Sunbelt by the Sea

By the early 1960s, residents of Virginia Beach and the surrounding Princess Anne County had come to see themselves as under siege. Their assailant: the neighboring city of Norfolk, which over the previous years had exploited state annexation laws that vested cities with the power to petition to annex unincorporated portions of neighboring counties regardless of population density, to carry out its vision of a consolidated coastal metropolis. As Norfolk steadily absorbed portions of Princess Anne County and threatened to overwhelm the physically small resort town, the dreams of Virginia Beach becoming a magnet for a mobile, pleasure seeking American public, and a suburban haven for white, middle-class families—nourished over the past half-plus century by an exclusive circle of corporate and civic boosters—threatened to wash out to sea, while the specter of sharing political power and public resources with the substantial numbers of African Americans living in Norfolk crashed ashore. For Princess Anne County’s African American population, scattered across the mostly rural county in small farming villages or concentrated in deteriorating neighborhoods located adjacent to the oceanfront hotels where many worked, the prospect of annexation by Norfolk threatened, as they saw it, to dissolve the social and political institutions they had developed in the century following emancipation and strip them of the last vestiges of their landed independence. Better the devil they knew—in this case a rapidly declining market for small farmers and a historically exploitative leisure-based service economy—than the devil they did not know—a city with dubious motives to turn farmland into suburban subdivisions, and dilute black voting strength at the moment when the legal foundations of Jim Crow were crumbling.

To stave off further annexation, whites voted to kill the county, with anxious black voters by their side. With the city of Norfolk aiming, as one official described, its “water pistol” at Virginia Beach officials, threatening to cut off the supply of fresh water on which the county’s own growth and development depended, the people of Princess Anne County defiantly voted, in 1962, to merge city and county governance. Annexation by Norfolk ground to a halt, and overnight Virginia Beach became the World’s Largest Resort City, its future set in the sands that hugged the coast and that promised to deliver people and prosperity to the once-sleepy coastal county.

The unmaking of Princess Anne County and the making of Virginia Beach highlights the role of nature (and struggles over “natural” resources) in shaping the Sunbelt economy—and, by extension, lends insights into the nature of what Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino label the “Sunbelt ethos.” ¹ The Sunbelt grew up along the water, and its waters came to embody the unsustainable weight of its contradictions. ² Industries were attracted to southern states for their lax environmental laws and the freedom to pollute bodies of water with relative impunity. People came for the region’s abundance of environmental amenities, often in defiance of its limits. Areas possessing immense aesthetic value but lacking in the necessities of sustainable living (among them, sources of fresh water) made access to dwindling resources a constant source of political contest. ³ As ownership of waterfront property became a sign of status guarded by gates and private police forces, and dollars spent on leisure and vacationing subject to changing middle-class perceptions of safety and desirability, governance of people and nature gravitated toward strategies of privatizing public space through design and economic policy, concentrating poverty in areas invisible to the engines of a coastal economy, and pursuing environmental policies focused primarily on preventing disruptions to seasonal economies and hostile to questions of sustainability. ⁴

The following essay traces the rise of Virginia Beach, Virginia, from a small resort town for the wealthy and privileged surrounded by wilderness, small farms, and relatively large numbers of African American landowners into a vacation destination and sprawling bedroom community of middle-class, predominantly white homeowners. In so doing, this essay also seeks to bring the coast into the study of the metropolis, and the environment into the making of modern political culture, by examining how the emergence of coastal metropolises—characterized by economies fueled by tourism dollars and real estate development—transformed the political economy of race and influenced American political culture as a whole. The historic patterns of settlement and concepts of land use and landownership in coastal areas, as this essay shows, stood in sharp contrast to other regions of the South and the nation, while the unique environmental characteristics and inherent limits and liabilities of coastal ecologies (and the quest to overcome them), this essay argues, profoundly influenced the making of coastal economies. On this coastal landscape, control over people became inseparable from control over nature, while struggles over jobs, housing, political representation, human dignity, and economic justice centered on and were constituted through the shores and the lands that surrounded them. As both Sunbelt and coastal metropolis, the Hampton Roads metropolitan area thus offers a fitting setting to integrate the insights of political ecology with political economy, and to examine how the nature of cities shape and inform the nature of power.

The brief for coastal “exceptionalism” begins with a snapshot of the latter half of the nineteenth century as viewed from the beaches and sandy soil of postbellum coastal counties. As former planters and New South industrialists wrested control over the land and worked to establish new forms of labor coercion, few of them gave places such as Princess Anne County more than a passing glance. In the decades following the Civil War, the lands along the Atlantic coast from Norfolk to the Albermarle Sound remained sparsely settled and marginal to the mid-Atlantic economy. Not coincidentally, it became home, during these years, to substantial numbers of black landowners. Precipitous decreases in land values following the war, augmented by general strikes among freedpeople against coercive labor arrangements, drove former planters in the region to sell, as one study found, “at least part of their holdings at virtually any price.” ⁵ By the late nineteenth century, tidewater Virginia had emerged as the cradle of black landownership in the United States, with rates of ownership that far outpaced the Piedmont and Black Belt. ⁶

Such remarkable gains in black landownership during these decades, it should be noted, did not translate into economic empowerment among the region’s freedmen and women, nor did it usher in a broader transformation of existing relations of land and power. ⁷ That freedpeople could expect to acquire lands along the Atlantic coast, and achieve a semblance of independence from the plantation economy, underscores the meager profits that could be wrested from the sandy and unproductive soil, and the unfavorable opinion in which most Americans held coastal areas during these years. Associated with death, disease, predatory animals, and volatile weather, and isolated from interior markets, coastal lands were indeed often seen as only suited for “Negro” habitation. ⁸ It also reflected the structure of the region’s agricultural economy. While resistant to cash crops, the area’s low-lying land, marshy, alluvial plains, and location on the eastern seaboard proved remarkably adaptive to growing and marketing fruits and vegetables. By the late nineteenth century, the region supplied most of the fruits and vegetables consumed in cites along the eastern seaboard. During these same years, the region’s black landowning population reached its zenith. ⁹ By selling small plots to black families, large-scale truck farmers secured a measure of control over their workforce by, in effect, tying their laborers to the land and foreclosing the need to round up workers to harvest and bring their products to market each season. ¹⁰

