition. He used his leverage as a respected scholar, a trusted voice of moral conscience, and as a widely beloved and actively engaged citizen and neighbor to push for as much change as he possibly could, for as long as he could.
In all these ways and more, John Moeser offered a model of how to live — a model relevant not only for scholars, but for all of us.
We will miss him profoundly but remember him every time we see this city and the region make another step in the direction of moral progress, economic inclusion and racial justice.
Tom Shields is associate dean for academic and student affairs in the University of Richmond School of Professional and Continuing Studies, chair of graduate education, and associate professor of education and leadership studies.
Thad Williamson is associate professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond and served as inaugural director of Richmond’s Office of Community Wealth Building.
Amy L. Howard is senior administrative officer for equity and community at the University of Richmond.
