“No Kings” protesters march down Broad Street in Richmond in October 2025. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Two hundred and fifty years ago, 13 rebellious colonies, in one fell swoop, broke with their parent country, with the institution of monarchy and with feudalistic assumptions of permanent hierarchy — all by issuing the Declaration of Independence, with its extraordinary assertion of the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.”
That assertion of moral and political equality contradicted the facts of life in the 13 colonies in 1776 — and for generations after. Scholars and citizens alike continue to debate whether the founders were hypocrites whose language was mere rhetoric to advance immediate political aims, whether they were visionaries who did not know how to translate their ideals into practice, or whether the language was intended from the start to refer only to white men.
Here in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, many antebellum political leaders believed that the words did, in fact, apply to everyone — and they didn’t like it. As Harvard University political theorist Danielle Allen observes in her illuminating book, “Our Declaration,” Southern secessionists made a point of drafting a Confederate constitution based explicitly on racial hierarchy and the “natural” domination of whites over Blacks.
What Black Americans (and abolitionist allies) took as a promise — equality — most Southern Americans took as a grave political, moral and economic threat. Indeed, in Richmond the slave trade based in Shockoe Bottom, second largest in the South, was a major economic engine. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved human beings were trafficked in Shockoe — a crime of staggering magnitude that was simply the everyday reality of antebellum Richmond.
The Civil War was fought to resolve the issue, climaxing in the Union’s capture of Richmond and President Abraham Lincoln’s triumphant visit to the city in April 1865. The war resulted in the adoption of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, abolishing slavery and guaranteeing equal protection to all persons — the veritable “new birth of freedom” that President Lincoln prayed for at Gettysburg.
But this extraordinary constitutional clarification of the meaning of equality did not, in fact, bring equality on the ground in Richmond, in the South or in the nation. After a remarkable period in the 1870s and 1880s in which Black people exercised civic rights and were elected to serve in city council and the state legislature, Jim Crow-era racial restrictions drove Black residents out of political leadership in Virginia by the century’s end.
Thad Williamson
Moreover, beginning in 1890, white Richmonders reasserted narrative control over the meaning of the Civil War by constructing a series of outsized monuments that had the dual roles of valorizing Confederate leaders and promoting profitable real estate development. The longstanding Confederate edifices on Monument Avenue represented a perpetuation of Confederate ideology and a rejection of the central ideal of the Declaration of Independence: equality.
Indeed, prominent white Richmond civic and political leaders again and again undertook policies in the 20th century that reinforced white supremacy and racial segregation here in Virginia’s capital city: resistance to public school desegregation, the demolition of Black neighborhoods, the concentration of most public housing into one corner of the city, the racially motivated annexation of parts of Chesterfield County in 1970 in order to prolong white political control of the city in the wake of the Voting Rights Act, and more.
But this was never the whole story.
Richmond has also long been a major center of Black political activism and political leadership. We are the home of Virginia Union University, founded literally on the site of the notorious Lumpkin’s Jail in Shockoe Bottom, which has educated generations of Richmond leaders. (One of those graduates, Henry L. Marsh, became Richmond’s first Black mayor in 1977; another, L. Douglas Wilder, became America’s first elected Black governor in January 1990.)
Even prior to passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Richmond Crusade for Voters, founded in 1956 to combat the neosegregationist doctrine of “Massive Resistance,” succeeded in mobilizing Black political power in Richmond, often through creative tactics. Legal challenges to the 1970 annexation led to a reshaping of the city’s political structure in 1977 — and the historic election of a majority-Black City Council that year.
The ascendance of local Black political power in Richmond coincided with suburbanization, deindustrialization and white flight from the city — national patterns that were exacerbated in Richmond by the refusal in the late 20th century to integrate schools on a regional basis, the refusal to allow the capital city to annex any further land and the refusal to establish a functional regional transit system. Richmond was also devastated by spikes in violent crime in the 1990s, leading many to question the city’s long-term viability at the turn of the century.