In Princess Anne County, scores of small communities of freedpeople took shape, many founded by large white landowners, others the product of African Americans’ own efforts to carve out independent communities centered on subsistence, neighborhood economies, and limited engagement with capital markets. ¹¹ But as black farm families settled along the coast and interior waterways of Princess Anne County and sought shelter from the storm of Jim Crow, attitudes toward the sea changed as humans’ ability to access and exploit its most attractive elements (and place limits on exposure to its liabilities) grew. In conjunction with the extension of rail lines from Norfolk down the coast of Princess Anne County, in 1880, the Seaside Hotel and Land Company, formed by Norfolk businessman Marshall Parks, purchased four farms consisting of over 700 acres of mostly pine forest along the county’s coast. Two years later, they acquired eleven additional farms totaling roughly 1,350 acres and began work on developing the resort town Virginia Beach. ¹²

Along with seaside hotels came a small army of seasonal black workers recruited to cook the meals, clean the rooms, and service the needs of wealthy white vacationers. At Virginia Beach, like other turn-of-the-twentieth-century resort towns, all-black wait staffs and black minstrels became a familiar feature of high-class hotels. ¹³ So, too, did neighborhoods consisting of African American service workers. In Virginia Beach, the small black village of Seatack, which consisted mostly of black subsistence farmers and unskilled laborers in the decades following the Civil War became by the early twentieth century home to a dense cluster of shotgun houses constructed by the resorts and hotels to shelter workers. ¹⁴ (See figure 1) On the beach and along the boardwalk, performances of race were tightly scripted. Like other seaside resorts, Virginia Beach offered visitors rides aboard wicker baskets pulled by black males. ¹⁵ And like other cities by sea, town fathers saw it as their duty to prevent the presence of black persons except in a service capacity. In response to the apparent threat of African Americans from the neighboring city of Norfolk circumventing this code of the beach, in 1938 the town of Virginia Beach passed an ordinance that required all hotel and domestic workers to be photographed, fingerprinted, and registered with the police, a move that in effect classified the town’s entire black workforce as potential criminals and, conversely, made being black, not at work, and anywhere near the beach a criminal act. ¹⁶

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Map of historically African American communities of Princess Anne County, Va.

Control over the workforce was inseparable from control over nature. Following a massive hurricane that ravaged the eastern seaboard in 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps constructed sand fences along the town of Virginia Beach’s beachfront, which on completion were maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers. These fences and man-made dunes aimed to create an impenetrable barrier between the ocean and back bays. While the sand fences did little to fortify the beachfront, they did devastate local fish populations. As the levels of salinity in inland waterways plummeted, fish species declined and the saline marsh plants that fed the area’s waterfowl population died, removing from rural black landowners and service workers a primary source of subsistence and small commercial activity and forcing them even more firmly into relations of dependence on markets. In 1938, the town completed work on a concrete boardwalk and seawall that ran along the commercial hotel strip. Designed to protect beachfront property from storm damage and facilitate the growth of the tourism economy, the seawall further destabilized the coastal ecosystem by halting the ebb and flow of erosion and deposition, preventing the natural replenishment of sand on the shore, and setting in motion an uninterrupted process of erosion, a process exacerbated by the misguided actions of coastal property owners who, in a desperate struggle to hold onto their sand, erected groins into the water. By 1956, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers found that the seawall and other protective measures had led to the loss of over 1,829 meters of beach. In response, the Virginia State General Assembly authorized, in 1952, the creation of the Virginia Beach Erosion Commission, which, in coordination with the Corps, began hauling sand on barges and depositing it onto the beach fronting the commercial zone. ¹⁷ Between 1951 and 1998, a later report noted, the city spent over $80 million (adjusted to 1996 dollars) on beach replenishment and had dumped over 13 million cubic yards of sand on the coast. ¹⁸

Along with waging a hopeless battle to halt the movement of beaches—a process that was both a natural feature of coastal areas and a product of misguided strategies implemented in the past—boosters of the region’s vacation and tourism industries also worked to rid the land of mosquitoes that kept many a traveler away from southern shores. Adopting methods of mosquito control first implemented by the U.S. military in Panama, Princess Anne County officials began, in 1932, draining wetlands and spraying breeding places with crankcase oil. Funding for mosquito control projects was initially obtained through local fund drives. Later, the federal government stepped in to shoulder the burden. In 1933, the New Deal agency the Civil Works Administration awarded a grant to the county to begin a wholesale drainage of wetlands in Linkhorn Bay. Later, the county received grants from the ERA and WPA for similar projects near the beachfront resorts. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), meanwhile, supplied the labor to carry out the work. In 1939, county residents formed a citizens’ committee on mosquito control, and in 1940 the state legislature passed a bill that established a series of mosquito control districts in the county. ¹⁹ Proponents of mosquito control spoke of the pest in a manner similar to the nonworking African Americans from Norfolk who ventured into town uninvited. By 1950, R. E. Dorer, deputy chairman of the Virginia Beach–Princess Anne Mosquito Control Commission, declared that, while the war against mosquitoes within the county’s borders had been won, “The principle [sic] trouble experienced now is from those mosquitoes that breed outside of the areas and fly in.” ²⁰ As early as 1940, these dual wars had seemed to yield results. During the summer months, the town’s population swelled to over forty thousand, with eighty-nine stores, two casinos, thirty-one restaurants, two golf courses, and two movie theaters in operation. ²¹

