For the benefit of its future, Dr. Julian M. Hayter thinks that Richmond needs to take a long look at its history, in particular its recent history. “The past doesn’t care if we recognize it but it still acts upon us,” says the associate professor of Leadership Studies at University of Richmond’s Jepson School.
Hayter’s 2017 book, “The Dream is Lost: Voting Rights and the Politics of Race in Richmond, Virginia,” which came out of his master’s dissertation at the University of Virginia, has emerged as one of the definitive Richmond texts, a well researched, highly readable and somewhat provocative account of how race and politics intersected in the city during the turbulent years between 1945 and 1985.
The Iowa native’s latest work, “The Making of Twenty-First-Century Richmond: Politics, Policy, and Governance, 1988-2016,” is a collaboration with fellow University of Richmond professors Amy Howard and Thad Williamson. It picks up where “The Dream is Lost” left off, examining the years 1985-2016, a period of Richmond political and social life, he and his co-authors argue, that is greatly misunderstood and immeasurably important.
“If you dig deep into the sources, you start to realize that modern-day Richmond was built in the twilight of the 20th century,” he says. “The public policies delineated in the book paved the way for many of the things that Richmonders enjoy now and take for granted.”
While a seasoned city watcher can disagree with the authors’ conclusions about such topics as the Sixth Street Marketplace, the Centerstage performing arts center and the necessity for private-partnerships, the scholarship is solid and the tale is enlivened by pivotal, larger-than-life characters, some of them well-remembered, such as former governor, and controversial “Strong Mayor,” L. Douglas Wilder, and more obscure but undeniably important figures, like former City Manager Robert Bobb.
At its best, “The Making of Twenty-First-Century Richmond” educates, challenges perceptions and inspires discussion. “I hope that readers come out of it with a better understanding of how Richmond got to now,” says Hayter, who got his M.A. and Ph.D in American History from UVA, and who was a sitting board member of Mayor Levar Stoney’s Monument Avenue and History and Culture Commissions. “More importantly, I hope they understand that the way Richmond looks now is a byproduct of things they may never have been aware of.”
Julian Hayter recently talked to Style Weekly about the new book, published by the University of North Carolina Press, and more, at his home in the North Side.
Style Weekly: What was the impetus behind ‘The Making of 21st Century Richmond’?
Julian Hayter: I was a late comer to this. Thad [Williamson] and Amy [Howard] had been doing interviews and some research. After my book [“The Dream is Lost”] came out, on Richmond’s history from the 1940s to 1985, it seemed logical to bring me along to help them write a book on modern history. I think there was a kind of deep-seated need to write a book that helped to describe how we got to the present. The best way to do that was to start after my book ended and go to 2016, at the end of Mayor Dwight Jones’ tenure.
How did you collaborate?
It’s hard to co-author. A historian, above all else, has to recognize patterns, patterns in the historical narrative and in the writing. We would write entire sections, co-author entire sections and my job was to try to knit all of it together, to try and tell a story. And it’s hard to do. Thad is a political scientist so he’s responsible for a lot of the data, the hard evidence, but also a lot of the philosophical stuff toward the end. And a lot of the historical stuff is me and Amy, because we’re historians.
You start by mentioning the monuments coming down in 2020, and the scenes are depicted on the cover. But you stop the book at 2016. Why?
2020 is too present. In fact, some historians might argue that 2016 is too present. For us, the continuity of the story we were telling ended very comfortably in 2016 with the departure of Dwight Jones but even more significantly, the creation of the Anti-Poverty Commission, which was designed to address many of the problems that we dilleniate throughout the book. Any author struggles with origins and endings.
I guess I wanted to get your thoughts on Mayor Levar Stoney. What do you think of him?
I don’t think anything of him, really, in relation to this book. He’s his own man. In terms of finding a historical parallel, I don’t think you will. He’s young, not a Richmonder. As the recent election shows, the people who are being elected to public office in Richmond look a lot less like historical Richmond than the people elected up to 2016. Stoney and [Mayor-elect Danny] Avula represent the profound demographic changes that have taken place over the past 15 years.
Can we call that progress?
I don’t know. It’s hard to measure progress without knowing how things shake out. You don’t want to pull the trigger too early on claims of progress. It depends on the legacy that these people leave. Another reason we ended the book in 2016 is that you can actually measure the legacy of Dwight Jones better than you can Levar Stoney.
The book’s view seems to be that Richmond leaders in the period between 1986 and 2016 largely deserve our thanks.
