1. On Henry Marsh III, see Julian Maxwell Hayter, “We’ve Been Overcome: Black Voter Mobilization and White Resistance in Richmond, Virginia, 1954–1985,” Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2010.

2. Section 5 of the VRA, the preclearance clause, maintains that jurisdictions must preclear voting-related changes in election systems with the Justice Department or a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. More specifically, the act requires “jurisdictions covered by Section 5 to submit any new proposed changes in election provisions at every level of government to the Department of Justice for preclearance.” Voting Rights Act of 1965, 42 USC § 1973c.

3. In at-large election systems, voters fill all contested seats on governing bodies. For instance, if nine seats are up for grabs (as was the case in Richmond) out of twenty total candidates, voters cast nine votes for their preferred candidates. These candidates must run throughout an entire jurisdiction (be it city or state). In single-member district systems, cities are divided into geographical districts. Voters in each district cast votes for candidates in their district. On voting systems, see Minority Vote Dilution, ed. Chandler Davidson (Washington, D.C., 1989); Morgan Kousser, Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 1999); and Ruth P. Morgan, Governance by Decree: The Impact of Voting Rights in Dallas (Lawrence, Kans., 2004).

4. Majority-minority districts are congressional/local districts comprised primarily of racial and/or ethnic minorities.

5. On racial politics in the post-1965 South, see Minchin, Timothy J. and Salmond, John A., After the Dream: Black and White Southerners Since 1965 (Lexington, Ky., 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Not all racial redistricting took place at the municipal level. In fact, congressional redistricting at the state and federal level had profound implications for racial representation in Washington and state congresses (especially in the late twentieth century). These districts, especially in areas with legacies of residential segregation, are often racially homogeneous. This, according to Earl and Merle Black, has had grave implications for party politics in the South. African Americans, they contend, have been concentrated into smaller, heavily Democratic districts. In contrast, whites vote in “safe” suburban and rural white districts (districts that, over the course of the late twentieth century, voted increasingly Republican). On congressional redistricting and the rise of southern Republicans, see Black, Earl and Black, Merle, The Rise of Southern Republicanism (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 331–37.Google Scholar

7. The first seminal voting rights texts (particularly Lawson’s Black Ballots) applauded the VRA’s ratification as a watershed in American political history. Lawson, for instance, focused almost exclusively on how federal actors removed the remaining legal barriers to the franchise. During the 1980s and 1990s, voting rights scholarship not only drew attention to the increased attacks on the VRA (particularly during the act’s various renewals and vote dilution) but also the antidilution litigation that characterized contestations over southern voting post-1965. While these studies generally focused on federal actors in Washington, they occasionally used local cases to illustrate how the courts, Congress, and policymakers continued to focus on electoral results standards and the spirit of equal opportunity (Graham and Abigail Thernstrom were, for different reasons, much more critical of bureaucrats’ involvement in the strengthening of the civil rights bills). On the initial policy-oriented studies, see Graham, Hugh Davis, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960–1972 (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Steven Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York, 1976); Steven F. Lawson, In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965–1982 (New York, 1985); and Abigail Thernstrom, Whose Votes Count: Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).

8. See Graham, The Civil Rights Era, chap. 9.

9. By following the evolution of voting rights into the 1990s, these studies also emphasize conservatives’ attempts to repeal Sections 4 and 5 of the VRA and roll back racial redistricting. These studies are also less optimistic about the preservation of the VRA and voting rights litigation. On broad and comparative voting rights scholarship, see Jack Bass and Walter De Vries, The Transformation of Southern Politics: Social Change and Political Consequence Since 1945 (Athens, 1995); Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman, eds., Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965–1990 (Princeton, 1994); Kousser, Colorblind Injustice; and, Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago, 2004).