Ironically, growing efforts to stabilize the region’s coastlines paralleled frantic efforts to redraw county and municipal boundaries. Following World War II, the region quickly emerged as a center of the nation’s expanding military-industrial complex. During the war, the region’s overall population doubled, with the vast majority of white and black migrants coming from outside the state. ²² As the region grew more dependent on federal dollars, a new class of corporate leaders attuned to the region’s changing demographics and seeking, above all, to exploit its economic potential and manage the influx of middle-class white families, emerged. In the 1950s, two-time gubernatorial candidate Ted Dalton received 45 and 37 percent, respectively, against Byrd Organization candidates while running on a probusiness platform that advanced “tourist conscious” policies as opposed to “massive resistance.” ²³

In tidewater Virginia, being tourist conscious meant being conscious of the power of boundaries to delimit race and class and determine future prospects. Under Virginia law, municipalities could petition to annex unincorporated areas in bordering counties if granted approval by a three-judge annexation court. Conversely, Virginia law prohibited municipalities from annexing or absorbing other municipalities without joint agreement. As early as the 1930s, the town of Virginia Beach had set its sights on the rural farmlands of Princess Anne County to its north. In 1935, it was rebuffed in its attempt to annex the territory between the military reservation at Fort Story and the town’s northern border (See figure 1). During the war and accelerating in the years following, white youth and military personnel stationed in Norfolk flocked to a growing number of taverns and “honky tonks” located along this portion of the oceanfront. As they did, complaints of public drunkenness, profanity, and drag racing rose. Scott Sterling, owner of the Princess Anne Hotel, foresaw the “beginning of the end of real estate values” unless action was taken. “If this continues,” Charles W. Gardner, vice president of the Martha Washington Hotel, predicted, “it’s going to sharply lower the morality and standards of this family beach.” ²⁴ The problem, as they saw it, lay in the town of Virginia Beach’s inability to prevent the county from granting beer licenses to establishments located outside of the town’s borders, one that annexation of the area would solve. In 1951, the city again sued the Circuit Court of Princess Anne County to annex 1,054 acres under the premise that its residents used the city’s sand beaches but did not pay its full share in taxes to maintain them. The court rejected the suit, noting that “the tax [for beach maintenance] is levied principally on the tourist trade (hotel rooms, cigarettes and meals).” ²⁵

Throughout the remainder of the decade, Norfolk was instead succeeding in absorbing portions of Princess Anne County, where it envisioned a sprawling landscape of suburban subdivisions housing white-collar workers in defense industries. On January 1, 1959, in its most significant annexation to date, Norfolk absorbed 13.5 square miles and 38,000 residents from Princess Anne County, the beginning stages of a long-term plan to create a sprawling metropolis under a unified government. ²⁶

The close circle of business and political officials who governed Virginia Beach envisioned a future that did not include the people and problems they associated with Norfolk, namely, a large African American population and, not unrelated, fears of higher property taxes under a consolidated government. Following the 1959 annexation, Princess Anne County officials petitioned the state legislature to halt future annexation proceedings. Sensing a revolt in the works, the city of Norfolk halted extension of water lines into planned suburban subdivisions in Princess Anne County, a potentially fatal blow to a county that, at the time, lacked any fresh water source of its own and whose own long-term growth projections were entirely dependent on cooperation with Norfolk. The cries of real estate developers sent both sides to the bargaining table, where Sidney Kellam, owner of the seaside Sir Walter Raleigh Hotel and Virginia Beach’s unofficial political boss, agreed to participate in a metropolitan planning study in exchange for Norfolk placing a five-year moratorium on annexation and resuming extension of water lines into Princess Anne County. Norfolk officials agreed to the proposal, laid down the “water pistol,” and turned the spigot back on. ²⁷

With this breathing space, Kellam embarked on a campaign to consolidate the City of Virginia Beach and the county of Princess Anne into one municipal unit. The consolidation and subsequent incorporation of the entire county would erect an impenetrable municipal barrier and thereby effectively halt Norfolk’s eastward expansion. In many respects the campaign to dissolve county governance resembled similar efforts to maintain the political status quo in the face of school desegregation and black political enfranchisement. Promerger billboards placed on the sides of roads connecting Princess Anne County and Norfolk read, “Vote Merger!—Stop Annexation. Keep Taxes Low.” ²⁸ Proponents actively played on the anxieties of rural farmers in the areas targeted by Norfolk for suburban expansion, who, as one Princess Anne County landowner put it, “fear[ed] the time of the individual farmer in Princess Anne County . . . is about to go the way of the Dodo bird.” ²⁹ To them, Kellam assured, “About all we’re going to do is take down the county sign and put up the city sign.” ³⁰

But for a burgeoning class of Sunbelt entrepreneurs, city–county consolidation would speed the region’s incorporation into the coastal economy of the future. Virginia Beach city manager W. Russell Hatchett predicted the merger would make Virginia Beach “one of the greatest recreational cities—not in the United States—but in the world. And,” he added, “the economy of the future will rest squarely on that basis.” ³¹ Opponents of the merger ridiculed the “honky tonk” resort town’s delusions of grandeur, ³² and labeled the plan a case of “murder and suicide”—of the city of Norfolk, the county of Princess Anne, and ultimately the Hampton Roads metropolitan area. By creating a fragmented political landscape consisting of two large cities locked in competition over growth and development, the merger, Princess Anne County resident Joseph D. Deal predicted, destroyed any chance of the region eventually blossoming into a major East Coast metropolis. ³³ Norfolk resident Arthur A. MacConochie suggested that, should the measure pass, the new consolidated city should be named New Berlin, with “[c]heckpoints . . . set up to be sure that no one carried bottled water out, or good will in either direction.” ³⁴ More specifically, some opponents noted that the merger aimed merely to ensure that middle-class white suburbanites could enjoy the cultural and economic benefits of living in proximity to Norfolk without the burden of higher taxation. “This childish plague-on-your-house attitude manifested by both groups,” Frederick W. Nagle argued, “can lead only to the ultimate detriment of the entire area. Each group must recognize its responsibility—the city to keep itself economically vigorous, and the county to share the burden of the advantages which it exploits.” ³⁵

