Behind the Second Veil

Abstract

In the last few decades, scholars of African American history have lifted W. E. B. DuBois's sombre of that lay between the white and black worlds of the Jim Crow South, revealing a vibrant world of struggle and survival.1 But the color barrier lay a second of class, woven by elite African Americans to hide the perceived immorality and poverty of the black working class from prying eyes. In her exhaustive study of post-emancipation Durham, North Carolina, Leslie Brown pulls aside the of race, but gives us only glances through the second of class. African Americans defined class status primarily through the ideology and practice of bourgeois respectability. Public displays of respectability hid not only the working class from sight, but also diminished differences within the middle class and elite ranks of black Durham. What contemporaries saw in Durham was a remarkable community of respectable upbuilders who erected a prosperous and stable facade of black success in the wake of the Civil War. Brown meticulously shows us how that facade was constructed, but not fully what it hid. In her opening chapters, Brown describes a New South city that was founded after emancipation and thus relatively untainted by the legacy of slavery. At the close of the Civil War, large numbers of African Americans began to settle in Durham, many of them women and children, initially in a community they provocatively called Hayti. This community became a safe space where an emerging entrepreneurial elite built churches, schools, and protective associations. Brown's aspiring class, a term she borrows from Michele Mitchell, was not part of an older black aristocracy, but like their New South white counterparts gained their status through property ownership and entrepreneurship.2 But the relative stability and prosperity they found behind the veil in Black Durham had a cost. Although segregation was good for black business, it marked the race as inferior and cut off opportunities to benefit from public works and city infrastructure. Brown makes it clear that this cost was