10. Parker found that Washington augmented race-based entitlements in the VRA to specifically counter anti-VRA whites and the proliferation of vote dilution following 1965. His emphasis on white backlash to black voting rights was specifically directed toward Abigail Thernstrom. Thernstrom, in 1987’s Whose Votes Count, argued that racial redistricting turned the VRA into a vehicle for electoral affirmative action. Thernstrom’s criticism of federal voting rights protections, according to Parker, represented efforts to roll back the advances in civil rights legislation rather than focus on white opposition to the civil rights bills. See Frank R. Parker, Black Votes Count: Political Empowerment in Mississippi After 1965 (Chapel Hill, 1990), 1–3 and 11–12, and Thernstrom, Whose Votes Count.

11. Recently, voting rights scholarship focuses more intently on the role local people played augmenting the VRA. These endeavors, as was/is commensurate with civil rights historiography in the 1990s and beyond, emphasize the role local people played in shaping federal voting rights mandates. These texts, however, have almost exclusively concentrated on the Deep South. Arguably, much of this focus has been dictated by primary sources—after the VRA’s ratification, the Department of Justice’s federal observers and attorney’s spent a significant portion of their time fighting white resistance in the Deep South. For voting rights studies that emphasize local people’s contributions to the VRA and the litigation that followed the act’s ratification, see Chris Danielson, After Freedom Summer: How Race Realigned Mississippi Politics, 1965–1986 (Gainesville, 2011); Laughlin McDonald, A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia (Cambridge, 2003); and J. Mills Thornton, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa, 2002). On the deployment of federal observers and attorneys throughout the South, see United States Commission of Civil Rights, Political Participation, 1968, 168–71.

12. On the maelstrom that followed the Court’s Brown decision, see Klarman, Michael J., “How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis,” Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (June 1994): 81–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Moeser, John V. and Denis, Rutledge M., Politics of Annexation: Oligarchic Power in a Southern City (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 124.Google Scholar

14. On the various types of vote dilution, see Davidson, Minority Vote Dilution, 2–15.

15. Political Participation: A Report of the Commission on Civil Rights, May 1968, 19.

16. Virginia’s poll tax (which was $1.50 annually and needed to be paid up to three years and six months prior to a general election) was enacted during the Constitutional Convention of 1901–2. In actuality, the levy eliminated voters (both black and white) who were likely to vote against political machines. African Americans and white voters briefly aligned in the late nineteenth century under the banner of Virginia’s Readjuster Party. Poll taxes, as it happened, were a panic reaction to interracial politics in Virginia following the American Civil War. Whites designed these taxes to create a small Democratic electorate. This electorate eventually controlled Virginia politics (particularly under Harry F. Byrd) until the mid-twentieth century. Political organizations were often instrumental in controlling local politics because they paid poorer Virginians poll taxes. On the poll tax and machine politics, see Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia (Charlottesville, 1996), 12 and 230. On Reconstruction-era politics in Virginia and late nineteenth-century political interracialism, see Peter J. Rachleff, Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865–1890 (Urbana, 1989).

17. On Virginia’s late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century legacy of political paternalism, disenfranchisement, and the ways elites maintained political authority, see Smith, J. Douglas, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2002), 2–10.Google Scholar

18. On resistance to the VRA at the local and state level, see Chris Danielson, After Freedom Summer; Steven F. Lawson, In Pursuit of Power; and Frank Parker, Black Votes Count.

19. Although Bagley repeatedly denied using the word “nigger,” numerous locals, including Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors member Fritz Dietsch, recalled the mayor using the term. They specifically recalled Bagley’s use of the term in relationship to annexation and the possibility of a majority black city council. Councilman James Carpenter also recalled Bagley’s use of term. Curtis Holt’s lawyer, Cabell Venable, referenced Bagley’s usage of the word several times during oral arguments in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. See Cabell Venable, “City of Richmond vs. United States,” The Oyez Project at IIT Chicago–Kent College of Law, accessed 25 June 2013, http://www.oyez.org/cases/1970–1979/1974/1974_74_201. On later oral interviews with Fritz Dietsch regarding Bagley’s comments, see Moeser and Dennis, The Politics of Annexation, 93. On Bagley’s refutation of these claims, see The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After, A Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, January 1975, 454.