While historian Matthew Lassiter quite correctly labels this type of “defensive incorporation” as another weapon in progrowth Sunbelt capitalists’ arsenal, deployed to maintain race and class privilege through spatial segregation and metropolitan fragmentation, ³⁶ in Princess Anne County, the plan to dissolve county governance enjoyed its strongest levels of support among residents of the rural African American villages who stood in the path of Norfolk’s physical expansion. Among county voters, the measure passed 7,476 to 1,759, and among voters in Virginia Beach, 1,539 to 242. In the final vote, the black precinct of Seatack led all other county precincts in percentage of votes cast in favor of consolidation, with 95.63 percent of the precinct’s voters supporting the referendum. ³⁷ A view from the ground explains why. For Princess Anne County’s black population, especially its fairly substantial numbers of multigenerational rural landowners, Norfolk’s efforts at annexation posed a clear and immediate threat to their sense of landed independence and to their community institutions. William Watson, a black landowning farmer in Princess Anne County, recalls watching with dismay as black public officials from Norfolk surveyed and made plans to take over the village of Seatack’s “colored” school. White and black leaders in Norfolk, he recalled, “would have loved to taken it all. When they were in the process of annex[ation], some of the teachers from Booker T. Washington High School [in Norfolk] came out there to check our school out and check out what kind of facilities we had and athletic facilities and all these things in anticipation that they were going to take it. . . . Of course, we stopped them from doing that.” ³⁸ For Watson, the “we” included the power broker Kellam, a quintessential racial paternalist who always seemed available to grant personal favors and small concessions to the county’s black residents in pursuit of a climate of racial peace. ³⁹ The strong support from rural residents, one report noted, reflected their strong opposition to annexation from Norfolk less than their desire for incorporation into Virginia Beach. ⁴⁰

So lopsided was the vote, the most contentious issue was the name of the future city. In an omen of emerging bases of power in the new city, Virginia Beach ultimately prevailed over Princess Anne because “substantial sums of money had been spent in advertising the beach as a summer resort for tourists.” ⁴¹ Overnight, the City of Virginia Beach became the nation’s fifth largest city in terms of geography and the self-proclaimed “World’s Largest Resort City,” while Norfolk’s territorial growth ground to a permanent halt. Thanks in no small measure to Princess Anne County voters who sought to prevent suburban sprawl coming from Norfolk, the new Virginia Beach became a magnet for middle-class white families from Norfolk and the constant stream of military families from across the country, who were pulled in by the new, affordable homes in the burgeoning numbers of suburban subdivisions in the city’s northern half and driven out (as they saw it) by the prospect of sending their children to integrated schools in Norfolk and contributing their taxes to support the urban poor. During the 1960s, the city’s population more than doubled, to 172,106 residents, 95 percent of whom were white, while real estate values skyrocketed. ⁴²

As white families poured into Virginia Beach, making it not only one of the largest but also one of the whitest Sunbelt cities, African Americans discovered that their active support for the merger did not translate into political power following the merger. Under its reconstituted government, all but three members of the City of Virginia Beach’s council represented individual districts, but all council members were elected at-large. As a result, African American voters persistently lacked any representative voice in city government. ⁴³ In the new city, African Americans encountered familiar hiring patterns in the public sector. As late as 1982, the city’s police department employed only 8 African Americans on a 260-person force; of the city’s 186 firemen, only 4 were black. By comparison, all of the city’s garbage collectors were black. ⁴⁴

For rural black residents and landowners, incorporation often resulted in either their further isolation from centers of economic growth or displacement as a result of patterns of growth and development. City officials continued a policy of establishing special service districts—which provided water, sanitation, and other public utilities—only in rural areas targeted for growth. ⁴⁵ By the early 1970s, it was not unusual to find expensive mansions situated around paved cul-de-sacs within yards of rural villages that consisted of deteriorating homes situated on dirt roads. For real estate speculators, these impoverished neighborhoods of small black landowners located in proximity to burgeoning suburban developments offered an almost irresistible market to plunder and gave rise to a host of legal mechanisms of land expropriation. In the village of Reedtown (See figure 1), for instance, developer Coite Rudacil began accumulating property from black landowners in 1973 with the intent of developing a townhouse community. To expedite the removal of black landowners, Rudacil employed, among other devices, the tax lien, a method of hostile land acquisition uniquely suited to the conditions facing rural black landowners in the 1970s rural South. ⁴⁶ With many of the children of deceased black landowning farmers having long ago left the rural South and remaining residents struggling to make ends meet, unpaid property taxes accumulated. So long as rural areas remained outside the scope of future development, the issue was of little concern to landowners and public officials alike. But in areas of potential growth, unpaid property taxes became a significant liability. Once a speculator claimed a lien on a piece of property, the victim faced the choice of either repaying the taxes (in one case, at 6.5 percent interest) or lose the land, while the speculator could choose to either ensnare his or her victim in an endless cycle or debt or resell the land to developers. In some cases, a study by the Black Economic Research Center found, speculators actively tried to track down relatives and compel them to enter into a repayment package, while others quietly assumed ownership following a public notice of sale, which required only publication in a local newspaper’s legal notices and a posting on the county courthouse door. ⁴⁷ African American Flossie Branchcomb’s parents owned, by her recollection, a substantial portion of farmland in the New Light section (See figure 1) of Princess Anne County. As property taxes rose, her parents struggled to meet payments, eventually losing it to a tax lien. Its placement on the open market sped the growth of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, a major engine of the region’s new economy, who acquired the property for the location of Regent University. ⁴⁸

