Obituary: Henry Marsh, Civil Rights Lawyer and First Black Mayor of Richmond, 91

 

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.

Read the January 25, 2025 VPM article.

Read the March 22, 2018 Richmond Free Press article.

Charles Person, Youngest of the Original Freedom Riders, 82

Charles Person was the youngest of the 13 original Freedom Riders who traveled from Washington to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1961 in an effort to integrate interstate bus terminals across the South - and who were nearly beaten to death for doing so. He was an 18-year-old freshman at Morehouse College, although he had been accepted at MIT, when he first became involved in the civil rights movement, joining the thousands of students across the South who were marching against Jim Crow laws and sitting in at segregated lunch counters.

His first arrest, during a sit-in at an Atlanta restaurant, was in 1961. When he returned to campus, he saw an ad from the Congress of Racial Equality looking for volunteers for a trip by commercial bus from Washington to New Orleans. Along the way, the ad said, they would test the December 5, 1960 US Supreme Court decision (Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454) banning segregation in bus terminals serving interstate travelers. 

After training in nonviolent techniques, he and the others - including the future congressman John Lewis - left from Washington’s Greyhound station aboard two buses. Person was paired with an older white rider, James Peck. Their job was to enter the terminals so Person could try to use the white restroom while Peck entered the Black restroom. Then they would order food at the designated white and Black lunch counters. Their first test, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, just drew ugly stares from white people in the depot. In Charlotte, N.C., Person was almost arrested when he tried to have his shoes shined in a white part of the terminal.

The next stop was Anniston, a small town in eastern Alabama. The station was closed, but the driver stopped anyway. Another bus had been firebombed outside town, he said and if they wanted to proceed, the Black Riders would have to move to the back. When they refused, the driver left the bus. The white men who had boarded in Atlanta, members of the Ku Klux Klan, then viciously attacked the Riders; knocking Person and Peck unconscious before being dragged to the rear. “They threw us to the back of the bus,” Person said in a 2021 interview on the podcast “Book Dreams.” “One eyewitness said they stacked us like pancakes.”

In Birmingham, Alabama, on Sunday, May 14, a crowd of white people, including scores of Klansmen, awaited the Riders. After the bus driver refused to carry them further, the Riders left the bus. In the station when Peck said the two of them were friends, several men pulled him into a hallway and began beating him with a pipe. Somebody grabbed Person, too, but after awhile he was able to escape. By then the Klansmen were beating up the Riders with abandon. Person managed to catch a city bus, and finally reached the home of the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a leader in the city’s civil rights community. More Freedom Riders, including Peck, eventually made it to the home. Though most doctors did not want to treat them for fear of retribution, they eventually found medical care.

Around 400 people joined the bus campaign in total, many facing beatings and prison. But it worked: In November, 1961, President John F. Kennedy’s administration ordered the desegregation of all interstate bus terminals. "It really was the template for citizen politics in the 1960s,” said Ray Arsenault, the author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Oxford University Press, 2011. 320 pages. Paperback $18.99). “A lot of what came after - the antiwar protests, the women’s movement - all drew on these ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”

After settling in Atlanta in the 1980s, Person became locally involved in civil rights activism. In 2022, he wrote Buses Are a Comin’: Memoirs of a Freedom Rider with Richard Rooker (304 pages. St. Martin's Press, 2021. Paperback $19.00).

Read the US Supreme Court summary of Boynton v. Virginia.

Book Review: "The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North" by Michelle Adams

 

The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North by Michelle Adams. 528 pages. $35.00 hardcover.

"Splendid . . . Adams’s book explores class as well as race, with a richness and sophistication that recall J. Anthony Lukas’s 1985 masterpiece, Common Ground." - Jeffrey Toobin, New York Times Book Review.

This book relates Detroit's struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs and the associated struggle for desegregation in the North. In The Containment, Michelle Adams, the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, tells the history of the attempts to integrate Detroit schools, and the problems that followed when this effort collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. The book includes brief bios of the activists who tried to help Detroit's students during this period of riots, Black power, and white flight. In 1974, Federal District Judge Stephen Roth ruled that integration was not possible within the city's boundaries and ordered a new plan to include 53 of the 85 surrounding, mostly white, school districts. 

This metropolitan desegregation remedy could have remade the future direction of racial justice. Instead, the US Supreme Court on July 25, 1974 overruled the lower courts in ruling that the federal courts "could not impose a multidistrict, area-wide remedy upon local districts in the absence of any evidence those districts committed acts causing racial discrimination." The decision seriously impeded the struggle for forced desegregation both in Michigan and throughout the North, and limited the scope of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional.

Read the State Bar of Michigan's Michigan Legal Milestones historical article.

Read the full text of the Milliken v. Bradley decision.

Evaluation of 50 Years of Exclusionary Zoning Litigation

 

Robert G. Schwemm has published in the UIC Law Review - (37:3): 390-456 - an historical review of the Arlington Heights cases and the ongoing legal barriers to address metropolitan segregation through zoning litigation. See “Reflections on Arlington Heights: Fifty Years of Exclusionary Zoning Litigation and Beyond.”

Schwemm is the Ashland-Spears Distinguished Research Professor of Law and William L. Matthews, Jr. Professor of Law at the College of Law, University of Kentucky. He also is author of the encyclopedic standard Housing Discrimination: Law and Litigation (West Group, 2001 and updated annually by Clark Boardman Callaghan).

Arlington Heights (Illinois) was an exclusionary zoning case, one of many such cases brought in the 1970s that challenged local land-use practices blocking subsidized housing projects for racial minorities who were underrepresented in the area. Passage of the FHA in 1968 stimulated more of this type of litigation. Since then, many exclusionary zoning cases have been filed, and, as the Supreme Court noted in 2015, they make up the basis of this type of FHA claim. Arlington Heights is the most important of these cases. 

In the 50 years since the case, the Village of Arlington Heights has become a more diverse and welcoming community that recently elects Democratic candidates. But residents of these type of "high-opportunity" communities have generally continued to oppose any subsidized housing projects. Exclusionary zoning remains a battleground today, as occasional FHA-based actions generally have failed - and continue to fail - to overcome more powerful social and economic forces that encourage affluent suburbs to use zoning to exclude affordable housing. 

There have been positive developments since the Arlington Heights case that could influence future desegregation. The link between where you live and your financial, social, and medical life chances has been solidly established by much research. Also, bans on “source-of-income” discrimination have been added to many state and local fair housing laws that the majority of Americans now live in jurisdictions with such a ban. Though mainly designed to guarantee voucher-holders access to more rental opportunities, these source-of-income laws have also been used to challenge exclusionary zoning.

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Source: April edition of Poverty & Race by the Poverty & Race Research Action Council 

(PRRAC).