Signs of Hatred Absent in Former Slave Capital

In an old shade-tree neighborhood well on its way to threadbare, along a boulevard where commuters sweat their way into and out of downtown, on a corner near an empty bus stop, stands an iron signpost: “Here ran, east and west, the intermediate line of Richmond’s defenses during the Civil War. . . .”

Now there is only blacktop, sidewalk, heavy trees, everyday houses, thick green lawns, litter and dog droppings.

The raised letters of the marker describe how, back in the war, they tried and tried to take Richmond, those Yankee boys. And when one of the Union generals was killed, the sign concludes, “Southern morale soared.”

Ah, indeed?

The year was 1864 and the proud, languid, stubborn, besieged South, with the cicadas screeching in the foliage and the air damp with the smell of magnolias and cordite, the rich women reduced to wearing their curtains--why, of course the city leaders would hoist crystal glasses of warm water, which they gamely called cocktails, to the death of the general.

Imagine what they imagined about losing this war.

But imagine, too, the trembling hand and the private dread of the slave woman who had to cut the drapes into dresses for the misses and who flinched every time the artillery shook the shutters? What of her morale when the Union invader--liberator?--fell dead in the dusty field?

Today, we have passed through the endless miles of mini-malls and housing tracts and traffic jams that Southern cities erect as their modern defense against good taste (penetrate this, you invader) and we are pointing the Pontiac toward the center of Richmond, toward the Capitol of the old Confederacy.

Here is a place to cogitate about the imperishable anger in America. What can Richmond tell us about people living with their differences?

“I think relations among people here are better than in most parts of the country. Whites have felt for a long time that blacks would have to be included in affairs, one way or the other,” Virginia Union University Chancellor Allix B. James says.

Because this is a story about race relations, everybody wears their colors: James is black, his university almost all-black, your correspondent white.

Dr. James’ explanation is fine, as far as it goes. But it goes not quite far enough. Dr. James, how do you explain the benign feel of Richmond, this onetime capital of slavery, this onetime caldron of slave unrest?

In two days, I saw not a single skinhead with sullen face, heard not one motorized boom-box bellowing out angry rap. I didn’t see a black-power T-shirt or a Dixie flag, either. I concluded that people here are not so terribly determined to emphasize their antagonisms at every chance.

My conclusion was underscored everywhere I looked by the way people lunched together, sat in the audience together at the jazz club, walked and talked along the streets and shopped together.

Nobody can grasp a city just passing through. There must be barriers everywhere. But they were too low or too camouflaged to impede my progress. The slights and the hatreds are no doubt alive and well-nurtured, but they were too subtle to catch on the fly. Maybe this is a racial powder keg. But there was no evident smell of burning fuse, and journalists have good noses for such things.

So what about it, Dr. James? How did Richmond get this far, without quibbling about how far it really is, or how far it needs to go?

We talked longer than we need to describe here, covering much of the same hard-work, goodwill banalities that you hear everywhere. And then we get to this point: Look around Richmond and there is something different. Inside the old line of Confederate defense are black statues, monuments, museums, leaders, institutions, history.

“You see that kind of evidence of intelligence, leadership, and whites have to respect it,” says James.

Many Americans know that a black governor, L. Douglas Wilder, the grandson of freed slaves, now presides over a Capitol that was designed by Jefferson.

But how about Maggie L. Walker, a wheelchair-bound woman who founded a newspaper, an insurance firm and the turn-of-the-century St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, the nation’s oldest surviving black-owned bank? Her home and the memory of the birth of “America’s black capitalism” is preserved in Richmond by the National Park Service.

Or Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, the early 20th-Century actor and dancer? He donated a traffic light to help children get to school. A statue near downtown thanks him for “his many kindnesses to the citizens of Richmond.”

Curious, how a person’s color fades when cast in bronze.

“I’m from Columbus, Ohio, and when I was in high school, the only way I ever learned about the achievements of black people was from my parents. And I had a teacher who adopted a black baby. Otherwise, all you heard about was Martin Luther King, and he was only one man.” Angie Martin is speaking at the campus of Virginia Union University. She is a student. She is black.

“Here they teach you about what other black people accomplished. . . . You’re not going to want to go out and be a success unless you see that people before you succeeded. . . .”

This is not to suggest that Richmond is a fairy tale. A white reporter interviewing two black students stirs open suspicion. Friends with set jaws come up one by one to make sure the women are OK. This is a black campus, and a wary one.

Martin continues: “And they teach you here about what you’re going to face from white people as you go out and try to be a success. . . . How white people have instilled in black people’s minds that we’re not anything, that we’re not going to do anything.”

Our last destination in Richmond is the 2-year-old Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, a tiny, struggling but hopeful institution. We fret and wonder while en route, if blacks benefit from understanding this part of the communal American past, what about whites? What are they learning over at the Confederate memorials?

At 11 a.m. there are 17 people waiting for the Black History Museum to open. That’s about one person per exhibit: Two teachers and 15 preschool youngsters.

Hey, maybe this is a fairy tale after all.

Of the 17, only two are black. One teacher, one student. There is one Asian-American . . . but wait a minute, why are we doing this, why are we counting? They don’t look like they are. Why not conclude by saying that morale here in the old South rose a little again, if only for a moment.