What we found was that the road to modern Richmond was paved in the 1990s and the 2000s, and many of the people responsible for laying down that asphalt have not been given credit for it. When Richmond talks about the positive things that have happened, it’s almost exclusively [attributed] to people moving into the city, as if these people are coming here and spreading pixie dust on the city and things organically transforming for no other reason than the fact that they came here. That’s not how change happens. Even the events depicted on the cover of our book, the de-monumenization of Richmond, was the shockingly predictable outcome of a city undergoing change.
Were there any surprises while researching the book?
I don’t want to say no. I think you have inclinations as a researcher and a writer in where you want the story to go, but sometimes the documents take you to other places. If there’s one element for me — I can’t speak for my co-authors — it’s that the story of Richmond politics in the twilight of the 20th century is often told as the story about corruption. And there was plenty of it, right? I think Richmonders have a tendency to think that local government is more corrupt here than it is anywhere else. But if you go to any city in the U.S., you’ll hear local people complaining about local government … it’s a function of local government. Everybody thinks their potholes are worse than everybody else’s.
You argue that the corruption has to be measured alongside the positive things that occured?
Yes, like building a levee on the James River. People talk about how dysfunctional Black governance was in the twilight of the 20th century, yet segregationists spent the better portion of the century letting the James River flood into downtown, in large part because they had built so many problematic partnerships with deep pockets that they were using the fucking river as a dumping ground. The James River was an industrial wasteland. And people come to Richmond now and they see this natural landscape and they don’t realize that it’s engineered. It is a completely manufactured relationship between the built-in natural environment that comes down to some policymakers who had vision in the 1990s and who recognized that if we wanted to expand Shockoe Bottom and any other flood prone area in Richmond, we had to finally levee the James River and control the predictable flooding that was going to happen.
So what we’re seeing now is this kind of renaissance that has taken place around the recreational James, and it’s the direct byproduct of the public policies that helped to build the levee in the 1990s. Most people think that this renaissance has taken place because of in-migration of people who aren’t Richmonders that have somehow reclaimed the natural landscape. But that reclamation would have been impossible had policymakers not had the foresight to recognize that downtown viability was contingent upon controlling the James River.
It seems so obvious in hindsight but it took so long to do it. Why?
Most cities recognize that controlling water is essential … and yet they never dammed the James. They never mustered the political will because segregationists did not care about what happened to downtown Richmond. The inclination in Richmond, the demographic trend, was to move as many white people to the suburbs as they possibly cold to avoid Black people, and to hell with downtown, in large part because many of the spaces that white folks cared about were high enough off the river to avoid flooding. That is an acute lack of political vision, I think, that categorizes how the segregationists treated the city and the things that Black people had to do to resuscitate it from that ignorance.
Who is the most important political figure of this era, to your mind?
Robert Bobb [Richmond’s city manager from 1985-1997]. People have a tendency to focus on the throne instead of the power behind the throne. Until Doug Wilder’s election [in 2004], when it voted to bring back the ‘strong mayor’ model, the council/city manager model governed Richmond for most of the 20th century. That means the city manager was effectively the city’s CFO [Chief Financial Officer], and the most powerful person in city government.
Why choose Bobb and not his successor Calvin Jamison?
It could have been either one of them. But Bobb went on to Oakland and did some pretty magnificent things, too. I just think that some of the things they did to forge public/private relationships in the ’80s and ’90s … city governments by their nature are limited in their ability to tax, particularly at the same clip as state and federal governments. So public-private relationships are more important to local governments. The kind of business model that people like Bobb forged were essential to create good will between African-Americans, who at that point still had relative control over city hall, and the business community, who recognized that they might be able to inspire some kind of renaissance. I mean, [former Mayor and State Senator] Henry Marsh and the business elites helped to create Richmond Renaissance [which is today’s Venture Richmond], the operative word was renaissance. They saw the potential of a city that had been hollowed out by segregationists. They recognized that potential was contingent on these private partnerships.
But these partnerships weren’t always inclusive of all Richmonders, were they?
I didn’t say they were inclusive. But they were necessary for the city to move itself out of its lethargy. Bobb was one of the first people to capitalize off of these partnerships. The problem with Richmond governance is that the public officials were often embattled or embroiled in skepticism from the public, but the city manager was somewhat insulated. Most people don’t even know they exist. Most people don’t know how local government works to begin with. He recognized, at a time when Richmond was struggling to just survive, that we needed to build the apparatus to move the city forward and that’s part of his legacy. When you are the power behind the throne, you’re not contingent on re-election cycles so you can push policies that can move the city forward in ways you may not reap the benefit of while you are in office.
“I think that the city manager model often can treat cities like corporations rather than governments, and the strong mayor model can often treat cities like kingdoms rather than political jurisdictions.”
In your view, has Richmond been served better by the strong mayor model or the city manager model?
