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EGACY Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.
WEDNESDAYS • Aug. 3, 2016
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INSIDE 1st black bishop’s new role - 2 Questioning U.Va.’s billions - 4 Discrimination settlement- 9 Va. grants for job training - 17
Richmond & Hampton Roads
A view of GL from above from new company, Cirrus
LEGACYNEWSPAPER.COM • FREE
Kaine recalled for commitment to Richmond’s blacks
NYT - He offered the first formal apology for Richmond’s role in the slave trade. He led the effort to add a statue of Arthur Ashe, a Richmond native, to its Monument Avenue. He attended a largely black church and sent his children to racially mixed schools. During Tim Kaine’s six years in Richmond’s local government, he became known for his commitment to the city’s blacks. But there were also stumbles as he began to fashion himself as the centrist conciliator that he is known as today, trying to steer a middle path in a majorityblack city drenched in Confederate history. No one here will forget the giant picture of Robert E. Lee. It briefly graced a prominent downtown wall in the spring of 1999, setting off an angry backlash from many blacks in the city. Within days, it was removed. Then Southern heritage groups revolted. Soon, Mayor Kaine was putting forward a compromise inside Richmond’s packed City Council chambers: a revised image, this time of a decidedly downcast General Lee in civilian dress after the surrender at Appomattox, that would be part of a series of murals featuring Abraham Lincoln and Powhatan Beaty, a black man who won the Medal of Honor fighting for the Union. This was not what the blacks had in mind. One after another, speakers rose to their feet to insist that any image of Lee would be, in the words of one protester, “a last slap in the face.” The Richmond City Council nevertheless passed Mayor Kaine’s proposal, 6-3, and the mural went up. In a matter of months, someone had set fire to it. In Richmond, race is always front and center. Its leafy grand boulevard lined with towering monuments to Confederate war heroes and its
clusters of bleak, low-rise housing projects are reminders of the city’s segregated past and its enduring legacy of poverty that are impossible to ignore. It was here that Kaine, now a Virginia U.S. senator and the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, settled after graduating from Harvard Law School. It was also here that he started his political career, and often found himself navigating the charged history and continuing sensitivities of the same black community that he had eagerly embraced in his private life. Powered by his ambition and ideals, Kaine took the helm of a racially divided and crime-ravaged city against considerable opposition from many blacks here who believed Richmond needed a black mayor. He cast himself as a bridge builder, and black leaders of that time remember him as a stark departure from the white legislators they had known before. “What was unusual was for a white male elected official to really go out into the black community, to walk among African-Americans, to attend church services in African-American communities,” said Viola Baskerville, who served with Kaine on the City Council and went on to work with him in the governor’s office. But as the fight over the Lee mural demonstrated, Kaine’s desire for compromise sometimes left raw feelings. “I was disappointed in Tim,” recalled Henry Richardson, a former City Council member who privately urged Kaine to abandon the idea. “I felt he had an opportunity to lead, but he didn’t stand up and say, ‘Look, we don’t need to be forcing this type of symbol on black people.’” These were wrenching years for Richmond, which was confronting the consequences of decades of white and black middle-class flight. In the late 1980s, the city was hit
Tim Kaine, Anne Holton, campaigned with Hillary Clinton over the weekend.
hard by crack cocaine, setting off a crippling epidemic of drug addiction and violent crime. In 1994, the year Mr. Kaine joined the City Council, a record 160 people were killed in Richmond, which at the time had a population of 200,000. While in office, he championed a program known as Project Exile, which mandated that all local gun crimes be prosecuted in federal court. Looking back on the initiative now, many progressives have attacked it as a mass incarceration program for young black men — though at the time, as with most anti-crime measures of the 1990s, its critics were few. Kaine also led the effort to reopen a black high school from the days of segregation, converting it into a magnet school. It has since been praised for its academic success, but also come under scrutiny for having a predominantly white student body. More contentious was Kaine’s sponsorship of an ordinance to prevent the Nation of Islam from
selling Final Call newspapers from a downtown median strip. He framed the issue as a matter of public safety, and his bill allowed vendors to continue selling papers on the sidewalk, but some AfricanAmericans saw the ordinance as discriminatory. “To me, it looked like it was singling them out,” recalled Rudy McCollum Jr., a City Council member who voted against the bill, which passed 7-2. Kaine, who declined to be interviewed, had grown up near Kansas City, Mo., and was drawn to Richmond by his fiancée at the time, Anne Holton, whom he had met in law school. Her father, Linwood Holton, was considered a progressive icon. In 1970, as the white Republican governor of Virginia, he broke with many Southern leaders who were resisting the desegregation of public schools, and famously walked his eldest daughter — Kaine’s future sister-in-law — into a
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