20. On the Second Reconstruction’s initial successes and Reconstruction’s failures, see Valelly, Richard M., The Two Reconstructions, 199–224.Google Scholar

21. On the reapportionment revolution, see Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962); Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960–1972 (New York, 1990), 377–92; and Richard Hasen, The Supreme Court and Election Law: Judging Equality from Baker v. Carr to Bush v. Gore (New York, 2006).

22. Southerners detested the fact that Section 4 of the VRA specifically covered the South. They consistently objected to the fact that the VRA subjected covered states to federal supervision and preclearance. Nixon attempted to win the favor of emergent southern Republicans by publicly criticizing not merely the VRA, but also Sections 4 and 5. He often associated Section 4 and 5 with federal overreach and contended that states should be left to govern their own political affairs. On Nixon’s initial strategy against the VRA, see Lawson, In Pursuit of Power, 162–63.

23. In Griggs, the Court broadly interpreted Title VII, the fair employment provision in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to apply to rules that disparately influenced minorities. Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 401 U.S. 424 and Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era, 383–90.

24. On the Warren Court’s compensatory logic established in Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 (1954), see Graham, The Civil Rights Era, 192–93.

25. Holt v. City of Richmond, 334 F.Supp 228; Holt v. City of Richmond, 459 F.2d 1093 (1972); and City of Richmond v. United States, 422 U.S. 358 (1975).

26. City of Richmond v. United States, 422 U.S. 358 (1975).

27. On American political development, Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek contend, “Political development is a durable shift in governing authority. By ‘governing authority’ we mean the exercise of control over persons or things that is designated and enforceable by the state. By ‘shift’ we have in mind a change in the locus or direction of control, resulting in a new distribution of authority among persons or organizations within the polity at large or between them and the counterparts outside. . . . [T]he term durable acknowledges that the distribution of authority is not fixed, and that its stability or change in any given historical instance must be regarded as contingent.” On American political development, see Orren, Karen and Skowronek, Stephen, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge, 2004), 123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Lowndes, Novkov, and Warren, eds., Race and American Political Development, 8.

28. On backlash to public school integration, see Klarman, “How Brown Changed Race Relations,” 81–118; Richard Kluger, The History of Brown v. Board and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York, 2004).

29. Rustin, Bayard, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” Commentary 39, no. 2 (February 1965).Google Scholar For the origins of the American civil rights movement, see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York, 2009); Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, Mass., 2010); Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill, 2003); Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, 1995); Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill, 1996); and Beth Tompkins, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill, 2000).

30. On interrogating the Montgomery-Selma narrative and Rustin’s “classical phase,” see Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 1234. On organizing traditions, see Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom. On the classical phase of the civil rights movement, see Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics.”

31. On massive resistance strategies, southern conservatism, and the persistence of southern racism, see Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicanism; Klarman, “How Brown Changed Race Relations”; Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2007), chap. 11; and Kruse, Kevin M., White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. (2013), 5.

33. Tova Andrea Wang, The Politics of Voter Suppression: Defending and Expanding Americans’ Right to Vote (Ithaca, 2012), xiv.

34. Black Power scholars emphasize that these exclusively political strategies eventually supplanted extrainstitutional uplift movements. Scholars Devin Fergus and Cedric Johnson contend that the Great Society created a framework that allowed blacks to contest institutional discrimination and racism through formal political channels. Extrainstitutional forms of uplift like Black Power, etc. were often purposefully absorbed (or co-opted) by liberal political coalitions as a way to temper radicalism. African American community organizers, according to these scholars, came to rely on these formal political avenues to redress social problems throughout their communities. On black Americans and brokerage politics, see Devin Fergus, Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965–1980 (Athens, 2009), 1–13; and Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis, 2007), xxiii.

35. Between 1969 and 1974, southern suffragists brought roughly 150 objections, under the VRA’s Section 5, to voting relation changes in the South. The Justice Department initiated forty-five suits under the VRA by 1975 and participated in a host of private suits like Richmond’s litigation. The Voting Rights Act Ten Years After, 5 and appendix 5.

