To readers, the two newspapers could be viewed as defenders of tradition or as bastions of anachronism. But there were many other forces at work as well in these years, and they all seemed to carry the banner of impassioned, sometimes reckless change. Richmond's draft induction station was picketed by protesters during a demonstration in 1970. Here were Elvis Presley, sexual freedom and abortion invading a land of Frank Sinatra moodiness, closeted passions and necessary virtue. Men on the moon peered back at a nation where poverty and hunger lingered, where drug use morphed into a recreational pastime, where a counterculture movement snubbed the lessons of its predecessors.
Human relations are somewhat more intimate.
Tempered by the reserve of a certain personal dignity, friendliness prevails. Everywhere the dark laughter of the Negro is to be heard. But there was also a growing dissonance, he suggested, that was rooted in the condition of the state's black people, about one-fifth of the population. After decades of near stagnation, World War II pushed Virginia's population above the 3 million mark for the first time in 1945, an increase of some 500,000 people from before the war. Richmond and its suburban counties of Chesterfield, Henrico and Hanover grew from 284,000 people to 350,000 between 1940 and 1950.