Each one has problems and each one has pros and cons. I think that the city manager model often can treat cities like corporations rather than governments, and the strong mayor model can often treat cities like kingdoms rather than political jurisdictions. But sometimes you do need a strong mayor, particularly if, say, a city council is raucous. And sometimes the city manager model works when dealing with all of these kinds of [factions] within a government. That person I think can negotiate the conflicts between these bodies in a way that a mayor can’t.
How important was Henry Marsh, the city’s first Black mayor?
Marsh’s influence is that he recognized the importance of forging relationships between private and public interests. I think this comes up in the book repeatedly: Public officials were asked to solve problems that in some ways were outside the realm of politics. There was generational and deepening poverty in the city of Richmond best exemplified by the compression of poor communities in the public housing projects. They became places of profound disappointment. No politician, by themselves, was going to work the city out of those kinds of problems. The best parts about Henry Marsh, he recognized that you have to have a long-term vision to deal with short-term problems, which is hard to do as an elected official.
When Doug Wilder came in and pushed to be a strong mayor, it seems like it was more about making a statement.
He strikes a different tone, and I think in large part because Doug had been involved in local politics for so long that he had his finger on the pulse of the invisible hand; he saw things that other people didn’t see. In some ways, I think his criticisms of the business community were warranted because there were any number of actors who didn’t have the best interests of the city at heart. When he came in, he brought what was dark to light.
You guys seem to take a more measured stance on the Sixth Street Marketplace development, long criticised as a wasteful boondoggle.
Sixth Street Marketplace really became the embodiment of the way that people began to think about how to resolve majority Black city problems in the ’80s and ’90s. Cities had been hollowed out by not only suburbanization but by urban retrenchment. The federal government under Reagan literally walked away…they pulled funds by the millions, block grants were gone. There were a number of things that cities used to try to save themselves in the 1970s that [stopped]. I talked a lot about this in my previous book. But you then began to see what we call these ‘silver bullet’ strategies. Mayors start to champion these ideas that if we can just get a stadium, or a mall, it will all work out — we still see this, by the way.
If we could just get a casino …
Right. If we can just get more taxable income back to the city, this income would give us enough financial remuneration to generate some kind of momentum.
But it’s Lucy with the football, right? They keep trying this again and again.
You can’t blame them, though. When you have a city that is hollowed out, and the middle class people take their tax dollars with them, you have a city that is more deeply impoverished. Who are you going to tax? How do you pay the bills? The easiest way to do that, other than to lure middle class people back to the city, which takes time, is to lure businesses back to the city that you can tax. It’s more of a panic reaction than it is political vision. It’s a panic reaction put forward by politicians who recognize that we’ve got to do something to fill the proverbial coiffers. So the Marketplace becomes this idea that we can lure money back not just to downtown but to the city in general.
But why would West Enders come downtown to get another version of what they already have in the counties?
They wouldn’t. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Sometimes the spaghetti sticks to the wall, sometimes it doesn’t. Richmond is not alone in this. There are any number of examples — like the Disney-fication of Times Square. I could go on for days… downtown Chicago, Washington D.C., every city in the U.S. tried to come up with a solution to hollowing tax bases by building stuff. It’s a kind of economic pragmatism that eclipses civil rights optimism, it’s ‘what are we going to do to pay the bills?’ And in doing that, there were a lot of missteps. But the road to the future is sometimes paved with mistakes. Unfortunately, that often comes at the expense of taxpayers, but you don’t get modern-day Richmond without those types of initiatives.
“The problem is that you can’t tax VCU, so one of the biggest institutions behind the downtown renaissance is an institution that you can’t tax. The idea of the 21st century is how Richmond negotiates its relationship with VCU that allows for other types of growth, but respects the school’s expansion. And it’s been a rather difficult negotiation.”
What are some of the challenges you mention in the book that still plaque us today?
VCU is the best example, in my opinion. You’ll have to speak with Thad and Amy and see what they think. It’s a double-edged sword with VCU. [Former president Eugene] Trani helped save downtown by turning a commuter school into a legitimate R1 [school]. The man had his finger on not only the pulse of the school but the local business community and the people he knew he could partner with to effectively expand into downtown in a way that mitigated the blight. Very few people remember what downtown looked like before VCU started to expand. The problem is that you can’t tax VCU, so one of the biggest institutions behind the downtown renaissance is an institution that you can’t tax. The idea of the 21st century is how Richmond negotiates its relationship with VCU that allows for other types of growth, but respects the school’s expansion. And it’s been a rather difficult negotiation.