In Reedtown, Rudacil applied high-pressure tactics on the remaining residents who refused to sell. “Oh, he’s been here I can’t call the number of times,” Reedtown homeowner Mary Smith told a reporter in 1982. “But I’ve turned him down every time.” Thwarted by Smith and other “holdouts,” who vowed not to sell to Rudacil under any conditions, the city worked to make living conditions in Reedtown as intolerable as possible, in 1982 cutting off garbage service to the neighborhood (under the pretense that the unpaved roads made it dangerous for garbage trucks to enter) and forcing residents to carry two weeks of trash a quarter of a mile to the nearest dumping grounds. ⁴⁹

As the city continued to grow, the chasm between wealth and poverty grew wider. In the shadow of new suburban developments, black residents in neighborhoods like Seatack and Burton Station (See figure 1) continued to rely on outhouses. As late as 1982, according to one estimate, over 174 outdoor toilets were in operation in the bustling resort city, almost all located in predominantly black neighborhoods. ⁵⁰ A 1987 report on the impoverished conditions of areas not designated as special service districts read, “Only miles from where tourists pay $150 a day and up for rooms overlooking the water . . . and homes may sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars . . . residents . . . have to go outside to use the bathroom because there is no indoor plumbing.” ⁵¹ Well into the 1990s, the vast majority of the city’s “pockets of poverty,” as one reporter described, lacked indoor running water or plumbing. ⁵² A black woman carrying buckets of water down a county road was a common sight for residents or vacationers who happened to veer off the main thoroughfares. Those able to pay for the installation of a septic tank frequently dealt with malfunctioning tanks leading to backed-up sewage accumulating in yards and flowing down unpaved roads. One person described the smell of the Mt. Zion neighborhood in the summer as “atrocious.” In the early 1990s, black children in the Seatack neighborhood used trash cans as basketball hoops, “while less than five miles away,” George Mimms, president of the city’s NAACP chapter fumed, “little white kids, I am sure, were playing basketball in a $13 million dollar facility . . . not in trash cans.” To walk through the city’s black neighborhoods was to, as a local pastor described, step into “the 1930s.” ⁵³

Many of the hazards facing the city’s black populations were not holdovers from the Jim Crow era but outgrowths of the Sunbelt. Take “borrow pits,” for example. A byproduct of road and housing construction, borrow pits are essentially holes dug into the ground to supply dirt for home foundations and road grading. In areas where soil quickly gives way to sand below the surface, borrow pits were common features as public officials searched for sources of sand for beach replenishment—and physical reminders of the engine of the region’s economy. Unsightly and dangerous, borrow pits were, not surprisingly, often found in close proximity to African American neighborhoods, where they became known as “death pits.” As they filled with rainwater, becoming small, man-made lakes, borrow pits were often a place black children ventured to cool off during the summer months. Working black parents spent their summers worrying that some day they might not return. ⁵⁴

Indeed, the dilapidated and dangerous condition of these neighborhoods was no mere accident or unfortunate byproduct of blacks’ supposed culture of poverty, but was quite deliberately built into the city’s future growth model. Virginia state law severely restricted the power of cities to condemn privately owned property for resale to private parties in the interest of the common good. Unlike other cities during these years, Virginia Beach lacked the power of eminent domain except for construction of roads and schools. In lieu of condemnation power, the city flexed its regulatory power, driving down the value of land eyed for development and creating unlivable conditions for residents that would, in the end, force them to sell. NAACP local chapter president George Mimms gave voice to a growing consensus among rural black landowners of a deliberate policy of underdevelopment aimed at keeping “the value of [black-owned] land . . . depressed and below market value.” ⁵⁵

The veracity of Mimms’s and others’ charges of malignant neglect seemed to find confirmation in the saga of Burton Station, a community of roughly one hundred landowning black families located along the border of Virginia Beach and Norfolk and in the middle of a burgeoning industrial corridor that would later include the Norfolk International Airport. In 1969, Virginia Beach officials reclassified a substantial portion of the community from residential to industrial without notifying homeowners. Residents learned of the switch several years later, when their applications for federal and private loans to improve their homes or obtain a construction permit were denied. ⁵⁶ Prevented from making alterations or improvements to their property, residents watched as the neighborhood experienced an inexorable decline. At one point in the 1980s, the neighborhood’s lone church was forced to relocate after being denied a permit to make structural improvements. ⁵⁷ Other landowners were prevented from operating small businesses on their property. ⁵⁸

As growth and progress came to some parts of Virginia Beach, civil rights activists and black civic leaders channeled their energies toward redressing these imbalances. After years of protests and complaints, they succeeded, in the early 1970s in forcing the city to commit to provide basic services to twelve historically black and grossly underserved “target” areas, primarily through funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). But rather than affording the city’s poor a measure of compensation for decades of malignant neglect, the Community Development program instead became another mechanism of displacement. In neighborhoods targeted for future development such as Reedtown and Burton Station, funds were allocated strictly for relocation of remaining residents. In other target areas, funds never materialized or were allocated strictly to homeowners for emergency or temporary repairs on structures beyond hope of rehabilitation, suggesting a deliberate strategy of using HUD funds for cosmetic repairs that lined the pockets of public officials and private contractors while leaving the neighborhoods as vulnerable to later redevelopment as before. As New Light resident Alice Green described, “You could call them up and say, ‘My roof is leaking,’ or ‘My chimney is falling down,’ and they would send a contractor and spend a whole lot of money patching something you knew was not substantial.” ⁵⁹ In one instance, HUD officials found that the city was charging low-income residents a fee for accessing newly laid sewer lines that had been paid for with funds from the Community Development program. In other instances, HUD funds designated for target neighborhoods were instead rechanneled toward wealthier ones. ⁶⁰ In 1977, the area director of HUD expressed “serious questions about [the city’s] capacity to implement the program.” ⁶¹ In 1978, HUD ordered the city to stop charging residents for improvements that HUD funds had already paid for, and the following year threatened to cancel all future funding. Improvements to designated areas crawled along as federal funding under the Reagan administration slowed to a trickle, while resistance among residents toward any use of local taxes for rebuilding poor black neighborhoods grew. Not until the late 1990s did the project reach all targeted areas. ⁶² By then, many of the city’s African Americans had come to see “Uncle Sam’s helping hand,” as one writer put it, “as a tool of the city’s white power structure to force them from their homes to make room for commercial and multi-family residential development.” ⁶³

