Race, Class and Power in the Building of Richmond, 1870-1920.

Race, Class and Power in the Building of Richmond, 1870-1920. By Steven J. Hoffman (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2004. vi plus 232 pp.).

In Race, Class and Power in the Building of Richmond, 1870-1920, Steven J. Hoffman argues that historians too often have attributed urban physical development to all-powerful elites. Consequently, they have ignored how "American cities are the sum of the actions of all urban dwellers, not just those of the city's business and political leaders." (p. 187) Using Richmond, Virginia as a case study, Hoffman maintains that the authority of urban commercial-civic elites was far from total, and people of color and workers were far from powerless in shaping city growth. (p.1)

Hoffman demonstrates that large-scale factors beyond the control of Richmond's bourgeoisie hampered elite "city-building" agendas. These factors included an expanding national state and economy following the Civil War, which wrested key economic decisions out of local hands. (p. 53) The South's colonial relationship to the North, further, made the region's elite dependent on outside investment capital. (p. 46) Most importantly, the city-building projects of Richmond's homegrown elite were constrained by the activities of African Americans and working-class whites, who protested, privately lobbied officials, and contested for municipal office. (p. 113) Hoffman proffers that electoral politics clearly favored white workers, who had access to the Democratic Party by virtue of their race. But African Americans, otherwise disfranchised by the "for whites only" Democracy in Richmond, wielded electoral strength in Jackson Ward, a predominantly black and Republican stronghold. Under the aegis of the Knights of Labor, Jackson Ward politicians and dissident white workers created an independent "Workingmen's Reform" ticket that swept the city council in 1886. (p. 137) However, the author suggests that most overt challenges to elite power were unsuccessful. Black elected officials from Jackson Ward deferred to the commercial-civic elite on most municipal matters, and were ineffective when they openly fought white authority. (p. 121) White workers had more opportunity to exercise electoral power, but Hoffman contends that white workers who won office tended to be the most conservative, aligned themselves politically with elites, and eschewed working-class politics. (p. 135) Even the "Workingman's" insurgency was a short-lived success: Although it led to the construction of a new City Hall and streetcar line, the revolt crumbled amid the defection of many white workers back to the Democratic banner.

More effective challenges issued from the mundane institution- and community-building efforts of black and white working-class Richmonders. Restricted by racial segregation, fraternal societies seeded the soil for a vibrant African American economy that facilitated business development and home-ownership. (By the early twentieth century, Richmond was home to three of the nation's most important black-owned banks.) (p. 150) The expansion of the black community that followed--including the creation of the black suburb of Browneville--influenced city-building not only by physically changing the urban geography, but also by "forcing" white residential and commercial development westward so as to escape black encroachment and preserve Jim Crow. (p. 168)

The author concludes that Richmond's non-elites had their greatest impact by being an amorphous threat in the imagination of elites "by virtue of the potential power they held as a result of their participation in the city's politics" (p. 131). Hence, the elite city-building agenda was ultimately limited by commercial-civic leaders' own racism and class chauvinism. Fearing black political dominance, white elites enforced a racial consensus that delayed discussions of contentious city growth schemes for decades, until African Americans were formally disfranchised. (p. 132) Likewise, the author reveals that while business leaders complained about a labor shortage, this was actually the result of the racialization and gendering of job classifications.(p. 75) And while they promoted public health as a means of attracting investment capital, Richmond elites undermined this project by denying sanitary water and sewer services to black and working-class white communities. (p. 96)

Race, Class and Power in the Building of Richmond is meticulously researched, and Hoffman deftly juggles urban, economic, and social history. The historical background Hoffman provides of Richmond creates a strong sense of place, and his discussion of the political economy of the James River is a model for other historians exploring similar topics. He situates Richmond as a site possessing characteristics of both southern and northern cities, allowing for comparisons of both. Yet, he does not carry this analytic framework beyond the introductory chapter. A more sustained argument would have further highlighted Richmond's significance, strengthening the author's contention that the city embodied a particular urban type.

Moreover, Hoffman asserts that he is defying urban historians who have overemphasized elite dominion in city-building agendas, but he offers few details about the scholars he is engaging. Considering that social historians have been issuing the same challenge to top-down perspectives for decades, a brief overview of relevant historiography would have been helpful. While the author makes much of the need to recover the self-activity of non-elites in shaping the municipal landscape, his narrative gives greater weight to elite agency. In arguing that non-elites influenced affairs through the potential threat posed by their mere existence, he curiously undermines the thesis of black and white working-class agency. Rendering black residents and white workers objects of white elite anxiety gives their activities an indirect importance, and unwittingly foregrounds elite preoccupations and initiative. Granted, the author does this in the interests of illustrating how elites' actions were motivated by dynamics outside their prerogatives, which is meant to upset assumptions about their hegemony. Still, hegemony does not preclude contestation; it merely requires that dissent unfold within a frame that reifies the legitimacy of a given elite. For instance, the black residential-commercial expansion Hoffman discusses may have conflicted with the white commercial-civic agenda. But altering the physical landscape, and wielding power, are two different things. Black spatial development occurred on terms largely dictated by white elites--that is, African Americans moved into spaces vacated by whites on their own accord. Indeed, many of the elite "constraints" Hoffman details are self-inflicted through its members' own ingrained prejudices. Either way, the locus of agency mainly revolves around the very commercial-civic leaders the author seeks to de-center.

Another of the book's expressed goals is to pull "African-Americans and white workers out of their neighborhoods and communities" and place them within the larger structure of the city. (p. 2) The author is at his best, however, when he fixes his gaze on black community-building. But while he offers a rich description of Richmond's black associational life, his description of white workers is underdeveloped. This stems, in part, from the fact the white workers in Richmond lacked the ethnic identification necessary to produce the array of institutions found among African Americans, as well as European immigrant workers north of the Potomac. (p. 144) Invisible, too, is Richmond's black working class; the author's focus is squarely on the black petty bourgeoisie and elite. Further, the author gives little detail of the interaction between white working-class and black citizens. Studies of "whiteness" have come under criticism recently, but insights from this literature could have been useful here. Were conservative white workers who defended the racial consensus betraying their class interests, as Hoffman implies? Or did white supremacy and working-class consciousness coexist, as labor historians like David Roediger have argued? How did the interests of black business elites and white workers converge and diverge? His brief coverage of the "Workingman's Reform" challenge is suggestive, but his description of this pivotal episode would have benefited from greater attention and depth. These criticisms aside, Hoffman's work is an important contribution to urban, southern, and black business history.

Clarence Lang

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign