The Early 1900s
Mixed-race neighborhoods were not uncommon in Richmond during the second half of the nineteenth century, but by the early twentieth century residential areas across the city were increasingly segregated. The introduction of an extensive electrified streetcar system beginning in 1888 and the construction of race-restricted housing in the newly developed streetcar suburbs inaugurated an era of “white flight” from the city center. In 1911, the Richmond City Council passed an ordinance ensuring the “strict domiciliary segregation of the white and colored population.” After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1917 that race-based zoning ordinances were unconstitutional, Richmond in 1924 adopted an ordinance based on Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act that prohibited residents from living in a neighborhood where they were not permitted to marry a member of the majority population. In 1929, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Richmond’s ordinance was unconstitutional, but restrictive covenants in deeds and real estate practices such as steering, in which Black homebuyers were directed to existing Black neighborhoods, were used to maintain racial segregation in the city. In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, which was established by the federal government to bail out distressed homeowners, created maps for Richmond and other cities that “redlined” Black neighborhoods as financially risky, which began a pattern of denying federally backed loans to Black homebuyers. The result of these laws and practices was an increasing concentration of Black residents in the older, deteriorating neighborhoods of Richmond.
In 1926, a study of housing conditions in Richmond’s Black neighborhoods found that the areas with the densest concentration of African American residents included Richmond’s downtown area, which was home to the thriving Jackson Ward neighborhood known as the “Wall Street of the South”; an adjacent area west of the city’s downtown known as Carver/Newtowne; and an area in the southeast of the city called Fulton. Housing conditions in these neighborhoods ranged from fair to very poor, with deteriorating wood-frame houses, unpaved streets, and overcrowded homes. The study blamed the overcrowding in many Black neighborhoods on the “strong and hostile popular opinion among the whites” to the spread of the Black population into white neighborhoods and the “limited market for mortgages” for Black homebuyers. Increasingly, urban planners categorized these overcrowded, deteriorating neighborhoods as “slums” and called for clearing them.
Bartholomew’s Plan and the Richmond Housing Authority
The Housing Law of 1937 provided substantial funding to local housing authorities for the construction of public housing for lower-income families and individuals as part of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal policies. It required that one unit of “slum” housing be demolished for every new unit of public housing constructed. The Richmond Housing Authority (RHA) was created in 1940 following the election of progressive Democrat Gordon B. Ambler as mayor of Richmond. In 1941, the agency began acquiring homes through eminent domain for the purpose of razing them to clear the land for public housing.
Richmond hired the influential city planner Harland Bartholomew to draft a master plan for the redevelopment of the city. Bartholomew was a segregationist who advocated for zoning laws to prevent the movement of Black people into “finer residential districts.” Bartholomew and his consulting firm developed master plans for more than 550 cities, including Washington, D.C., Richmond, and Charlottesville, that emphasized clearing properties in Black neighborhoods, maintaining segregated housing, and making cities more car-friendly by widening roads and building highways.
Bartholomew presented his master plan to Richmond in 1946 on the heels of an influx of Black industrial workers into the city as a result of World War II, which only increased crowding in the older, downtown neighborhoods. The plan characterized these largely Black neighborhoods as “slums,” noting that upwards of 50 percent of homes had no indoor or private toilet, without noting the decades of disinvestment and discrimination that produced these conditions. It also warned of “blight” spreading to adjacent neighborhoods if they were not redeveloped in an efficient manner to protect property values.
Foreshadowing the displacement that would accompany many of Bartholomew’s master plans, the Richmond plan noted that while the improvement of housing conditions for low-income Black residents was the city’s major redevelopment issue, “it was questionable whether low-rental housing should always be built in the central area of the city.” It suggested that such desirable land could be used for “down-town apartments for white collar workers,” who were presumably white, or for “some industrial or public purpose,” while public housing could be built in less desirable areas.
The plan suggested demolishing some Black neighborhoods, such as “slum property” along 17th Street in Shockoe Bottom, to make way for a new interregional highway; proposed building a new civic center on land cleared in downtown Richmond; and suggested the formation of neighborhood associations to maintain the “integrity” of residential neighborhoods. Many of these white neighborhood associations would become formidable power brokers over development in Richmond, steering highways and other undesirable land uses away from white neighborhoods and into Black ones.
Apostle Town and Gilpin Court
The first neighborhood selected for “slum clearance” by the Richmond Housing Authority was Apostle Town in Jackson Ward, so named for its main streets of Saint Stephen, Saint James, Saint Peter, Staint John, and Staint Paul. Many Black residents owned and inherited properties in Apostle Town, which was home to notable figures like the entrepreneur Maggie L. Walker and religious leaders William Troy and John Jasper, though many homes had fallen into disrepair by the 1940s.
The cleared blocks were replaced with the city’s first public housing project: Gilpin Court, a 300-unit project named for Charles Sidney Gilpin, a famous Black actor from the neighborhood. The project displaced 250 Black families from their homes in Apostle Town, who were given less than four months to vacate their properties.
The Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike
Building new roads to facilitate travel between Richmond, the growing suburbs, and nearby urban areas was a major focus of urban redevelopment. The Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike was proposed in 1946 to upgrade the congested roadway between Richmond and Petersburg, but was defeated twice in public referendums. To circumvent public sentiment, Richmond’s city council and business leaders turned to the Virginia General Assembly, which in 1954 created the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike Authority and granted it the power of eminent domain. The Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike, which eventually became part of Interstate 95, the major East Coast highway, bisected Jackson Ward, the city’s largest Black neighborhood, splitting it into two separate neighborhoods—North and South Jackson Ward. Historic preservationist Mary Wingfield Scott said despite its run-down condition, the neighborhood was a “treasure trove” of significant old homes and questioned why some of the more substantial buildings couldn’t be repurposed into apartments for local residents.