36. According to voting rights scholars, the Second Reconstruction was initially successful because congressional and court-based divisions over civil rights policies were “less pronounced” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This institutional stability led to VRA’s renewals and, subsequently, the perseverance of minority voting rights well beyond the 1970s. During the 1990s, the erosion of congressional stability and the rise of conservative attacks on civil rights bills threatened, J. Morgan Kousser argues, to “reverse the course of minority political success.” On the maintenance of the Second Reconstruction and conservatives’ attacks on minority voting rights, see Kousser, Colorblind Injustice, 2 and 56–58; Parker, Black Votes Count, 11–12; and Valelly, The Two Reconstructions, 213–18.

37. Lowndes, Novkov, and Warren, eds., Race and American Political Development, 258–59.

38. Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” 1238.

39. As Desmond King and Rogers Smith define “racial orders”: Racial institutional orders are characterized by political actors that have adopted racial concepts or objectives in order to bind together coalitions and structure governing institutions that express the interests of their architects. Members support these coalitions out of shared interests. Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith, “Racial Orders in American Politics,” in Race and American Political Development, ed. Lowndes, Novkov, and Warren, 81.

40. Thernstrom, Whose Votes Count, 15.

41. Political Participation, 11.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., 12.

44. Lawson, Steven F., Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics Since 1941 (Malden, Mass., 2009), 118.Google Scholar

45. Richmond Afro-American, 30 March 1966, 1.

46. Ibid., 19.

47. Smith, Managing White Supremacy, 68.

48. Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics.”

49. Kousser, Colorblind Injustice, 55.

50. Political Participation, 1–132.

51. On Richmond’s legacy of gradualist leadership, see Raymond Gavins, The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership: Gordon Blaine Hancock, 1884–1970 (Durham, 1977). On post-Brown v. Board racial polarization in the South, see Klarman, “How Brown Changed Race Relations,” 81–118. On Oliver W. Hill, see Edds, Margaret, “The Letters of Oliver and Bernie Hill: The Making of a Legendary Civil Rights Lawyer,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Jun. 01; 121, no. 3 (2013): 210–49.Google Scholar

52. Virginia passed a series of initiatives during the mid-to-late 1950s designed to keep schools segregated. For instance, the so-called Gray Plan eventually called for a referendum to establish a Pupil Placement Board. Policymakers created this board to review African American applicants to white schools. The plan also recommended that public funds be set aside for students that preferred to attend private (often Catholic) segregated schools in lieu of integrated public institutions. The Commonwealth’s General Assembly also ratified legislation that virtually criminalized the operation of litigation-based organizations like the NAACP. On segregationist public school initiatives and the anti-NAACP laws, see Robert A. Pratt, The Color of Their Skin: Education and Race in Richmond, Virginia, 1954–1989 (Charlottesville, 1992).

53. Until 1966, Virginia’s poll tax disenfranchised both poor black and white voters. Voters had to pay poll taxes in person at local courthouses (which often discouraged those with outstanding fines). On how Virginia’s political organizations used poll taxes to maintain their authority, see Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia, 230.

54. Richmond Afro-American, 11 June 1960, 1.

55. Brooks was the NAACP’s registration director until 1975. In fact, all three of the Crusade’s founders were, in effect, legatees of the NAACP’s previous litigation strategy against segregated schools, particularly Richmond natives Oliver W. Hill and Spotswood Robinson. On African Americans in Richmond politics prior to the 1950s, see Hayter, We’ve Been Overcome, chap. 1. On the relationship between the Crusade, the NAACP, and their efforts to register voters, see John M. Brooks, “NAACP Files,” M296. James Cabell Branch Library, Cabell Black Collection (Richmond: Virginia Commonwealth University).

56. Richmond Afro-American, 4 February 1961, 1.

57. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana, 1993), 141. On Harry F. Byrd, see Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia.

58. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia, 12.

