Julian Maxwell Hayter. The Dream Is Lost

“What happens to a dream deferred?” Langston Hughes asked in his 1951 poem “Harlem.” That question inspired Lorraine Hansberry’s award-winning play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), as well as innumerable jeremiads about the glacial pace of civil rights progress in the United States. While not responding to Hughes directly, Julian Maxwell Hayter offers his own answer to the famous inquiry in The Dream Is Lost: Voting Rights and the Politics of Race in Richmond, Virginia. Hayter chronicles the influence of the civil rights movement on Richmond politics from the 1950s through the 1980s. The Dream Is Lost covers the careers of several major players in city politics during this period, but it focuses on the grassroots activism of the Richmond Crusade for Voters. Founded in the late 1950s by middle-class black professionals and still active in the 2010s, the group fought against segregation and various forms of black disenfranchisement while supporting diverse political candidates and campaigns. Hayter argues that local groups like the Richmond Crusade paved the way for passage of the federal Voting Rights Act (1965) and then harnessed the power of newly enfranchised black voters to send progressive black and white leaders to state and local offices from the 1960s through the 1980s and beyond. Despite attempts by the city’s white political elite to dilute black voting power through suburban annexation in the late 1960s, the Crusade and the U.S. Department of Justice forced the city to shift from at-large city council elections to district elections, which saw the first black majority council and first African American mayor elected in 1977.

Ballot · Black Power · Democracy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Voting · White (mutation) · White supremacy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Race, History, and American Society · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies