From Intent to Effect: Richmond, Virginia, and the Protracted Struggle for Voting Rights, 1965–1977

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. … We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

—President Johnson, “To Fulfill These Rights,” June 4, 1965

Twelve years after the ratification of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 [VRA], Richmond, Virginia, elected a historic majority black city council. The 5–4 majority quickly appointed an African American lawyer named Henry Marsh III to the mayoralty. Marsh, a nationally celebrated civil rights litigator, was not only the city’s first black mayor, but the council election of 1977 was also Richmond’s first since 1970.¹ In 1972, a federal district court used the VRA’s preclearance clause in Section 5 to place a moratorium on council contests.² This moratorium lasted until the Supreme Court and the Department of Justice (DOJ) determined whether Richmond’s 1970 annexation of portions of Chesterfield County had diluted the black electorate’s power by adding nearly forty-four thousand white suburban residents.³ While the Court upheld the capital city’s boundary expansion, it demanded in return that Richmonders abandon at-large elections and implement an electoral system that allowed African Americans, who represented more than 50 percent of Richmond’s population prior to annexation, to vote within almost exclusively black districts. Districts immediately led to the election of Richmond’s majority-black city council. By the mid-1970s, these majority-minority districts demonstrated that national officials (liberals and conservatives alike) planned to defend the “equality of results” standard that Johnson articulated at Howard University in 1965.⁴

By illustrating Richmonders’ drive for an unimpeded vote and Washington’s defense of the VRA, this article outlines how local people influenced national voting rights policy. Much has been made of southern African Americans’ appeals to political empowerment and the ways whites parried these appeals after the VRA’s ratification. Scholars contend that 1965 was the beginning of a complex, policy-oriented era in America’s struggle for racial equality.⁵ Yet the solutions Washington devised (e.g., racial redistricting) to prevent resistance to the VRA had unintended consequences for local southern politics.⁶ Historians, beginning with Steven Lawson (and, later, Hugh Davis Graham), have spent decades interrogating developments in voting rights after 1965.⁷ Lawson and Graham not only demonstrated how Washington policy elites actually ratified civil rights legislation, they also highlighted the ways policymakers defended the civil rights bills beyond 1965.⁸ A number of relatively recent studies by scholars such as Morgan Kousser and Richard Valelly place the electoral reforms of the 1960s within the larger context of American political development—both trace the contention over suffrage expansion from the Reconstruction amendments to the civil rights movement and beyond.⁹ These efforts contend that while institutional political stability in Washington (particularly Congress and the courts) was critical to the initial preservation of the Second Reconstruction, whites continued to resist blacks’ appeals for political parity. Frank Parker’s Black Votes Count, which emphasized Mississippi’s local voting rights struggles after 1965, was one of the first endeavors to specifically demonstrate how the dialectic between local black suffragists and white detractors influenced the VRA’s development.¹⁰ By focusing on the border South, this article also shows that local southerners, not merely national policy elites, were central to the creation of district systems.¹¹

The rights embodied in the VRA cannot be explained by separating local minority mobilization, on one hand, and federal policy directed toward race, on the other. Southern localities became seedbeds for voting rights litigation during the 1960s and this litigation often supplanted direct-action protests and civil disobedience strategies. Everyday people not only helped instigate this litigation, but they were responding to a brand of white recalcitrance that rivaled massive resistance to public school integration in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education (1954).¹² As it happened, whites were just as skeptical about the rise of blacks in...