It was no coincidence that black landowners’ distrust of the state grew in proportion to the city’s desperate struggle to meet its rosy projections of future economic growth. By the mid-1980s, the City of Virginia Beach seemed beset by an identity crisis, as its booming popularity as a bedroom community for Hampton Roads’s middle-class professionals (due in no small part to property tax rates that were kept low by the city’s reliance on sales and hotel room taxes) was seen as increasingly coming at the expense of its vacation and tourism industries, leading to congested highways and high demands on public services that were, as a 1985 study by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) found, “[in]consistent with a positive image for a resort area.” On the oceanfront, the city’s laissez-faire governing philosophy and ceding of control over development to the developers had resulted in haphazard and uncoordinated development, most notably a series of towering hotels along the main resort strip that cast a long shadow over the beach by early afternoon (See figure 2). Norfolk planner Edward G. Carson characterized the oceanfront as suffering from a “chaotic visual identity,” while development consultant Donald E. Hunter, one of many persons hired by city officials during these years, remarked, “It’s unusual for a city to sit back and say, ‘OK, private developers, redevelop our beachfront.’” ⁶⁴ By the mid-1980s, visitor growth had slowed from a high of 5.5 percent annual growth to 2 percent. In the 1986 season alone, the number of returning visitors fell by over 20 percent—always an ominous sign. ⁶⁵

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Aerial photo of Virginia Beach’s main resort beach section

Hopes of making the city a national vacation destination also dimmed. The ULI study found that 64 percent of the city’s tourists came from within a 450-mile radius of the city, and largely from the states of Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. Similarly, the vast majority of the meetings held at the city’s hotels and convention center were for regional groups. In surveys of visitors, respondents complained of chaotic traffic along Atlantic Avenue, a repetitious commercial district of neon signs and T-shirt shops, and hotels “in general need of a facelift.” The report put it bluntly: “Virginia Beach is not viewed as a classy resort.” ⁶⁶

As revenue declined, racial hostilities along the boardwalk escalated. Local civic and corporate leaders grumbled about the growing presence of young blacks crowding the city’s streets and driving away middle-class white families during the summer season. After a 1988 Labor Day gathering of African American fraternities and sororities (ironically, one of the few events that drew in visitors from across the country) resulted in sporadic disturbances and confrontations between police and revelers, pressure to cleanse the beachfront of unwanted people grew louder and more sustained. The following Labor Day, as an even larger crowd of black college students (estimated at 100,000) descended on the beach for the fifth annual Greekfest, state police officers and the National Guard, clad in riot gear, were there to greet them as they arrived (See figure 3). As the four-day festival got underway, tensions escalated as officers handed out tickets for petty violations such as jaywalking, playing radios, loud talking, and blocking traffic and created an air of intimidation and disrespect. Students reported being called “boy” by officers and having riot sticks shoved in their chests at the slightest offense. By Saturday evening, word circulated along the boardwalk that the oceanfront hotels had charged black guests three times the normal rate for their rooms while refusing to provide housekeeping services. Thereafter, the situation quickly deteriorated. There were reports of vandalism and looting along Atlantic Avenue. At 2:30 a.m., battalions of police officers in riot gear marched in V formations, accompanied by police-trained German shepherds, from both ends of the street as the vast majority of the student revelers fled to their respective hotels. Others remained to verbally confront the officers. Two students were shot. By 6 a.m. an additional six hundred members of the Virginia National Guard arrived and throughout the following day stood watch over the city. At 11 p.m. Sunday night, the police implemented an unannounced curfew and proceeded to physically remove all persons from the city’s streets and boardwalk. Reports of wanton police brutality circulated. Observers compared the scenes to Vietnam, South Africa, and “stuff . . . in history books and old movies.” By midnight, officers had arrested over 160 persons on charges ranging from failure to leave a riot scene to public drunkenness, destruction of property, and lewdness. ⁶⁷

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Escalating tensions between African American college students and local businesses during the annual Labor Day weekend Greekfest boiled over in 1989, resulting in extensive damage to hotels and storefronts along the oceanfront, numerous injuries and arrests, and the calling in of the National Guard to reestablish order

Reports and video footage of the violent confrontations were broadcast across the nation, and overnight Virginia Beach became fodder for black activists and conservative reactionaries in the culture wars and a symbol of America’s continuing “race problem.” ⁶⁸ As the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights launched an investigation into the incident, tourist and vacation revenues plummeted. The desire among middle-class white Americans to avoid all confrontations with the problem of race in America was—as Bryant Simon notes in his study of the decline of another oceanfront resort city, Atlantic City—nowhere more pronounced than in the places they sought out for travel and leisure. ⁶⁹ The following year, Virginia Beach’s Convention and Visitor Development Department reported a loss of seventeen thousand tourists from the previous year, while the city reported a $285,000 decline in tax revenues. In the aftermath, city boosters and tourism promoters struggled to balance fears of alienating middle-class black families (an emerging segment of the tourism and vacationing market) and being labeled a white supremacist resort city with their desire to control the types of persons and activities found along the oceanfront so as to attract a targeted audience of families with incomes of $45,000 or more. To that end, promoters staged events aimed at drawing in “multicultural groups” of middle-class, middle-age families, including blues and jazz festivals, while declining to host events that might attract “younger visitors” and enacting an informal ban on “urban or rap music” along the oceanfront, moves that received some of the loudest cheers of support from the middle-class African American families who came to the beach each summer. ⁷⁰

