Jackson Ward: The Harlem of the South
Near Richmond, Virginia
Second Street in Jackson Ward had a nickname: the Deuce. During the nineteen twenties, thirties, and forties, the Deuce was the center of Black commercial and cultural life in Richmond, a stretch of the ward lined with stores, restaurants, banks, and theaters that served a community largely shut out of the rest of the city by segregation. Jackson Ward itself had developed after the Civil War as freed Black residents and formerly free Black families built businesses and institutions in the neighborhood north of downtown.
By the early twentieth century it had become a concentration of Black entrepreneurship remarkable enough that people called it the Harlem of the South, or the Black Wall Street of America. Leaders here included John Mitchell Jr., editor of the Richmond Planet newspaper, and Giles Beecher Jackson, the first Black attorney to practice before the Virginia Supreme Court.
The centerpiece of the Deuce's entertainment scene was the Hippodrome Theater, opened in nineteen fourteen as a vaudeville and movie house. During its peak years from the nineteen twenties through the nineteen forties, the Hippodrome was a stop on the Chitlin' Circuit, the network of venues considered safe for Black performers in an era of segregation. Billie Holiday performed there.
Louis Armstrong. Nat King Cole. Bill Robinson.
Ella Fitzgerald. Ray Charles. The stage that hosted that roster was on Second Street in Richmond's Jackson Ward.
Urban renewal programs in the nineteen forties, fifties, and sixties tore through the neighborhood. A Richmond housing authority plan displaced thousands of Black families. Interstate construction in the fifties cut into the community's physical fabric.
Jackson Ward lost much of its commercial core to those projects. The revival of the neighborhood since the nineties has brought back some of what was lost, but the scale of what existed before the highways is gone.
