The Dream Is Lost: Voting Rights and the Politics of Race in Richmond, Virginia by Julian Maxwell Hayter (review)

Julian Maxwell Hayter elucidates the ways black Richmonders fought for electoral representation at the municipal level from the 1950s through the 1980s. Hayter focuses on the efforts of the Richmond Crusade for Voters, founded in 1956 and devised to ensure political representation for black citizens of Richmond, Virginia. The organization proved its political maturity through the 1960s, registering and galvanizing black voters. As white flight out of Richmond accelerated through that decade, white leaders devised a plan to annex portions of bordering Chesterfield County. In City of Richmond v. United States(1975), the Supreme Court delivered a victory to the Richmond Crusade for Voters, arguing that "the predominant (if not sole) motive and desire" behind the 1969 annexation was to weaken black voter representation (p. 146). The Court ordered the city to move from an at-large election system to a district-based one, wherein black citizens would win "'assured' representation" (p. 94).

If the district-based system seemed a victory, it was an incomplete one for black residents. The growth of the black middle class, the increasing poverty that burdened the truly disadvantaged, the shift of Richmond's economy from manufacturing to professional jobs, and the economic policies of the Ronald Reagan era all coalesced to fracture the unified black electorate, discourage impoverished black people's turnout to the polls, and encourage the rise of black technocrat mayors like Roy West, who represented a shift from "black governance" to "[acquiescence] to piecemeal economic concessions for a handful of strategically positioned, well-heeled African Americans" (p. 216).

Despite Hayter's accessible prose, the book suffers a major legibility problem. The publisher nestled all of the photographs and maps in the fourth chapter. The maps themselves are not quite useful for readers unfamiliar with Richmond—they are small, and the print on them is mostly unreadable. Moreover, they are reproductions from archives that offer little help in clarifying any of the boundaries or the racial and economic distributions that are so pivotal to the narrative. Despite Hayter's thorough descriptions of census data and electoral changes, without readable maps produced specifically to illustrate the data in the text, the social geography of the city and its changes over time remain quite incomprehensible.

Early on, Hayter implies that the book will highlight the experiences of black women, but a strong and thoroughgoing gender analysis is largely missing. Hayter makes a passing reference to a "dog whistle" against black female council member Willie Dell, who was described by opponents as not being "'rational,'" which was a racialized critique as much as it was a gendered one (p. 222). He notes that middle-class black Richmonders viewed her as a "sapphire" (p. 301). However, there is no sustained exploration of how gender suffused Dell's campaigns, the campaigns against her, or her time on the council. Despite having conducted his own interview with Dell, Hayter makes little apparent use of her own words in the text. If Dell had something to say about her experiences as a black woman, I would have appreciated the opportunity to hear her voice.

Ultimately, readers learn about the machinations of local politics in Richmond and the rise and fall of the Crusade for Voters. Within the scope of civil rights histories, the book serves more as corroboration than as intervention. By its end, the work proves to be finely executed local history, drawing on a small array of archives and an extensive selection of newspaper reports, and relying on respected historians for its broader contextual matter. However, it could have benefited from the kind of pointed, explicit, moral argumentation that characterizes its conclusion, wherein Hayter warns readers that failure to corral the political will to ensure truly democratic representation of the needs of black, impoverished...