Such measures did little to slow the declining revenues of tourism-related businesses. And as hopes for pleasure as an economic engine dimmed, the city increasingly looked to attract new, high-tech businesses and industries to the region. “If Virginia Beach wants better-paying jobs and a stronger economy,” a report on the city’s economic present and future concluded, “it has to brush the sand out of its hair.” ⁷¹ And put the undeveloped portions of the expansive city to use in attracting new businesses. To that end, the city council embarked on a concerted effort to clear out, once and for all, the black, mostly poor residents of Burton Station and fulfill long-standing plans to locate an industrial park there. Beginning in 1992, the city began offering residents $43,560 per acre for their land. Some immediately sold. Others expressed a desire to sell but were hamstrung by the lack of clear title to land that had been in a family’s possession for over a century. Others held out in hope of a more just offer after learning that the value of their land on resale by the city far exceeded the paltry offers they were receiving, which were based on assessments of the land’s current—not future—value. Some simply did not want to move from land they and their families have lived on for generations. From 1992 to 1996, the number of residents in Burton Station fell from one hundred to fewer than twenty. In all, the city spent over $3.3 million to purchase eighteen acres of land and relocate roughly twenty families. But the lots purchased by the city were noncontiguous, and with the remaining residents refusing to sell, the area remained immune to redevelopment even as living conditions in the neighborhood grew more intolerable. On abandoned lots where families once grew okra, butter beans, and squash, trash accumulated. Massive potholes pockmarked the streets; reports of crime rose. ⁷²

The city made little secret of their run-down strategy. But as efforts to buy out the remaining residents reached a standstill, in 1996 the city turned to the voters to approve the formation of a citywide Redevelopment Authority vested with the power to condemn private property and resell it for the sake of economic development. ⁷³ The creation of the Redevelopment Authority was, as the city council openly acknowledged, “its last resort for finishing its work in Burton Station.” ⁷⁴ The referendum received widespread support from the city’s business community and equally widespread skepticism from the working and middle-class whites whose own sense of victimization at the hands of an intrusive state and palpable fears of government intrusion into private real estate markets (stoked by the conservative Republicans who, in 1994, assumed control of both houses of Congress) had given rise to a broader movement for property rights in opposition to centralized planning. In response, proponents of the measure stressed that the referendum restricted the city’s power to condemn property to areas “already blighted, that is, made up of unsafe or unsanitary dwellings”—implicitly, the predominantly black and poor parts of the city—and that it involved no plans to introduce low-income public housing into the city. ⁷⁵ Few white voters were in any mood to accept vague promises of governmental bodies exercising limited authority. “I don’t see any need for it,” a sixty-two-year-old white voter told a reporter. “I think there’s enough government already in place.” ⁷⁶

Long-time African American residents’ own encounters with the state over the previous decades informed their own opposition to the planning and redevelopment authority. Having experienced the decades following passage of the civil rights acts and the end of Jim Crow as an endless string of broken promises, duplicitous and deceitful actions, and purposeful neglect on the part of public officials, the rural black landowners of Virginia Beach had come to see the state as strictly a force that stifled opportunity and capriciously denied services provided to others. For Mimms and many others, the referendum was the final stage in a long-term “plan” to divest blacks of their historic ties to the land. The city, he charged, had “historically and intentionally deprived [this and other poor black] communities of economic resources and infrastructure maintenance” so as to “keep . . . the value of the land low” in anticipation of the day when they would “have the power [to] come in and buy the land dirt cheap and resell it for big bucks.” Alice Green relocated to the New Light section of Virginia Beach in 1969 after her Norfolk home had been condemned by that city’s Redevelopment and Housing Authority and led efforts to educate black landowners of their rights and advise them on long-term planning there. To her, the scenario seemed all too familiar. “They just want to push us out. . . . Virginia Beach would love to become what they call ‘lily-white,’ anyway. If they get the housing authority, that’s one way of doing it.” ⁷⁷ “It’s frustrating,” Burton Station resident Lulu Davis said of the city. “It’s like they just left us.” “If they can’t do anything for me, don’t even bother me,” said Burton Station resident Melvin Elliott, whose family ties to the neighborhood reportedly dated back to emancipation. ⁷⁸

Unlike their white libertarian counterparts who joined them in opposing the Redevelopment Authority, few blacks waxed rhapsodic of a golden age before the fall. For them, the abusive power of growth liberalism was merely old wine in a new cask. In newspaper articles and editorials, black opponents referred to the city’s sordid racial history—such as its incorporation as a village in 1906, when town fathers intentionally drew the village of Seatack outside of the village’s municipal boundaries, and the county’s secret rezoning of Burton Station from residential to industrial in 1969—to buttress claims of a long-term “plan” to drive blacks from the area. ⁷⁹

When white and black voters joined to defeat the proposal by a narrow margin in spite of strong support from area business leaders and chambers of commerce, it seemed, perhaps, an odd coalition, rooted in a mutual distrust of a common set of foes that had long profited from divisiveness and contempt at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, might take shape. When the city council advanced a similar measure to create a housing and development authority four years later, the Virginian-Pilot columnist Brenda McCormick implored voters to ignore the racially charged imagery circulated by progrowth forces and instead focus on the broader implications of handing more control over the land to government: “Nobody wants a crack house or an unkempt property or slumlords operating in their neighborhood. That’s what we think of when we hear ‘blight.’ And that’s what they want us to think. And we might think, you know, well it’s harmless enough because the City Council means ‘their’ neighborhoods; not ‘our’ neighborhood. We learned a long time ago that if they can do it to ‘them,’ they can bloody well do it to ‘us.’” ⁸⁰