59. On the “Virginia Way” and genteel paternalism, see Smith, Managing White Supremacy, 4–9.

60. Smith, Managing White Supremacy, 68.

61. Leaders believed lynch mobs were bad for the commonwealth’s business culture. Unlike states beneath the border South that tolerated and encouraged indiscriminate lynching practices, Senator Byrd promoted the idea of supplanting mob violence with legal injustice. As the Commonwealth’s governor, Byrd passed antilynching laws through Virginia’s legislature in 1928 as a means to control disorderly conduct and property damage. Elites also patronized black institutions in Richmond such as churches and Virginia Union University. On Byrd and antilynching, see Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia, 80; and Brundage, Lynching in the New South.

62. Gates, Robbins, The Making of Massive Resistance: Virginia’s Politics of Public School Desegregation, 1954–1956 (Chapel Hill, 1964), 22.Google Scholar

63. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia, 63.

64. Robert A. Rankin, “The Richmond Crusade for Voters: The Quest for Black Power,” University of Virginia Newsletter 51, no. 1 (1974): 1–7.

65. Rankin, “The Richmond Crusade for Voters,” 2.

66. Ibid.

67. Moeser and Dennis, The Politics of Annexation, 46.

68. Ibid., 34–35 and 46.

69. Crusade founder William Thornton argued, “If 9,000 colored voters all vote for the same 9 men, these 9,000 votes will put these 9 candidates ahead of the 13 others on the ticket. The same ‘balance of power’ which will assure election of the nine men who get support of 9,000 colored voters can at the same time unseat several councilmen who are definitely against the rights of colored citizens.” Richmond Afro-American, 11 June 1960, 1 and 6.

70. The resolution argued in favor of compulsory school attendance, a separation of local school boards from the state’s Pupil Placement Board, a $1.15 minimum wage, and equitable promotion practices in city employment. The Crusade’s Research Committee found, for instance, that only 26 percent of city employees were African American and of those 26 percent, 80 percent performed menial labor (e.g., maids, janitors, custodians, kitchen helpers, cooks, truck drivers, animal collectors, etc); African American employees disproportionately made up the lowest pay-scale bracket. Richmond Afro-American, 28 April 1962, 1 and 3.

71. City of Richmond v. United States 422 U.S. 358 (1975), 64.

72. This decline in Richmond’s population was due largely to court-ordered busing and the proliferation of low-income housing. During the late 1950s and 1960s, whites moved into Richmond’s growing suburbs in record numbers. On suburbanization in Richmond and the Sunbelt South, see Lassiter, The Silent Majority, chap. 11.

73. Moeser and Dennis, The Politics of Annexation, 60.

74. Ibid.

75. For the Supreme Court’s abolition of poll taxes, see Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966).

76. City of Richmond v. United States, 78.

77. Richmond News-Leader, 27 May 1967, 14.

78. On the Byrd Machine’s decline and its slow disintegration prior to Byrd’s death, see Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia, 317–18.

79. On how Richmond Forward’s white candidates swept Richmond’s whitest and most affluent neighborhoods, see City of Richmond v. United States, 90.

80. Eleanor P. Sheppard Papers, M277, Box 9, James Cabell Branch Library, Cabell Black Collection (Richmond: Virginia Commonwealth University).

81. City of Richmond v. United States 422 U.S. 358 (1975), 110.

82. Venable, “City of Richmond v. United States,” The Oyez Project at IIT Chicago–Kent College of Law, accessed 25 June 2013, http://www.oyez.org/cases/1970–1979/1974/1974_74_201.

83. Moeser and Dennis, The Politics of Annexation, 61.

84. T. Milton Carter, To R.F. Candidates, Eleanor P. Sheppard Papers, M277, Box 9, James Cabell Branch Library, Cabell Black Collection (Richmond: Virginia Commonwealth University).

85. City of Richmond v. United States, 83.

86. Ibid., 139–41.

87. Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia, 2006).

88. Carpenter was the reverend of a predominantly black Presbyterian church on Richmond’s South Side.

89. Hayter, We’ve Been Overcome, chap. 2.

90. Moeser and Dennis, The Politics of Annexation, 77 and 82.

91. Ibid., 82.

92. Venable, “City of Richmond v. United States.”

93. Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 281.

94. Moeser and Dennis, The Politics of Annexation, 115.

95. Ibid., 124.

96. Richmond News-Leader, 8 September 1969, A-7.

97. City of Richmond, v. United States, 42.

98. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 1 July 1969, 1.

