Page 53 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

By the end of 1883, Roanoke was just beginning to grapple with its revenue shortfalls and
infrastructure problems, and its residents were just setting the initial stage for building a
community out of their town’s diverse and often hostile factions.

Finally - Enter Civic Reform.

The public crusade to turn Roanoke into something resembling a modern industrial city moved
on other fronts as well. Local boosters and politicians, aware that the town had a reputation for
being crime ridden and debauched, eventually sought ways to curb behavior that middle and
upper-class whites deemed immoral, which led to a crusade against African American “dives” in
the city’s saloon district.

This process brought whites together in another common cause, but led to deeper
fragmentation of the community along racial lines. Elsewhere in town, numerous brothels
opened for business in working-class neighborhoods in the Southeast. Although popular with
young men working in the industries nearby, women in the neighborhood joined local clergy in a
reform campaign to drive the bordellos out of the area. When brothels continued to open there,
city officials respond to the problem by evicting bordello inhabitants in the Southeast and
limiting prostitution to Roanoke’s de-facto “red light district” in the mostly African American
Northwest.

Residents tired of complaining to elected officials about the city’s lack of municipal services
resorted to arranging some of them themselves. Some organized militias to augment the town’s
chronically under-funded and tiny police force, others formed fire brigades to protect their home
from conflagration, and still others raised funds for a public hospital to provide health care for
citizens in need.

These various improvement crusades not only fulfilled longstanding municipal needs, they also
functioned in ways that helped the white community coalesce around even more common
causes. Unfortunately, the more common ground that whites in town found, the more
Roanoke’s blacks were pushed to the margins of the community.

White newcomers from the North and blacks from the countryside poured into Roanoke in the
1880s and turned what had been a bastion of support for “Conservatives” and “Bourbon”
Democrats into hotly contested political terrain. Not long after winning the rail junction, native
and southern white Democrats faced a Readjuster / Republican coalition of local blacks and
northern newcomers. Former Confederate General William Mahone’s Readjuster Party actively
solicited African American votes, and in the early 1880s, blacks cast about two-thirds of all
ballots for the party. White support came mainly from Republicans, and by 1882, there were
enough new GOP supporters in Roanoke to join its “solid phalanx” of black voters to elect
Readjuster John S. Wise to Congress that year. The outcome stunned local Democrats and
generated even more resentment toward the northern newcomers arriving in town.

In statewide elections the following fall, the Readjusters lost the city in a landslide. The flip back
to the Democrats had several causes but was mainly the result of hundreds of new whites from
the countryside pouring into Roanoke, as well as the lack of issues left for Readjusters to solve.