Editor's note: We share this interview with VCU political science professor, author and activist Ravi Perry in advance of the Tuesday, Jan. 8, Controversy/History discussion, "Workforce Preparation: Race & Labor." Please join Perry, Dialectix founder Matthew Freeman and moderator Kelli Lemon from 6 to 8 p.m. at The Valentine.
Photo courtesy Ravi Perry
A few months into President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second term, on a balmy April 1937 day in Richmond, a black woman bellowed one word — “Strike!” — and shut down an entire tobacco factory’s production.
This event, during which hundreds of black men and women demanded higher wages and better working conditions of their employer, the Carrington & Michaux tobacco plant, is a lesser-known aspect of Richmond’s labor history, and an early documented example of the conflation of race with labor after the Civil War.
Race has always been intertwined with labor in the South and in the former capital of the Confederacy, says Dr. Ravi Perry, a political science scholar, author, activist and associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Still, in many Southern states, “there is this marked, willful reluctance to deal honestly and talk openly about slavery, even though it started here,” says Perry, who previously lived and taught in Mississippi, a state long considered a nadir of racial and socioeconomic oppression and violence.
Perry recognized that same reluctance in Richmond when he moved here in 2015 — a tight-lipped avoidance of our uncomfortable history concerning slavery and racism, and how race still influences many contemporary issues of inequity.
The Valentine’s Jan. 8 Controversy/History event, entitled “Workforce Preparation: Race & Labor,” brings the topic front and center, starting with a tour of the 1812 John Wickham House on the museum's grounds. Experiencing the antebellum-era home in which Wickham, an attorney, lived with his family and at least 15 enslaved black people will help attendees “learn more about Richmond’s history as a city built and maintained by enslaved labor,” reads The Valentine’s website. After the tour, Perry will speak; he hopes Richmonders will open themselves up to a raw but illuminating dialogue.
“Because I’m a political scientist, I’ll be framing how racial, economic and labor histories in Richmond in particular, but of course throughout the state and nation, have occurred because of political realities,” says Perry, a Toledo, Ohio, native who earned a doctorate in political science from Brown University and is chair of the political science department at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Case in point: The reason we had slave labor was ultimately because politicians wrote that into legislation.” It is critical to understand this connection, he says, if one hopes to understand the complexities of modern Richmond. “We still see the residual effects of those politics today.”
Recalling the city and state’s human bondage history, followed by generations of systemic racism designed to disenfranchise those descended from slaves, Perry says, “These aren’t things that just are, these are things that we have allowed to happen, because in a representative political system like America’s, the effectiveness of the government is on our shoulders as citizens. This is not an ‘us versus them,’ ‘black versus white,’ ‘urban versus rural,’ conversation; this is an American conversation.”
A Q&A session will follow Perry’s presentation, as well as small-group discussion. A topic that may emerge during the evening’s dialogue is the $1.4 billion Navy Hill development project, championed by Mayor Levar Stoney. NH District Corp., the nonprofit development group that includes the CEOs of Dominion Energy and Altria, is behind the Navy Hill plan, which lists economic and social benefits for a 10-block radius.
In addition to constructing hundreds of affordable housing units and replacing the Richmond Coliseum, the project would be “the largest job creation project in Richmond history,” says its website, with plans to create more than 12,000 jobs during the construction phase and 9,000 after. Further, the project promises to issue $300 million in city contracts to minority-owned businesses, which historically had been excluded from such opportunities.
The sprawling project named itself after the historically black Richmond community of Navy Hill, one of several thriving, self-sufficient late 19th- and early 20th-century African-American communities in Virginia — including Vinegar Hill in Charlottesville and Jackson Ward in Richmond — destroyed by infrastructure and development projects initiated or supported by local and state government. Navy Hill was obliterated by the construction of Interstate 95 in the 1960s.
Like many in the region, Perry has questions for the city’s leadership — and for us as residents. Promising millions in contracts to minority business owners sounds good, but “what are the affirmative action time-track goals that the Stoney administration has in terms of hiring minority- and women-owned firms during construction of the project?” he asks.
Whether it comes to fruition or not, Perry says the Navy Hill proposal “is an opportunity for us as a region to examine how we build capacity for minority- and women-owned companies, so that they get access to opportunities,” opportunities to which white-owned companies have always had access because of systemic racism.
Beyond the Navy Hill proposal, “What is the level of minority business enterprise participation in ongoing city projects? What is the ongoing enforcement mechanism? What is our long-range thinking in terms of creating and enhancing economic opportunity for all of us?” asks Perry.
Tuesday’s event, like the other conversations in the Controversy/History series, is free, and is slated from 6 to 8 p.m.
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