Jackson Ward, cut in two by the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike
Turnpike Authority created 1954; clearance and construction through the late 1950sJackson Ward, split by the turnpike trench north of Broad Street, Richmond City, VA
The turnpike that became Interstate 95 was driven through the largest Black neighbourhood in Richmond and split it in half. By 1957 the Richmond Times-Dispatch estimated that 1,900 Black families - about a tenth of the city's Black population - had been displaced by it.
Jackson Ward was where Black Richmond banked, performed, insured itself and published. The True Reformers chartered a bank there on 2 March 1888, the first Black-owned bank in the United States; Maggie Lena Walker founded the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, the longest-running Black-owned bank in the country; John Mitchell Jr. edited the Richmond Planet out of the neighbourhood and reported lynchings as killings when the white dailies reported them as justice. By the late nineteenth century the ward was roughly ninety per cent Black, and by 1903 Second Street was known as Black Wall Street. The name of the place was itself a racial instrument: white officials had drawn the Black population into a single voting ward precisely so that it could not carry any other.
In 1946 the planner Harland Bartholomew delivered a master plan for Richmond that recommended demolishing Black neighbourhoods and putting the land to other uses, highways among them. In 1954 the General Assembly created the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike Authority and gave it the power of eminent domain. The route ran through Jackson Ward, leaving a trench across it and two neighbourhoods where there had been one - North and South Jackson Ward, with Gilpin Court and the northern half cut off from the rest of the city.
In 1957 the Richmond Times-Dispatch estimated that the turnpike and the construction around it had displaced 1,900 Black families, approximately ten per cent of the city's African American population, with another 300 families still to lose their homes. The Library of Virginia's account of Jackson Ward alone counts more than a thousand residents and business owners displaced, among them the family of the Skipwith-Roper cottage, whose house was taken by eminent domain in 1957 and carried out to Goochland County. Gilpin Court was expanded in 1957 to hold people the road had turned out, and Fairfield Court and Whitcomb Court opened in 1958 for the rest.
Navy Hill, the Black community next to it, did not survive at all: Virginia Commonwealth University's medical campus now stands on most of the ground, and a highway marker is the only sign that the neighbourhood was there. Jackson Ward was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 30 July 1976 and designated a National Historic Landmark on 2 June 1978 - one of the largest landmark districts in the country tied to African American history, and, as the state's own register entry notes, smaller than it was, because redevelopment and expressway construction reduced it.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch put the displacement at 1,900 Black families by 1957, with 300 more to come. The Library of Virginia counts more than a thousand residents and business owners displaced in Jackson Ward alone.
Sources
- Jackson Ward and its Black Wall StreetNational Park Servicenps.govThe neighbourhood's institutions - the True Reformers' bank of 1888, Maggie Walker's St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, Second Street as Black Wall Street by 1903 - and the gerrymander that created the ward.
- Urban Renewal in RichmondEncyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanitiesencyclopediavirginia.orgThe 1946 Bartholomew plan, the 1954 Turnpike Authority, the Richmond Times-Dispatch estimate of 1,900 displaced Black families in 1957, the public housing opened for them, and the destruction of Navy Hill.
- House to Highway: Reclaiming a Community HistoryLibrary of Virginialva.virginia.govMore than a thousand Jackson Ward residents and business owners displaced by the turnpike, told through the Skipwith-Roper property seized in 1957.
- Jackson Ward Historic DistrictVirginia Department of Historic Resourcesdhr.virginia.govNational Register listing 30 July 1976, National Historic Landmark 2 June 1978, and the note that redevelopment and expressway construction reduced the district's size.