99. “City of Richmond v. United States.”

100. City of Richmond, Virginia, Budget—Fiscal Year, 1970–71: General Fund Budget Summary, S-2.

101. Lawson, Running for Freedom, 154–55.

102. Richmond Afro-American, 17 June 1967, 2.

103. Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 283.

104. Moeser and Dennis, The Politics of Annexation, 124.

105. Bill Sauder, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 1 July 1969, 1.

106. Allen v. State Board of Elections, 393 U.S. 544, 565 (1969). The Warren Court actually dived into issues of minority voting rights in a 1960 case called Gomillion v. Lightfoot. The Alabama legislature actually redrew Tuskegee’s boundaries after African Americans registered enough voters to challenge white control. The legislature drew up a twenty-eight-sided figure that effectively made it impossible for blacks to elect a candidate in Tuskegee. The Court ruled that the Tuskegee’s electoral district boundaries violated the Fifthteenth Amendment, which prevents the United States and/or an individual state from denying citizens the right to vote on account of race. Unlike later cases, Justice Frankfurter argued that states, however, are protected from judicial review when they exercised power within “the domain of the state.” There was no “countervailing municipal function” that justified such boundaries, so the Court ruled that these boundaries were designed to dilute blacks votes. This was one of the first voting rights cases that dealt exclusively with issues of discriminatory intent and effect. See Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U.S. 339 (1960), and Kousser, Colorblind Injustice, 54.

107. The Court’s decision in Allen was not only motivated by white backlash to the VRA, but a jurisprudential precedent that the Court established in the early 1960s (see the previous footnote). The Warren Court initiated the purported “reapportionment revolution” prior to the VRA’s ratification. Earl Warren’s Court spent the 1950s and 1960s crusading to expand individual rights, altering criminal law, and regulating state and local voting systems. In terms of voting rights, the Supreme Court began to manage reapportionment guidelines in 1962 and 1964. In Baker v. Carr (1962) the Court ruled 6–3 that, under the Equal Protection Clause, issues of reapportionment were justiciable. They went further in Reynolds v. Sims (1964); the Court, in an 8–1 decision, contended that the Equal Protection Clause required “no less than substantially equal state legislative” representation for all citizens. Reynolds required that states establish equally populated districts to protect against dilution under the principle of “one person, one vote.” They extended the one person, one vote principle to local governments in Avery v. Midland County Texas. Two years after Avery, the Court dived further into the business of political cartography—it eventually applied reapportionment logic directly to the Voting Rights Act. See Graham, The Civil Rights Era, 378; Richard Hasen, The Supreme Court and Election Law; Baker v. Carr 369 U.S. 186 (1962); Reynolds v. Sims 377 U.S. 533 (1964); and Avery v. Midland County Texas, 390 U.S. 474, 487 (1967).

108. Allen v. State Board of Elections 393 U.S. 544 (1969).

109. Graham, Hugh Davis, Civil Rights and the Presidency: Race and Gender in American Politics, 1960–1972 (New York, 1992), 174–76.Google Scholar

110. Kousser, Colorblind Injustice, 56.

111. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions, 214.

112. Maltz, Earl M., The Chief Justiceship of Warren Burger (Columbia, S.C., 2000), 7–8.Google Scholar

113. Powell eventually befriended a number of prominent African Americans from the Richmond area, including Oliver W. Hill. He also swore in Governor L. Douglas Wilder, the United States’s first elected black governor, on 13 January 1990. On Justice Powell, see John Jeffries, Justice Lewis F. Powell: A Biography (New York, 2001).

114. Schwartz, Bernard, ed., The Burger Court: Counter-Revolution or Confirmation (New York, 1998), 263.Google ScholarPubMed

115. Maltz, The Chief Justiceship of Warren Burger, 7 and 31–57.

116. Justices from the previous Court, such as Abe Fortas, John Harlan, and Hugo Black, were brief members of Burger’s Court. William Douglas, Thurgood Marshall, Douglas Brennan, Potter Stewart, and Byron White served longer terms. Maltz, The Chief Justiceship of Warren Burger, 4–30.

