Michael Paul Williams | Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch

Style Weekly : How has the city changed in the past 40 years?

MPW: Richmond city politics, going back to that time and into the ’70s was very, very cantankerous, to say the least, and divided by race. Richmond was only five years into its first majority Black city council and its first Black mayor.

1982 was actually the year that Roy West and four white council members voted out Henry Marsh [both West and Marsh were Black]. It was a time in which the racial divide, racial divisions very much defined Richmond city politics much more than seems the case today.

Dovetailing off that, we have a different form of city government than we had then. In 1982, we had a council-manager form of city government. The city manager had a lot of power. They mayor’s position was largely ceremonial, although Henry Marsh did imbue it with more power than typical mayors, just by dint of the historical nature of his election and the cohesiveness of the “team” of Black city councilmembers working as a block. Now, of course, we have a strong mayor form of government, which has changed the nature of city politics a lot.

Richmond in the ’80s and into ’90s was still a city reeling from the way race and white flight was shaping Richmond. Richmond, in 1970, annexed a piece of Chesterfield County [that now makes up the majority of south Richmond]. You know the history there: racially motivated annexation to try to retain white power in