The Dream Is Lost

The Dream Is Lost describes more than three decades of national/local racial politics and the unintended consequences of the civil rights movement. It uses the mid-twentieth-century urban history of Richmond, Virginia, to explain the political abuses that often accompanied American electoral reforms. The rights embodied in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 cannot be explained by separating the mobilization of black voters, on one hand, and federal policy directed toward race, on the other. The story first examines the suffrage crusades that predated the Voting Rights Act and how an organization called the Richmond Crusade for Voters mobilized African Americans a decade prior to 1965. As the Crusade mobilized voters, its members met firm resistance from their white counterparts. Local people and federal officials beat back the forces of white resistance by implementing majority–minority district systems. Although the reapportionment revolution led directly to the election of a black-majority city council in Richmond in 1977, it, too, had unintended consequences. The very forces that made Richmond’s majority–minority district system possible—an increase in African American populations in densely packed enclaves, unremitting residential segregation, white flight, and urban retrenchment—were the same that brought about intensifying marginalization in black communities during the twilight of the twentieth century. This story follows black voter mobilization to its logical conclusion: black empowerment and governance. It demonstrates that mid-twentieth-century urban redevelopment left a lasting impression on America’s cities. Richmond’s black-majority council struggled to negotiate the tension between rising expectations in black communities, sustained white resistance, and structural forces beyond the realm of politics.