Indeed, for the white middle-class voters who voted against the Redevelopment Authority, it was more contempt than pity for the plight of the region’s black poor that animated their libertarian ideologies. And since their fears of having done to them what was done to others were indistinguishable from their equally ardent desire to keep others away from them, suburban white libertarianism easily segued from strategic alliance with black voters to a thinly veiled racist demagoguery that dared not speak its name. Such was the case three years later, when word circulated of plans to connect Norfolk and Virginia Beach by high-speed light rail. Minimization of public transportation, Robert O. Self and Thomas J. Sugrue note, constituted one of the principle “formulas of private design and management” advanced by “Sunbelt entrepreneurs.” ⁸¹ True to form, white grassroots activists quickly sprung into action to scuttle the plans. Virginia Beach resident Wally Erb collected the seventeen thousand signatures necessary to place a referendum question on the November ballot that would prevent the city from using funds toward a light speed rail line. The rhetoric opponents deployed echoed those voiced in opposition to the redevelopment authority, including high taxes, bureaucratic meddling and government wastefulness, and a conception that rights are determined by majoritarian rule. It also pointed toward the emergence of the issue of “debt” passed on to future generations as a weapon wielded by libertarian-minded conservatives against forms of government spending associated with low-income and underprivileged citizens. Full-page newspaper advertisements in opposition to light speed rail called it one of the “greatest debts ever levied on the citizens of Hampton Roads.” ⁸² Beneath an avalanche of deliberately “color-blind” denunciations of wasteful government spending one easily found fears of black persons—in particular, the growing numbers of young, primarily male African Americans who continued to gather along the oceanfront on weekends—and a continued determination to divorce Virginia Beach from the people and problems associated with Norfolk. Opponents referred obliquely to the higher levels of crime that would supposedly accompany the extension of light rail from the mixed-race and -income Norfolk to the predominantly white, middle-class Virginia Beach, or to the introduction of people who, as opponent described, “don’t even know the neighborhood.” ⁸³ “To the criminals who don’t have cars,” resident Ray Sampson wrote, “Virginia Beach with its lax security and laid back attitude, would now be a fat, juicy target! Especially during the tourist season. By providing them with transportation, via mass transit, Virginia Beach would be giving these criminals the means to come in easily, do a few ‘jobs,’ and then make a smooth exit.” ⁸⁴ Others mentioned instances of rude language and bad behavior among seemingly unraced groups of individuals along the oceanfront. Among many opponents, the term “Crackville” became shorthand for describing the inner-city problems that associating with Norfolk foretold. Combined, they became, as Virginia Beach NAACP branch president Sandra Smith-Jones put it, “an easier way to say, ‘We don’t want black people from Norfolk.’” ⁸⁵

But when the region’s major newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot, ran a story that suggested that opposition to the rail line was due, in part, to deep-seated racial prejudice, opponents went ballistic, and expressed “outrage” at the newspaper for “fanning the flames . . . of race.” ⁸⁶ And indeed, opposition to the light rail could not be reduced to the definition of racism shared by the majority of opponents and proponents. Over the past quarter century, opponents could quite correctly highlight, Virginia Beach had become home to growing numbers of middle-class African American families, and welcomed countless numbers of minorities to the beach each summer, accounting for over 8 percent of annual tourist revenue. “The beach,” one black female visitor described in 1999, “is always full of black, white, even Asian families. And everyone always greets one another. They make me feel like home.” ⁸⁷ Conversely, fears of crime coming from Norfolk were inseparable from fears of tourist dollars being drained from Virginia Beach to the attractions in Norfolk that a light rail line would make more accessible. Instead, voters feared a certain type of person arriving on light rail trains, and other types of persons leaving. Opposition to light rail transit, moreover, became the language through which opponents articulated more fundamental threats to the foundation on which postwar suburban culture rested, namely, municipal fragmentation, class homogeneity, high tax revenues and low levels of individual and household taxation, taxation as a fee for service, fear and distrust of public spaces open to the wider “public,” and a shared determination to resist measures that called on citizens to cooperate and perhaps even sacrifice to address and combat broader social, economic, and environmental problems. ⁸⁸ Race had everything—and nothing—to do with it.

But for the region’s black population, the lopsided vote against the referendum that fall came as little surprise, and the color-blind arguments advanced by opponents rang hollow. “The ‘Light Rail’ vote,” Journal and Guide columnist Leonard Colvin wrote, “failed not because of cost nor how many people would NOT use it nor the amount of taxes some old Navy pensioners would have to fork over from their pockets. It was a matter of race.” “They continue to believe that the Beach belongs only to the white community,” Norfolk firebrand and political gadfly Joe Rose commented. ⁸⁹ Colvin wondered when “will middle-class whites feel safe from mythical and stereotypical marauding bands of chicken-smelling, dred-loc [sic] wearing, slang speaking, stroller pushing, unruly Black adults and children from Norfolk’s urban core[?]” ⁹⁰

The history of the Norfolk–Virginia Beach metropolitan area demonstrates the importance of place in the process of twentieth-century metropolitan growth and development. For tidewater Virginians, growth agendas and struggles over civil and property rights were constituted through local structures of governance, changing human environmental needs and sensibilities, and, more importantly, the political and economic fortunes that supposedly could be made and lost on the beach. The ascendance of libertarian localism in Virginia Beach’s sprawling suburbs (and in its tiny pockets of low-income, landowning blacks) does not simply point to broader, national trends as they were constituted on a local level, but instead calls attention to some of the unique social, economic, and environmental dynamics that set this coastal metropolis apart from its Sunbelt counterparts, and profoundly shaped its political culture and political economy over time.

Even as we dismantle the myth of southern exceptionalism and question the utility of regionalism as a category of analysis, ⁹¹ we should be careful not to dismiss the environmental features of certain regions (and changing value of those features) in shaping and informing the ideas and interests of the people who occupy and industries that emerge within certain places. For those seeking to bring the analytical tools of environmental historians to bear on urban and political history, and seeking to locate new subjects of analysis that transcend regionalism but recognize the power of place, the coast, this essay argues, offers a fruitful place to start.