What we’re seeing is a city that has changed a lot but has still yet to address some of the deeper problems that have existed during the mid-’50s. We still see Richmond Public Schools as an area of profound disappointment, the compression of poverty in public housing still hasn’t been addressed, we have an eviction crisis, probably one of the worst in the United States, directly correlated to what some people might call gentrification. So in some ways the book is saying that African American politicians saved Richmond but they also ushered out some of the very people they were trying to save.
The book also details the city’s problematic relationship with the counties.
Yes. That may be one of the biggest changes in the city in the last 20 years. The counties looked down on the city for a very long time. They didn’t mind exploiting the city but they didn’t want the city’s proverbial problems creeping up out there. With the idea that somehow that they were insulated from the city’s problems, despite the fact that they are part of this larger metropolitan equation, the counties thumbed their noses at the city. As Richmond has started to expand and grow and thrive in the 21st century, it has become the envy of the counties in some ways. The things that we delineate in the book really describe that transition. Poverty, for instance, is growing faster in some of the counties than in Richmond.
Voting patterns have also changed.
Totally changed. You’ve seen, in some ways, the purpleification of the counties. Just drive out to Hull Street and see how far it expands. There were people in the counties who spent their entire childhoods and most of their adulthoods never coming to the city of Richmond, ever. You can’t do that in 2024. You can if you want to, but you are missing out on a significant amount of a cultural renaissance that has taken place. The best restaurants, the best [amenities] in terms of culture …
Let’s talk about culture. First Fridays was a real catalyst in bringing people back to the city and that was not something started by politicians or public-private partnerships.
Yes, a lot of this growth wasn’t just being championed from the top down. There were plenty of people who were responsible for carrying the proverbial torch well though the dark ages, if you will. But you’ll find that in any city. People make chicken salad out of chicken shit. And there have always been people in Richmond who were able to look beyond how Richmond pathologized itself. Now people are moving to the city and capitalizing on some of these long standing traditions that happened before all of these demographic shifts. But that’s the nature of things. Cary Street used to be bohemian. It’s been in some ways Disneyfield or corporatized. And I think what we’re seeing is that there’s a little bit of bohemian Richmond that has been lost, and that’s the nature of things.
“Over the course of the chronology, what you begin to see is everyday people becoming more of a part of the decision-making process in Richmond, a city run by paternalists and, dare I say, oligarchs.”
Who is the most underrated figure in your book?
I’d move away from a person and think more about events. The debate between the Crupi Report and the Avon Drake report encapsulated how Richmond thinks about itself. James Crupi was an outsider, a consultant who delivered a report that criticised the business community. He gave it to them straight. Then Avon Drake’s report comes out and says, ‘Well hold on, there’s more to consider here.’
Over the course of the chronology, what you begin to see is everyday people becoming more of a part of the decision-making process in Richmond, a city run by paternalists and, dare I say, oligarchs. Over time, the people who were usually affected by many of these policies demanded a seat at the table. By the time we get to the end, 2016, you begin to see people who had been ignored for decades bringing their experiences to bear on the nature of public policy. That’s what I find most intriguing.
Talk about your background growing up in Iowa.
There’s a lot of Black people in Iowa, a lot of African Americans came through the Midwest. The story of Black Midwesterners outside of Chicago is an untold American story. There are way more of us than you think. In fact, my mother’s family was originally from Virginia and they left to go to an all-Black coal mining town in Buxton, Iowa. They couldn’t get mining jobs anywhere from Staunton to Kentucky, but they found an oasis in Iowa. I didn’t know the white world existed until public school.
When did you develop an interest in history?
Well, I think that history is one of the worst taught subjects in the American K-12 system. Part of the problem is the fact that nearly everyone who teaches it has the first name of ‘Coach.’ I got bitten by the history bug, or attacked by the history vampire. The way history was taught was more about heritage than history. There were no poor white people, no women, no people of color in the story. It was the story of how great men advanced the history of humanity. We didn’t learn shit about slavery, about Jim Crow, we might have heard a thing or two about Martin Luther King and other Black people who made white people feel good about themselves, but not the actual story.
So how did you connect with it?
I left high school and I moved to the West Coast and from that point on, I was determined to … I just knew there had to be another story here. And I found out when I went to college that people had actually been writing these stories. I just wasn’t told about them. Most high school students weren’t and you find that to this day. There are kids who show up in my class who know nothing about history. It’s bananas. No, I just started writing and doing research. I said, ‘I can do this, I can write, I want to write and I want to learn more.’ A PhD is just something you get as a consolation prize for loving research.
“The Making of Twenty-First-Century Richmond: Politics, Policy, and Governance, 1988-2016” by Thad Williamson, Julian M. Hayter and Amy L. Howard is available in bookstores or from The University of North Carolina Press at https://uncpress.org/