The project resulted in Gilpin Court and the rest of North Jackson Ward being geographically isolated from South Jackson Ward as well as from the rest of the city. Gilpin Court was expanded in 1957 to house residents displaced by the construction of the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike. The following year, Fairfield Court and Whitcomb Court were opened to house additional residents displaced by highway construction. By 1957, the Richmond Times-Dispatch estimated that 1,900 Black families—approximately 10 percent of the city’s African American population—had been displaced by the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike and related construction, with another 300 families slated to lose their homes.
One of the Jackson Ward communities decimated by the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike was Navy Hill, a community formed after the American Civil War (1861–1865) that was initially a mixture of German immigrant and Black residents. The community centered around Navy Hill School, one of two schools built specifically for Blacks students in the early twentieth century. Some of the school’s notable alumni included John Mitchell Jr., founder of the Black newspaper the Richmond Planet, and Maggie L. Walker. Due to the Richmond-Peterburg Turnpike and subsequent urban renewal projects, the Black residents of the neighborhood were dispersed. Today, Virginia Commonwealth University’s medical campus occupies most of the space once known as Navy Hill, with only a highway marker indicating of the previous existence of the neighborhood.
Carver, 17th Street, Fulton Bottom, and Randolph
In the late 1950s, the Richmond Housing Authority, now the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority (RRHA), formulated a ten-year plan to eliminate what it deemed the “worst slums” in the city following passage of the federal Housing Act of 1949 and its subsequent 1954 modification. These laws gave cities funding and new authority to acquire blighted land through eminent domain and condemnation proceedings, which they were now allowed to resell to private residential, commercial, and industrial developers rather than use for public purposes. The plan targeted the neighborhoods of Carver, 17th Street, and Fulton. Carver, located west of Jackson Ward, included six major industries and various Black-owned businesses, with a focal point being Moore Street School. It entailed demolishing 400 homes to make way for the continued expansion of the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike. Initially scheduled for implementation in 1959, the Carver Plan faced delays due to the displacement caused by the turnpike project. The cleared land, originally intended for residential and industrial purposes, saw a significant portion designated for the turnpike, further complicating the redevelopment process.
In 1961, Richmond received federal clearance for the $4 million 17th Street Urban Renewal Project, which the Richmond Times-Dispatch called the “most ambitious urban renewal program” to date in the city. The project cleared 150 acres of neighborhoods in Shockoe Valley, displacing 1,300 mostly Black residents, many to the Mosby Court public housing project opened in 1962 in an isolated, previously redlined neighborhood in the city’s east end.
In 1967, Fulton Bottom in the city’s east end, one of the last intact Black neighborhoods in Richmond, was designated a “slum” in a study sponsored by the RRHA. Established in 1853, the 200-acre neighborhood was adjacent to downtown Richmond and consisted of approximately 850 homes, churches, schools, and stores. The Fulton Urban Renewal Plan that was unveiled in 1970 would displace approximately 785 households comprising nearly 3,000 individuals. Having witnessed the destruction that occurred in Jackson Ward and Carver, Fulton residents were wary of the urban renewal plan. In the face of opposition, the city undertook a piecemeal approach to urban renewal. Beginning in the early 1970s, RRHA began acquiring and razing properties in Fulton, offering residents relocation packages to move to other neighborhoods and seizing the homes of those who refused to leave under eminent domain.
Led by Spencer E. Jones III and Earl Robinson, Fulton residents worked to prevent the complete destruction of the neighborhood. They applied to the Virginia Historic Landmarks Commission to have the remaining buildings added to the National Register of Historic Places. By the time the Historic Landmarks Commission considered the eligibility of Fulton as a historic site, the RRHA had demolished most of the structures in the neighborhood. The commission rebuked the RRHA for failing to prepare an environmental impact statement before razing Fulton, which, it said, led to the wholesale destruction of the neighborhood “without regard of the potential eligibility of its various buildings, structures and sites for placement on the National Register of Historic Places.” The last homes on Denny Street in Fulton were demolished in the late 1980s.
The 380-acre Randolph Urban Renewal Project was approved by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1973. The planning study suggested that a total of approximately 1,800 families and individuals would be displaced by the project. The primary objective was slum clearance as well as making way for the six-lane Downtown Expressway expansion of I-95, which would run through the community to provide access to the largely white suburbs. Despite protests from community members in both neighborhoods, the projects were implemented, resulting in the displacement of hundreds more Black households.
Legacy
Many of the city’s large public housing projects such as Gilpin Court became emblematic of the failure of urban renewal to provide acceptable housing or the neighborhood connection destroyed by the redevelopment plans. In 2020, the City of Richmond adopted its Richmond 300 comprehensive plan. The planning process involved three years of engagement and was shaped through a lens of equity and addressing injustices carried out during the urban renewal period in Richmond. In 2022, Richmond announced plans to tear down its six largest public housing developments and replace them with mixed-income housing. While residents of the developments were involved in the planning process, concerns remain about whether enough units will be available to accommodate those displaced by the redevelopment.
One of the major initiatives to come out of the comprehensive plan was the “Reconnect Jackson Ward Plan.” In February 2023, the U.S. Department of Transportation awarded Richmond a $1.3 million grant to study ways to reconnect the Jackson Ward neighborhood through new transportation connections and public spaces. However, due to gentrification of the Jackson Ward neighborhood, the Black population decreased by 10 percent between 2010 to 2020, echoing the decrease of the Black population in the 1960s because of highway construction and slum clearance.
