Marsh, Henry L. III 1934(?)–

views updated

Henry L. Marsh III 1934(?)–

Legislator

Henry L. Marsh HI became the first black mayor of Richmond, Virginia in 1977, a feat that ushered in a new political era for this onetime capital of the Civil War Confederacy. Marsh’s five-year tenure was a contentious one, but the changes he brought to the city remained in place a quarter-century later. Once considered one of the South’s leading black Democrats, Marsh’s name was even touted as a possible vice-presidential candidate in the 1980s. Since 1992 he has served in the Virginia State Senate as a representative of a Richmond district.

Born in 1934, Marsh grew up in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond, where he was a childhood friend of L. Douglas Wilder, who later became the nation’s first African-American governor since Reconstruction. Marsh earned his undergraduate degree from Virginia Union University, and roomed with Wilder during his years in law school at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Both became civil-rights attorneys in an era when many legal challenges were argued before the courts in an attempt to overturn the entrenched racism of the South. In 1961 Marsh became a partner in the Richmond firm of Hill, Tucker, and Marsh. Over the next few years, he was involved in some of Virginia’s most significant civil rights cases.

Marsh was first elected to the Richmond City Council in 1966. At the time, the city was a bastion of conservative Southern values. It had served as the capital of the Confederacy, the organization of Southern states whose determination to maintain the practice of slavery caused them to segregate from the Union and sparked the U.S. Civil War. In 1970 blacks were a 52 percent majority in the city, and, in response, the city’s largely-white political establishment annexed part of Chesterfield County, with its predominantly white suburbs. This brought Richmond’s black population back down to 42 percent.

Early Carter Ally

As a leading black politician in the 1970s, Marsh supported the presidential candidacy of Georgia Democrat and civil rights supporter Jimmy Carter, who was elected to the White House in 1976. The following year, a U.S. Justice Department ruling cited a recent extension of the federal Voting Rights Act when it ordered Richmond to revise its local electoral system to

At a Glance…

Born c. 1934, in Virginia. Education: Virginia Union University, AB; Howard University, LLB. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Methodist.

Career: Hill, Tucker, and Marsh, attorney, 1961–; elected to Richmond City Council, 1966; Richmond, VA, mayor, 1977–82; Virginia State Senate, 1991–; member of Senate committees on the state Senate’s transportation, rehabilitation and social services, courts of justice, and local government; co-founder, Richmond Renaissance, Metropolitan Economic Development Council, Blacks Mobilized Against Crime.

Addresses: Office —General Assembly Bldg., 910 Capitol State Room 329, Richmond, VA 23219-3400.

ensure a fair representation of the black population. In the next municipal election, black candidates—including Marsh—took five of the nine seats in the City Council. The council then elected the next mayor from among its ranks, and Marsh became one of a growing number of African-American mayors in the United States. More importantly, his election was hailed as a harbinger of a new era for the South, for Richmond was of symbolic importance among those who recognized the lasting divisions that the U.S. Civil War had wrought.

Before this point, the Richmond mayoral post had been a part-time job as symbolic caretaker of the city’s population. “Aided by the new black majority on the council, Marsh quickly began transforming the largely ceremonial and part-time mayor’s post into a political power base,” wrote Washington Post journalist Michael Isikoff. But these tactics alienated the city’s white population, especially when he replaced the city manager with a candidate of his own choosing. The mayor became the subject of stinging editorials on the pages of the city’s conservative newspaper, the Times-Dispatch. In remarks he gave for a special anniversary edition of the newspaper many years later, Marsh recalled that the editorial pages of the Times-Dispatch “attacked me at almost every opportunity.” Although the editorial attacks may not have been racially-motivated, the anniversary issue noted, “many people thought they were, and the criticism helped him politically at the time and gained him support among whites and blacks who felt he was targeted unfairly.”

Marsh also became leading member of National Conference of Black Mayors, and his ties to President Carter helped win the city generous federal grants. “Embraced by the Democratic administration as a leading black urban spokesman, Marsh became a frequent guest at White House dinners and Kennedy Center ballets and other Washington events,” wrote Isikoff. He was re-elected with other blacks on council every two years, but faced increasing hostility from the business community. One fracas erupted when Marsh and his council allies blocked a proposed hotel development, arguing that it would hamper the &82 million downtown renewal project already underway. The mayor was also criticized by white members of the Council, who charged that his executive style was too imperious, and that he made decisions on his own without consulting them.

