Richmond, Virginia in the 1960s: Capturing Tumult and Transformation Through Stunning Photos

Richmond, Virginia entered the 1960s as a city balanced on the edge of change. The old order — rooted in segregation, conservative politics, and postwar habits — was about to meet fierce resistance. Over the next ten years, the streets of Richmond would host civil rights sit-ins, political groundbreakings, urban demolitions, and a flood of new technology. The photographs from this era do more than document events. They show a city straining under the weight of its own transformation.

The civil rights movement arrived in Richmond with urgency. In 1960, about 200 students from Virginia Union University organized sit-in protests at lunch counters across the city where Black customers were refused service.

At the G.C. Murphy department store, students occupied all 74 stools in the whites-only lunch area for several hours. The store responded by closing at around 1 p.m. and reopening later with the lunch counter roped off. These demonstrations were part of a broader statewide push. The Virginia Civil Rights Commission had been established that same year to promote equal opportunities for all Virginians. By 1966, Henry Marsh — a civil rights lawyer — became the first African American elected to the Richmond City Council in the 20th century.

Schools were another front line. When students returned to Westhampton School in Richmond in the fall of 1961, Daisy Jane Cooper became the first African American student to integrate the junior high school. The following year, she made similar history at Thomas Jefferson High School.

Demonstrations reached beyond school doors. In 1965, more than 700 people marched across four Virginia cities to demand equality in voter registration. They also marched to honor the Rev. James Reeb, a white Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston who had been killed during a civil rights demonstration in Alabama the week prior. In Farmville, 175 marchers gathered and prayed on the lawn in front of the Prince Edward County courthouse.

While activists pressed for change in the streets, Richmond’s political and business circles were moving in their own directions. In 1960, then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson arrived in Richmond to campaign for the Kennedy-Johnson presidential ticket, speaking at Byrd Airport, in Hopewell, and at a Young Democrats rally at the Arena.

Downtown Richmond was being reshaped block by block. The old John Marshall High School became a flashpoint for preservationists in 1961, when about 25 alumni demonstrated against plans to demolish the building. They marched to City Hall to make their case to City Council.

Their efforts failed. That fall, a wrecking ball swung against the portico of the old school as a crowd watched. The site was cleared to make way for a new Civic Center. A new John Marshall High School had already opened on the North Side the previous year.

The First Market building on 17th Street met the same fate in 1961. The site had served as a public gathering place since the 1700s, hosting Confederate soldiers, Union troops, political speeches, a police station, and religious revival meetings. After the building came down, farmers and merchants continued selling produce curbside at 17th and East Franklin streets, paying 50 cents a day for a parking spot.

The retail landscape was changing too. Willow Lawn shopping center was expanding, adding a two-story building to house a Miller & Rhoads department store and an S&W cafeteria. Meanwhile, Raymond Munsch, vice president of Miller & Rhoads, was out on Grace Street leading a campaign to keep shoppers coming downtown.

New construction was visible from nearly every corner of the city. In 1967, Richmond officials prepared new traffic signs to redirect motorists as one-way patterns on First through Fifth streets downtown were reversed to handle the increased flow from the nearby Interstate 64/95 interchange. The change also required rerouting 11 bus lines. The following year, 76 homes were physically moved out of the path of the Downtown Expressway.

Byrd Field, Richmond’s main airport, was redeveloped during the decade to accommodate jet service. By 1968, passengers arriving in the terminal lobby were waiting in a building nearing the end of an extensive expansion. That same year, Richmond Mayor Morrill M. Crowe had already helped inaugurate Eastern Airlines’ passenger service from Byrd Field to New York in 1965.

Not far from the airport, new highways were reshaping travel across the region. In 1967, a 9-mile stretch of Interstate 64 from Bryan Park to Short Pump was opened with beauty queens and convertibles on the fresh pavement. The $23 million project skipped the ribbon-cutting formality — the lead car simply drove over a traffic counter cable.

The Cold War cast a long shadow over daily life in Richmond. In 1960, the Schellenberg family of Highland Springs had one of Virginia’s first privately owned radiation fallout shelters installed in their yard. The horizontal steel tank measured 7 feet in diameter and 16 feet long and was designed for up to six people. By 1962, Thalhimers department store downtown had been approved as a fallout shelter for up to 8,700 people and was stocked with two weeks of food, water, and medical equipment.

