Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 24, 1994 TAG: 9405240093
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By PETER BAKER THE WASHINGTON POST NOTE: below
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
For some 40 years, Neverett A. Eggleston Jr. has owned a motel and a car repair shop in the heart of Jackson Ward, once a thriving center where black entrepreneurs could prosper in the former capital of the Confederacy.
But today, Eggleston looks around to see that many of his neighbors are gone, their doors locked, their windows shuttered. And the people he blames for the loss are not the white corporate barons who once ruled Main Street, but the same black-led city government that once gave him so much hope.
"It's bad when a black guy talks [critically] about his people," he said the other day. "But these guys are the bottom of the barrel."
Such disillusionment crossed racial lines this month when voters replaced most of the City Council, including Mayor Walter Kenney. Frustrated by a record-high homicide rate, a deteriorating downtown core and a political system they considered dysfunctional, whites and blacks forged what one columnist called a "yuppie-buppie team" to topple the establishment.
When the new nine-member council takes office July 1, blacks still will hold six seats, but most are of a younger generation, one that has no connection to the civil rights-era movement that first seized power in 1977.
"There's a second generation of black leadership emerging that's very different from the 1977-78 group of leaders," said Robert Holsworth, a political scientist at Virginia Commonwealth University. "What you're seeing in the African American community is the same sort of frustration with their leaders as there is in the white community, and now they're taking it out on them."
The political turnover comes at a critical time for Richmond.
As in Washington, Baltimore and so many other cities across the country, disappearing jobs and savage crimes have driven Richmond's middle-class residents to the suburbs and triggered fears that decline is irreversible.
Since 1970, Richmond's population has dropped precipitately, from nearly 250,000 to just over 200,000. In the last decade, the black population, now 55 percent, has remained stable, while the white population has dropped by nearly 17,000, to less than 45 percent. Since 1988, the city has lost 9,000 jobs, and today the unemployment rate is 5.8 percent, twice that of Fairfax County.
The changing face of Richmond is obvious to anyone driving through downtown. The venerable Hotel John Marshall has closed, as have the treasured Miller & Rhoads and Thalhimer's department stores.
Most of the shops that remain open along Broad Street are secured with metal gates at night to ward off thieves and vandals, despite city officials' complaints that the gates are unsightly.
As of Wednesday, Richmond had recorded 67 homicides in 1994, about two-thirds more than at this time last year. Within four days last month, eight people were killed, not many for Washington, perhaps, but a staggering death toll for a city one-third the size of the District. At this pace, with the steamy summer months approaching, the homicide toll easily will surpass its one-year record of 117 in 1992.
The situation has gotten so bad that this month Gov. George Allen dispatched 14 state troopers to help local patrols. It was the third time in two years that a governor stepped in.
"These homicides right now are out of control," said Richmond Police Chief Marty Tapscott. "We've never seen anything like this before."
Cleveland Overton knows that firsthand. He sees it in front of his apartment complex in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods, south of the James River, where young men hang out talking and drinking all day. Last month, two were fatally shot nearby within two days of each other.
"It's changed a lot over the years, all these killings," said Overton, who has lived in the city 32 of his 48 years. Overton, unemployed and on disability, has experienced the violence himself.
"I was sitting out on the lawn one night, and I got my teeth kicked out because they thought I was snitching."
Like many residents, he said he went to the polls May 3 hoping for change. Despite the results, his expectations are low. "I don't think none of them are going to make a change overnight," he said.
The turnover in the election was biracial; three of the council members who were replaced are black and two are white. Defeated were Kenney, a veteran of the council's first black elected majority; Roy West, a former mayor; and Benjamin Warthen and Gwendolyn Hedgepeth. A fifth council member, Geline Williams, retired.
"It was something that had to happen because the city had to change, had to be turned around," said Shirley Harvey, a business owner who upset Kenney in her first bid for office.
The depth of the frustration was evident when the city's two rival political groups, the black Crusade for Voters and the white Teams for Progress, backed three of the same challengers.
"I get the sense that it's the maturing of the leadership, black and white, that realizes that unless we work together ... then we're not going to go anywhere," said Martin Jewell, crusade president.
Kenney, 63, a retired postal worker selected to be mayor by his colleagues in 1990, is a tall, courtly gentleman who enjoyed the job's ceremonial functions. But his passive demeanor offered none of the dynamic vision many sought. During his tenure, the council spent much of its time mired in personality-driven squabbling.
Kenney said he had deliberately tried to avoid being aggressive in an effort to build consensus. His successes, he added, were forgotten amid an anti-incumbent backlash.
But state Sen. Henry Marsh, D-Richmond, Kenney's political mentor and the city's first black mayor, believes Richmond has much to be proud of lately, including a new museum, a biotechnology research center and a riverfront development.
"I think Richmond is on the way," he said. "A lot of people are giving it a bum rap. It's not even a question of [whether] the glass [is] half full or half empty. I think our glass is more than half full."
There are bright spots. Tobacco Row, a warehouse-turned-apartment complex, has stoked ambitions of luring more people to live downtown.
The nightclubs in nearby Shockoe Bottom are teeming with young revelers on any weekend night, turning a formerly dilapidated section into the city's hottest entertainment district.
"The new black-led council has a real opportunity, if they have the ingenuity, if they have the smarts, to take us on a new beginning," said Avon Drake, who formerly headed the African American studies department at Virginia Commonwealth University. "We had a new beginning in 1977, but we need another one now."
by CNB