Hope in the Cities is Awarded a Kellogg Grant   

Amy Howard (University of Richmond), Rob Corcoran (Hope in the Cities), John W. Franklin (Smithsonian), Maureen Lee (Black History Museum), Ray Vines (NAACP), Tee Turner ( Hope in the Cities) (Photo: Cricket White)

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation announced a $75,000 grant to support the project as a step in establishing Richmond as a "national center for community trustbuilding." Activities will focus on accurate telling of racial history, highlighting the socio-economic challenges that are the legacy of this history, and exploring the role of trust as a foundation for building and sustaining healthy, inclusive communities.

"Richmond is uniquely placed to host this initiative," says Rob Corcoran, national director of Initiatives of Change which operates the Hope in the Cities program. "In the context of the 150th   anniversary of the Civil War, we want to increase understanding of the impact of history, Richmond's important role in emancipation, and the central role of race, class and jurisdiction in perpetuating inequity in the region. We also want to increase our ability to engage in honest conversation and to encourage courageous leadership and policy choice in areas that most impact the lives of children."

Forums, workshops, and other activities will take place during 2012 and will lay the groundwork for further programming in 2013.  The initiative dovetails with the "Unpacking the 2010 Census" project also launched this month.

With more than two decades of experience in community dialogue and racial reconciliation, Richmond is building relationships with other national projects such as the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation in Tulsa, OK where Hope in the Cities has led workshops for its annual symposium, and the William Winter Institute in Mississippi. The executive director of the Dayton Dialogue on Race Relations, which has used Hope in the Cities curriculum for a decade, attended a recent training session in Richmond. "We hope that the funding from Kellogg will help us to further develop the potential of this city as a place where people can come to learn skills to heal their communities and to build a just and inclusive future," says Corcoran.     

Rob Corcoran

Ben Campbell wastes no time in naming hard truths in his new book, Richmond's Unhealed History. It opens in 1607 with Captain Christopher Newport and his men arriving at the fall line of what is now the James River. They "planted the seed of a great nation with unprecedented opportunity for all human beings; they also planted seeds of economic exploitation, racial discrimination, a hierarchical class system, and a heretical version of Christianity...."

Campbell tells Richmond's story, but his book is a model for the kind of honest historical narrative needed in many communities. He makes an unflinching, detailed, and persuasive argument for acknowledging the origins and development of race and class systems that deeply influence the city today.  

Richmond's racial history is discussed more freely these days, but Campbell believes that "class is, if anything, even more foundational, seldom acknowledged, and more insidious in its impact." In the early years, most new arrivals in Virginia - white and black - were in servitude or bondage. By 1662, the small white elite, fearing that indentured whites would make common cause with Africans, began to develop legal structures for racialized slavery.

As a churchman himself, Campbell is always interested in where the church stood on these matters. Significantly, conversion did not mean freedom for Africans. Christianity became a description of white ethnic origin. The 1705 Comprehensive Slave Code specified Christians as White and slaves as Negroes. 

New waves of immigration brought Scots-Irish and German settlers, famers and artisans. Though poor, they formed a vital buffer between the aristocracy and the enslaved population. Racial privilege muted their class consciousness.

By now Richmond was the leading interstate slave market in the country and consequently the third wealthiest city in America. In 1857 alone, the business of supplying slaves to cotton plantations in the south generated $100 million in present-day dollars.

Some of Campbell's most powerful writing focuses on the post-Civil War and Emancipation years: a brief period of black political empowerment followed by decades of exclusion and segregation.

Campbell describes in detail the policies employed by white leaders to isolate the African American community, leading to concentrated poverty and contributing to urban sprawl. "The city pursued a plan that destroyed or invaded every black neighborhood" in the name of urban renewal. As black political power grew in Richmond following the civil rights movement, the General Assembly was busy changing annexation laws to protect majority white counties from increasingly black cities across the state in "panicked attempts to replace legalized segregation with a new jurisdictionally established separation of race and class."

Held to Account  

Chris Breitenberg welcomes the intense personal scrutiny of candidates in the Republican Primaries and says that we could all benefit from the scrutiny of others to help keep us accountable.    

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