A generation ago, few observers would have thought that by 2026 Richmond would be what it now is: a rapidly growing city with sharply reduced crime, improved educational outcomes and falling poverty rates. Those tangible changes of course bring their own new challenges, and some significant old ones remain.
Many factors — including political reform, policy commitments and the rising tide of urbanism across America — impacted Richmond’s resurgence. But not to be overlooked is this simple fact: During the five decades that Richmonders have practiced truly multiracial democracy, with whites, Blacks and, increasingly, other ethnic groups all sharing a measure of power, we have gotten better at it.
While the city is no utopia, civic leaders and actors in Richmond of different backgrounds are unquestionably better at working together, better at understanding one another and better at understanding the deep impact of historic injustices on present realities than they were a half-century ago.
Translating better understanding into better policy is hard and ongoing work — work that, at times, can feel overwhelming. Yet there are also clear signs of progress. Take transportation as one example. In the past decade we have adopted and sustained a zero-fare bus transit system that is the envy of many progressive cities, successfully launched a bus rapid transit route across the breadth of the city and seen the once-recalcitrant counties increasingly embrace transit expansion. Slowly but surely, the city-county demarcation lines are transforming from walls into bridges.
This is a significant development impacting the everyday lives of tens of thousands of residents, who now can get around more easily and to more places. It didn’t happen by accident, and it didn’t happen overnight. Changing fundamental systems like transportation, housing, education and the economy itself in a more inclusive, democratic direction is the work of decades — work that depends in equal measure on visionary activists, courageous elected officials, and competent and far-sighted civil servants.
When those ingredients come together, democracy — understood as government that is responsive to the needs of all residents, not just the most privileged — can work and gain traction on even the toughest problems.
Why does this matter?
America’s semiquincentennial falls at a time when many Americans are profoundly worried about democracy’s present and future. Many are wrestling with what democracy itself means and are wondering if equality is really for everyone.
We in Richmond have been struggling with those same questions for decades.
We have not yet answered the questions or resolved our own deep-seated challenges, many of them directly connected to the legacy of segregation. Yet Richmond’s rocky path to building a multiracial democracy offers some useful lessons and even a measure of hope.
Hope? That is not a word that should be thrown around lightly at the moment.
The backlash to civil rights gains that characterized Richmond for a generation after Brown v. Board of Education is now playing out on a national scale. Black political power across much of the country is under siege in the light of recent Supreme Court rulings gutting the Voting Rights Act. Immigrants and transgender people are being politically targeted, and the basic civil liberties of all residents stand at risk.
What are we to do? Protest — the right to fight for what is right — certainly has a crucial role to play in protecting those liberties and preserving our republic.
But so, too, do the lower-key, localized habits of civic engagement and civil discourse exemplified in the ordinary workings of local government, including even controversies over policy issues.
The next hot-button debate you watch, read about or even participate in at City Hall doesn’t have to be interpreted as more downtown dysfunction.
Instead, it might well be interpreted as the hard and sometimes heated work of democracy, as passionate people exchange views about what’s best for the future of the city and region, perhaps taking time not only to say their piece, but to truly hear the other side’s perspective as well.
In comparison to our national political discourse, Richmonders are actually pretty good at that kind of thing. And while there’s certainly room to get better, our collective determination to keep trying until we get things right is one of our strongest civic assets.
So, let’s keep trying and, yes, let’s keep arguing with and learning from one another. In doing so, we’ll help make Richmond a better place — and perhaps help make sure that government “of the people, by the people and for the people” sticks around for another 250 years.
Thad Williamson is a professor of leadership studies and philosophy, politics, economics, and law at the University of Richmond, and the co-author (with Julian Maxwell Hayter and Amy L. Howard) of “The Making of 21st Century Richmond: Politics, Policy, and Governance, 1988-2016.” He also serves as senior policy strategist for Mayor Danny Avula.
