In the 1960s, Richmond was plagued by a suffering economy, rotting infrastructure and widespread poverty, prompting the city to begin a years-long campaign to widen its boundaries. On Jan. 1, 1970, it annexed nearly 23 square miles of bordering Chesterfield County. Forty-seven thousand people became Richmond residents overnight, 45,700 of them White.
Many Richmond activists at the time claimed the redrawing of borders had an insidious motive, part of a large-scale effort to crimp the power of African Americans at the polls and keep them out of office. Attorneys for the city later acknowledged the annexation may have been racially motivated. But they maintained that, even so, the effect wasn’t unconstitutional.
“What that did in one fell swoop was to shift the demographic of the city,” Thomas Coates, III, a longtime Richmond lawyer, said.
Years of subsequent lawsuits, appeals, allegations of secret Whites-only meetings and election injunctions morphed into the Supreme Court case of City of Richmond v. United States. It became one of the Voting Rights Act’s earliest tests of geography and equity.
In the years before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the VRA, getting voters of color to the polls was dangerous business, especially in the South. Civil rights activists who fought to register Black voters faced beatings, jail time and, in Selma, Ala., police tear gas. The VRA outlawed racial discrimination in voting, outlining that states could not limit voters’ rights based on their race.
The redrawing of municipal borders, including the annexation of neighboring areas, isn’t inherently racist nor sinister; often, it’s how cities grow. Brooklyn and Queens, for instance, didn’t become part of New York City until 1898, 245 years after the city was chartered.
But civil rights historians say Richmond’s annexation of Chesterfield County was different, a moment steeped in the particular brand of racism that was then characteristic of the former Confederate capital: polite, sugarcoated and rooted in a fear of Black power. It was “racism with a velvet glove,” Rutledge Dennis, a professor of sociology at George Mason University, said, who was teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University at the time of the case. Dennis and his colleague John Moeser spent several years in the 1970s conducting a detailed study on the annexation.
Richmond had long served as a hub for the South’s slave trade, and by the mid-20th century, old money still ran the city and much of Virginia. Whites wanted to keep it that way.
“After all, Richmond was the Queen of the Confederacy,” Dennis said. “Richmond was special. And, for many Whites, that specialness did not include having Blacks attain political power.”