117. Griggs v. Duke Power Company 401 U.S. 424 (1971), and Derek Bell, “The Burger Court’s Place on the Bell Curve of Racial Jurisprudence,” in The Burger Court: Counter-Revolution or Confirmation, ed. Bernard Schwartz, 61–62.

118. Graham, The Civil Rights Era, 383–86.

119. Burger contended that Title VII forbade overt discrimination and practices that were “fair in form, but discriminatory in operation.” Ibid., 432. On compensatory Supreme Court logic, see Graham, The Civil Rights Era, 377–90.

120. Perkins v. Matthews, 400 U.S. 379 (1971), 387.

121. Ibid.

122. Hugo Black dissented.

123. The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After, appendix 5.

124. Harris, Ron, “Richmond: Former Confederate Capital Finally Falls to Blacks,” Ebony, June 1980, 45.Google Scholar

125. Ibid.

126. Venable, “City of Richmond v. United States.”

127. Moeser and Dennis, The Politics of Annexation, 144.

128. Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 289–94.

129. On 5 April 1971, district court judge Robert Merhige ordered Richmond to adopt a new desegregation plan that ensured that the ratio of black to white students in each school reflected the proportion of blacks in the entire school system. Bradley v. School Board of Richmond, 416 U.S. 696 (1974), and Pratt, The Color of Their Skin, 54.

130. Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 280–94.

131. Lawson, In Pursuit of Power, 212–15.

132. To win southern votes, Nixon resolved to remove the VRA’s preclearance and triggering formula off of the South, but eventually he was outflanked by bipartisan coalition in the Senate. See Graham, The Civil Rights Era, 360–61. On litigation and voting-related changes, see Kousser, Colorblind Injustice, 56; and Lawson, In Pursuit of Power, 162–63.

133. Lawson, In Pursuit of Power, 162.

134. The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After, appendix 5.

135. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 15 January 1971, 1.

136. City of Richmond v. United States, 422 U.S. 358 (1975), 16.

137. In 1971, the Court made it clear that plaintiffs could make cases against at-large systems if they diminished the power derived from voting. The Court, in Connor v. Johnson (1971), devised a solution to vote dilution. In Connor, African Americans in Hinds County, Mississippi, challenged disproportionately inequitable variations in multimember (at-large) districts. Justices established that single-member districts were preferable to at-large elections and could be used as remedies for local apportionment plans. DOJ point man Norman and the Supreme Court fell directly in line with the Crusade and their supporters’ desire for single-member districts. The Justice Department’s suggestion that Richmond introduce a ward-based plan that implemented majority-minority districts for council elections emboldened the RCV. Not long after Norman’s response, Crusade leadership, in the summer of 1971, advocated that Richmond replace its at-large city council election system with nine single-member districts. Richmond Afro-American, 29 May 1971, 1 and Connor v. Johnson, 402 U.S. 690 (1971), 402. Also, according to Earl and Merle Black, the compression of black voters into exclusively urban enclaves expedited the rise of the Republican South. Overtime, congressional reapportionment and redistricting led to almost exclusively Republican districts in the South’s suburb and rural areas. Scholars argue that this type of political cartography has had profound implications for the Republican Party, state legislatures in the South, and southern congressional representation in Washington. See Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicanism, 331–37.

138. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 2 October 1971, 1–2.

