Virginia Episcopalian Magazine Spring 2012 Issue | Page 29

Book Review

TOWARD HEALING
MALINDA COLLIER
Richmond’s Unhealed History
by Benjamin Campbell
Brandylane Publishers, 2011

Ben Campbell’s book opens with two quotes, one of which, from the
fifth chapter of Matthew, “a city built on a hill cannot be hid,” sets
the tone for his examination of 400 years of life at the falls of the
James. Campbell’s text is rich with research and data, but offers much
more than the myriad historical accounts I have read about Richmond
– delving into the complex human, racial and cultural conflicts and
connections that are prologue to still contentious issues of power,
franchise and access in Virginia’s capitol city.

As someone who has had the
blessing of working with members
of the diocesan Native American
Ministry Team, I appreciate Campbell’s
inclusion of the colonial period and
its systematic disenfranchisement
and near destruction of the Virginia
Indians. These people, our neighbors,
still experience the wounds inflicted
upon them by centuries of subjugation
and the more recent denial of their
heritage resulting from the Racial
Integrity Act of 1924. Their struggle is
admirably chronicled in the opening
chapters and serves to underscore the
difficulties tribes now face in securing
federal recognition.

And as a member of the diocesan
Race Relations Committee and an
anti-racism trainer, I am also grateful
that Campbell is not content to
hang all of Richmond’s issues on
the Civil War and leave them there.
Campbell’s binding of the colonial
period’s history of land-grabs and
conquest, and the exertion of the
Great Men’s privilege offers a logical
starting point for the progression into
the 19th- and 20th-century practices
of slavery, subjugation, exploitation
and explicit denial of access by the
privileged white population over the

disadvantaged minority – be it Virginia
Indians or Virginians of African origin
and descent. His description of the
means by which Virginia managed to
circumvent federal law to maintain
a status quo of white racial privilege
is an eye-opener for anyone who
might think we live in a post-racial
world or that racial discrimination is a
thing of the distant past. Campbell’s
examination of the legislation that
disenfranchised anyone classed as
non-white lays a sound and irrefutable
ground work for understanding
the devastation wrought in the 20th
century by Jim Crow laws, the Byrd
machine, massive resistance to school
integration, redlining, the destruction
in the name of “urban renewal”
of the of the city’s historic black
neighborhoods and corresponding
isolation of citizens in five major
housing projects, and finally the
undermining of the city’s elected
leadership and its ability to support
itself through taxation and annexation.

Let us read this book together in
our churches and begin the process
of education and revelation within
our community that will lead to new
understandings of why Richmond
remains captive to its past – and how

to break the destructive patterns.
Evaluating our history through a
spiritual as well as historical lens,
Campbell offers more than a few
grains of truth for us to confront and
with which to contend with as we
work together for the reconciliation
and healing needed in Richmond and
Virginia. This city built upon a hill
cannot be hid, and it should no longer
be content to hide from a past still
choking its future. t
Malinda Collier is the director of Christian education
at St. Mark’s, Richmond.

Spring 2012 / VIRGINIA EPISCOPALIAN

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