The Struggle for Change - (Carter G. Woodson Institute) by Marvin T Chiles (Paperback)

About the Book

"A Black-majority city with a history of the most severe segregation and inequity, Richmond is still grappling with this legacy as it moves into the twenty-first century. Marvin Chiles provides a unique take on Richmond's racial politics since the civil rights era by demonstrating that the city's current racial disparities in economic mobility, housing, and public education actually represent the unintended consequences of Richmond's racial reconciliation measures. Weaving municipal politics together with grassroots efforts and examining the work and legacies of Richmond's Black leaders, Chiles highlights the urban revitalization and public history efforts meant to overcome racial divides after Jim Crow-efforts that ironically reinforced racial inequality across the city. Compellingly written, this project carries both local and broader regional significance for Richmonders, Virginians, southerners, and all Americans"--

Book Synopsis

A Black-majority city with a history of the most severe segregation and inequity, Richmond is still grappling with this legacy as it moves into the twenty-first century. Marvin Chiles now offers a unique take on Richmond's racial politics since the civil rights era by demonstrating that the city's current racial disparities in economic mobility, housing, and public education actually represent the unintended consequences of Richmond's racial reconciliation measures. He deftly weaves municipal politics together with grassroots efforts, examining the work and legacies of Richmond's Black leaders, from Henry Marsh on the city council in the 1960s to Mayor Levar Stoney, to highlight the urban revitalization and public history efforts meant to overcome racial divides after Jim Crow yet which ironically reinforced racial inequality across the city. Compellingly written, this project carries both local and broader regional significance for Richmonders, Virginians, southerners, and all Americans.

Review Quotes

Even as Marvin T. Chiles documents the intensity and pervasiveness of racial conflict in Richmond, he demonstrates that a significant number of Black and white Richmonders worked assiduously to find common ground as they charted a path toward a more racially just city in the years after 1970. Chiles tells the story of Richmond in a tragic key that takes seriously residents' initiatives to remedy racial inequality, while documenting the meager results they had to show for those efforts.

The treatment of Richmond's recent history touches on all the topics one might expect: school desegregation, land annexation, urban redevelopment, white flight, and electoral politics. The Struggle for Change explains how these foundational issues of postwar urban politics unfolded in Richmond and focuses on several moments where interracial collaboration played an especially noteworthy role in the city's politics. --The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography

If history can help make sense of the senseless, The Struggle for Change: Race and the Politics of Reconciliation in Modern Richmond provides a critical historical perspective on current issues in the city. Marvin T. Chiles's analysis of the racial politics of modern Richmond cannot ease the anguish surrounding Jackson's untimely death, but it offers incisive historical lessons about how the city might avoid such tragedies in the future.--Journal of Southern History

The Struggle for Change sits at the nexus of urban history, southern history, and research on the long civil rights movement, while challenging some of the prevailing arguments in these fields . . . [readers] will come away from the book with a better understanding of Richmond, the South, and America since the civil rights movement.--Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

Marvin Chiles tells a rich, humane, and powerful story of a city confronting profound change and persistent challenge. He does so with deep research and compelling characters stretching across generations.

--Edward L. Ayers, University of Richmond, author of The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America

Timely! Richmond is at an inflection point, and this explains how we got where we are. The Courage to Change reimagines Richmond's history by thinking intently on how actual people shape and reimagine government

--Julian Maxwell Hayter, University of Richmond, author of The Dream Is Lost: Voting Rights and the Politics of Race in Richmond, Virginia

About the Author

Marvin T. Chiles is Associate Professor of History at Old Dominion University.