Marsh faced new challenges after 1980, when a conservative Republican, Ronald Reagan, replaced Carter in the White House. Reagan made sweeping cuts in the federal budget, and Marsh became a leading critic of the new administration’s urban policies. Such budget reductions forced many American cities to trim their social service expenditures, and urban residents were some of the first to be adversely affected. Richmond had to close city-funded programs for child day-care and for senior citizens. Many of the city’s recreation centers were also closed down. At one U.S. Conference of Mayors gathering in the early 1980s, Marsh blasted the federal government’s proposed draft policy for U.S. cities, which claimed that decades of federal subsidies had resulted in little improvement in the cities themselves.

Ousted by Political Bargain

Even in the early 1980s, Richmond was still a quietly segregated city, despite its black majority. There were few black-owned businesses of any scale in its metropolitan area, and though the city, as the seat of Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, had several law firms, there were no African-American partners among the top fifty firms in 1982. Even four years into his mayoralty, Marsh faced constant criticism from the old-guard political and business establishment in Richmond.

In 1982 Marsh won back his City Council seat once more—former Vice President Walter Mondale and Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy both called to congratulate him on the victory—but a new member had also won a seat, Roy A. West, a middle school principal who had never held political office. There were four white Council members, and West, who had made critical remarks about Marsh’s tenure, aligned with them. Washington Post writer Isikoff claimed “the oust-Marsh campaign is being orchestrated by the mayor’s longtime enemies on Main Street—the central Richmond thoroughfare that is the seat of the town’s almost exclusively white business establishment.” Isikoff alleged that West was offered the mayor’s job himself if he allied with whites on Council and voted against Marsh in the vote to name Richmond’s next leader. “This is historically the way whites have sought to maintain political control—by dividing the black community,” Marsh told Isikoff. “… There’s still a resentment over the fact that blacks provide the leadership in this city.”

On July 1, 1982, Marsh was unseated by West in the mayoral tally. The news made the front page of the Washington Post the next day. “Time after time, we have bent over backwards to win this white support and yet apparently we have failed,” Marsh was quoted as saying. Marsh’s former roommate, L. Douglas Wilder, was at the time the city’s representative in state senate, and played a role in the conflict. After weeks of tension, Wilder allegedly urged West to take mayor’s job, which Isikoff described as “a painful blow” to Marsh. “Senator Wilder and I are good friends,” Marsh told Isikoff. “The press has tried to create this rivalry … but there’s no friction between us whatsoever.” Wilder, incensed over Jet’s coverage of the Richmond election, filed a libel suit against the magazine and its publishers.

Marsh remained on the Richmond Council, however, and the battles only intensified. He was a tough critic of West, and many in the city’s African-American community were uncomfortable with the new mayor as well. In 1983 Wall Street Journal writer Paul A. Engelmayer described West as “almost certainly the only one of America’s 224 black mayors to work primarily from a white power base.” Wilder urged the mending of political fences. “The community is tired of hearing, ‘I’m the good black, he’s the bad black, ’ from either side,” Wilder told Engelmayer. “We aren’t each other’s enemies.”

Became State Lawmaker

In 1989 Marsh was mentioned in a New York Times story about a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Richmond decree forcing thirty percent of all city contracts be awarded to minority firms. “We had been making good progress in race relations in Richmond, but now I worry,” Marsh told New York Times reporter B. Drummond Ayres, Jr. Marsh considered the High Court’s ruling a strike against affirmative action. “Getting blacks into this country’s economic mainstream is the key race issue for the rest of this century,” he told Ayres, and mourned the Supreme Court decision as “very, very damaging.”

Marsh was elected to the Virginia State Senate in 1991 as a representative of the 16th district, which included parts of Richmond and Chesterfield County. A decade later, his constituents had kept him on the job. His family suffered a tragedy in 1997 when his brother Harold, a partner in their law firm, was fatally shot at a traffic light after spending a day as a substitute judge in Chesterfield County.