Northern Virginia Archive of Black Community Resistance

In the years after the Civil War, Falls Church was a primarily rural town – like most in Northern Virginia at this time, however the town contained a relatively racially mixed population. In the era of Reconstruction, as the formerly enslaved, and Black men born free practiced their right to vote they often voted Republican in the name of the party and President who had sought their emancipation, much to the ire of fellow Southern whites.[1] In the post-Reconstruction era, in an effort to curtail Black voting powers and Black freedom, many Southern states and localities began to gerrymander, further establish peonage reflecting slavery all but in name, and limit civil rights. Reflecting the Southern sensibilities of the time, the Town of Falls Church took to gerrymandering their borders.

In 1887, Falls Church took action to retrocede land back to Fairfax County, drawing in the boundaries of Falls Church’s incorporation, and cutting out a significant chunk of Southern Falls Church in an act of gerrymandering.  Gerrymandering is the practice of deliberately changing borders to give one group or political party an unfair advantage.[2] This can come in the form of racially gerrymandering, and gerrymandering for partisan purposes. The goal of the 1887 retrocession becomes quite clear when looking at voter rolls in Falls Church, and the population of southern Falls Church.

In the case of Falls Church in 1887, the decision to retrocede a significant portion of the southern incorporation equated to both racial and partisan gerrymandering. This southern section of Falls Church held a significant portion of the town’s Black population, and therefore a significant portion of its Republican voting base. Andrew Wolf notes that in 1873, “out of 623 voters, 232 were black, which was 37 percent.”[3] Following the final vote taken in 1890 by citizens of Falls Church that included more land to be retroceded in West Falls Church, the number of Black voters were reduced to 15 percent. By cutting Black voter rolls by more than half, the Town of Falls Church had dealt a significant blow to Black Falls Church, and the two communities left cut out from the town in the south – “The Hill” and Southgate. In the case of the then recently established Tinner Hill, their small community in southern Falls Church was heavily affected by this retrocession. Splitting the community nearly down the middle, Charles Tinner’s land was divided between communities reflecting the marginalized status of Black life in Falls Church.

Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence posits that acts of slow violence are incremental, happening through extraction, limits and barriers built over time, in a fashion that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous. [4] The retrocession of southern Falls Church is not slow violence, it was decisive and held clear intentions of racialized violence. Inversely, the ceding of Black land to Fairfax County created an environment that bred slow violence by disempowering Black voters, their claims to space and place in Falls Church, and Black enclaves like Tinner Hill through changing and haphazardly drawing borders. Falls Church’s retrocession challenged the power of the Black communities to exercise their rights.

The 1887 gerrymandering, and 1890 vote to officially retrocede this land and other areas equaling one-third Falls Church back to Fairfax County is essential to the process of slow violence and fashioning a myth of progress in the coming decades of the early-twentieth-century. The experience of Tinner Hill in the decades following the retrocession of southern Falls Church back to Fairfax County challenges the way we think about violence, displacement, and the price of progress. While a quick act that was not in the vein of Nixon’s slow violence, the retrocession established long term “incremental and accretive…repercussions,”[5] ones that are played out over decades following this event in its wake. By purposefully gerrymandering boundaries, Falls Church paved the way to subsequent displacement by way of slow violence enacted through the 1915 segregation ordinance in Falls Church, and the construction of Lee Highway in 1922 through the heart of Tinner Hill.