139. Moeser and Dennis, The Politics of Annexation, 158.

140. City of Richmond v. United States, 422 U.S. 358 (1975), 168.

141. Ibid.,159.

142. Ibid.

143. Ibid., 163.

144. Ibid., 163–64. City of Petersburg v. United States, 93 S.Ct. 1441 (1973).

145. White v. Regester 412 U.S. 755 (1973).

146. In September 1973, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Zimmer v. McKeithen, “eased its probative requirements” and recorded four primary and four enhancing factors that showed electoral changes were driven by racial intent or diluted minorities’ votes—regardless of intent. The four primary factors included demonstrating a lack of access to the slating process, unresponsive legislators to the needs of minorities, state policies that maintained at-large systems, and a historical legacy of discrimination that precluded minority participation in the political process. The enhancing factors were large election districts, majority vote requirements, a lack of residency districts, and anti-single-shot voting provisions. See Keith, Gary A., Rotten Boroughs, Political Thickets, and Legislative Donnybrooks: Redistricting in Texas (Austin, 2013), 80.Google Scholar Also see White v. Regester; Zimmer v. McKeithen 485 F. 2d 1297; Kousser, Colorblind Injustice, 336; Morgan, Governance by Decree, 41–56; and Valelly, The Two Reconstructions, 215.

147. Moeser and Dennis, The Politics of Annexation, 165.

148. Charles S. Rhyne, “City of Richmond v. United States.”

149. City of Richmond v. United States, 422 U.S. 358 (1975).

150. Ibid.

151. Ibid., 5 March 1977, 1.

152. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 2 March 1977, 1.

153. Ibid.

154. Margaret Edds, The Path of Black Political Power, http://aliciapatterson.org/APF0803/Edds/Edds.html.

155. In the summer of 1980, Ebony magazine published reporter Ron Harris’s article that outlined Richmond’s monumental political transformation following 1977. Harris not only historicized the centraility of race to Richmond politics, but also many of the figures that helped change the complexion of local politics. See Ron Harris, “Richmond: Former Confederate Capital Finally Falls to Blacks,” Ebony, June 1980, 45–46.

156. Reed, Aloph, Stirrings In the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis, 1999), 79.Google Scholar

157. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions, 201.

158. Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics.”

159. Lawrence Douglas Wilder, a Richmond native, has been a fixture in Richmond and Virginia electoral politics since 1970. He was elected to the Virginia State Senate in 1970 and this election made Douglas Virginia’s first black senator since Reconstruction. Wilder was also elected lieutenant governor in 1985. In 1989, Wilder was the first African American to be elected governor. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell swore him in. On L. Douglas Wilder, see J. L. Jeffries, Virginia’s Native Son: The Election and Administration of Governor L. Douglas Wilder (West Lafayette, Ind., 2000).

160. Shelby County v. Holder, No. 11-5256, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, 18 May 2012, 41.

161. Wang, The Politics of Voter Suppression, xiv.

162. Ironically, congressional redistricting in the 1990s gave rise to the very conservative congressmen (who were elected in almost exclusively white districts from America’s suburbs and rural areas) who attacked the VRA. On legal efforts to stem the tide of racial redistricting, see Mobile v. Bolden 446 U.S. 55 (1980), and Shaw v. Reno 509 U.S. 630 (1993). Congressional amendments to the VRA in the early 1980s, particularly Section 2, also influenced the future possibility of racial redistricting during the 1990s and beyond. See Kousser, Colorblind Injustice, 341–42.

163. Leading voting rights scholar J. Morgan Kousser contended in 1999 that recent efforts by the Court and conservative thinkers “have threatened to reverse the course of minority political success during the Second Reconstruction.” When I completed this article, the Supreme Court considered and decided Shelby County v. Holder. In Shelby, the Court struck down Section 4 of the VRA (5–4). Section 4(b)’s triggering formula covers state/local districts with a history of political discrimination. These covered areas were bound by Section 4 to observe Section 5’s preclearance clause. At present, the districts previously covered by Section 4 are no longer obligated, as per the Court, to submit voting-related changes to the Department of Justice. A majority of the Court held that Section 4 of the VRA “can no longer be used as a basis for subjecting jurisdictions to preclearance” because outdated coverage formulas place burdens on covered jurisdictions that are ostensibly no longer applicable to southern racial politics.¹⁶³ While the Court issued no holding on Section 5, it held Congress responsible for devising a new triggering formula. The Court’s decision (which cited high numbers of black voter turnout and elected officials as indicators for racial progress) renews a long history of southern and Republican efforts to undermine federal supervision over voting-related changes. Kousser, Colorblind Injustice, 2, and Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. (2013).