Technology was advancing on multiple fronts. In 1961, an IBM RAMAC computer — featuring a hard disk drive, a significant development for modern computing — was installed in the basement of Old City Hall. By 1965, a Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Co. employee was working in a computer room reviewing data as the era of digital processing expanded. And in 1968, Richmond Newspapers installed an NCR 315 computer system in their new computer center, handling billing, payroll, classified advertising, and circulation. The center’s manager said at the time that the system was “likely to meet our needs for at least 10 years — and maybe forever.”

The James River was both a resource and a recurring threat. In 1963, rain-swollen floodwaters rose more than 4 feet above flood stage at Westham and nearly 5 feet above flood stage at the City Locks, surrounding dwellings on Sharp’s Island near the 14th Street bridge. The river flooded again in later years — drivers navigated underwater streets in South Richmond in 1969.

Workers maintained Richmond’s aging infrastructure throughout the decade. Cornelius Simmons Jr., the city’s only full-time bridge tender, spent his days repairing the nearly century-old Ninth Street Bridge. One of its most persistent problems was smoldering wood — motorists tossing cigarette butts from car windows caused more than 100 small fires in the summer of 1966 alone. The bridge was eventually replaced in 1972.

Sports were a major part of Richmond life in the 1960s. Over 10,000 spectators packed Parker Field in 1960 to watch the Richmond Virginians play an exhibition game against the New York Yankees. By 1966, the Richmond Braves had arrived as the AAA affiliate of the Atlanta Braves, drawing 7,400 fans to their International League season opener. At the Country Club of Virginia in 1967, golf legend Arnold Palmer visited for a brunch, news conference, golf clinic, and exhibition foursome — only to lose to 17-year-old local amateur Lanny Wadkins and his partner, U.S. and British Amateur champion Bob Dickson.

Richmond also produced its own sports heroes. In 1964, tennis star Arthur Ashe Jr. stood at his home holding the Eastern Grass Court Championship trophy. Ranked sixth among amateur players in the nation that year, Ashe had beaten established players like Dennis Ralston and Clark Graebner on his way to the title.

The arts were also finding their footing. The Richmond Professional Institute, which would merge with the Medical College of Virginia in 1968 to form Virginia Commonwealth University, was nurturing a growing arts scene. College students relaxed in Monroe Park that year, taking advantage of the green space that had long anchored the area around RPI. The annual Festival of Arts at Dogwood Dell drew about 52,000 people to its 9th year of concerts and stage productions in 1965.

Air pollution was becoming impossible to ignore by the late 1960s. In 1968, smog dimmed Richmond’s skyline, and the Virginia Air Pollution Control Board moved to implement its first regulations that July. The rules targeted smoke, open burning, and industrial dust and fumes. Separately, a “Fight Litter ’68” campaign deployed 150 city workers across seven areas of Richmond over eight days, though the Advertising Club of Richmond was already planning a follow-up appeal because the problem persisted.

Everyday Richmond life carried its own textures and rhythms. In 1961, Virginia legalized liquor by the drink, and the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway applied for the first license to serve. By 1969, when liquor by the drink became legal in Richmond itself, women were stepping into bartending roles at local restaurants. At Michael’s on Fifth Street, Kimberly Farmer — who had previously bartended in Miami and New Orleans — was among about a half-dozen women who had recently taken bartending jobs in the city.

Labor disputes punctuated the decade as well. In 1965, about 300 workers — most of them women — from M&B Headwear Co. Inc. picketed outside the Richmond factory, one of the country’s largest suppliers of military caps. Members of the United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers International Union were seeking a roughly 15-cent per hour raise over two years. The average hourly wage for the workers at the time was $1.35.

Communities across Richmond were tying together in small but meaningful ways. In 1962, the bookmobile that stopped at 25th and Q streets in the city’s East End drew 70 children in its first two hours during its first week of visits. Within four weeks, crowds during extended three-hour stops had grown to 600. Funding was soon appropriated for a permanent library branch to serve the neighborhood.

In 1966, a group of Boy Scouts from Troop 644 in Mechanicsville launched a five-day, 58-mile voyage down the James River from Richmond to Jamestown on homemade rafts. Eleven boys and four adult supervisors made the trip using only paddles and the tide for propulsion. Completing the journey would earn each boy a 50-mile trip badge and move them closer to first-class Scout status.

As the decade closed, Richmond was a city that had absorbed enormous pressure from every direction — racial injustice, Cold War anxiety, urban growth, and cultural upheaval. The photographs from these years hold all of it: the protests and the parades, the wrecking balls and the ribbon-cuttings, the faces of people navigating a city that was never quite the same from one year to the next.