Marsh became prominent as a young lawyer during the civil rights movement and helped mount the legal challenge to “Massive Resistance,” the concerted effort to subvert the integration of public school as mandated by the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.
“My heart is heavy with grief and full of gratitude that I had the chance to know Henry Marsh—a truly exceptional person,” U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) said in a statement Friday. “Any single one of Henry’s accomplishments would be enough cause to be proud, but he never stopped looking for new opportunities to serve. I’m honored to have called him a friend and mentor.”
While he was growing up in Virginia, the “daily affronts to my dignity" (such as being denied a seat at a lunch counter or forced to sit in the back of a bus because of the color of his skin),” he wrote in a memoir, “also motivated me to do something constructive.” Marsh entered politics and won a seat on the Richmond City Council in 1966.
His Council service coincided with a shift in the politics of the state capital, once the seat of power in the slaveholding South and, a century after the end of the Civil War, remained dominated by a conservative White business class. At the time, Richmond’s mayor was selected by a city council of nine members elected at large. Following the city’s controversial annexation of White suburbs and a court challenge under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Richmond began a ward system that in 1977 produced the first Black majority on the city council. Marsh then was selected as mayor.
As mayor during 1977-1982, Marsh worked to improve the city’s housing; helped spearhead a partnership with the White business community to revitalize the city’s downtown; pushed to bring African Americans into key municipal positions and into civil service; and helped transform the city from a bastion of White power to one that really represented more equitably the population.
In 1991 he was elected to the state senate, serving until 2014. He was among those who pushed the legislature to reckon with Virginia’s role in slavery and segregation. In 2007, the General Assembly passed a resolution stating “profound regret” for Virginia’s slaveholding past.
As a member of a leading Black law firm in Richmond, with partners including the civil rights lawyers Oliver W. Hill, Sr. and Samuel Tucker, Marsh helped argue cases related to voting rights, school desegregation, and discrimination in employment. “We were constantly fighting against race prejudice,” he recalled. “For instance, in the case of Franklin v. Giles County, a local official fired all of the black public school teachers. We sued and got the (that) decision overruled.” The firm also worked on a variety of other fronts, ranging from housing and voting rights to employment issues.
Marsh's memoir The Memoirs of Hon. Henry L. Marsh, III: Civil Rights Champion, Public Servant, Lawyer was published in 2018 by GrantHouse Publishers (232 pages). It was edited by Jonathan K. Stubbs and Danielle Wingfield-Smith.
Read the January 28, 2025 Washington Post obituary.
