Threatening Property: Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods

Abstract

While many scholars have documented attempts at urban housing segregation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historian Elizabeth Herbin-Triant reveals how, in North Carolina, ideologies regarding housing segregation in cities also influenced the southern countryside. White demands to control where African Americans lived grew more fevered as Black families grew in economic power. Concerned about continued loss of property and economic standing, middling whites in particular tried various methods to control and suppress Black property acquisition in urban and rural areas.Herbin-Triant starts her history by explaining how North Carolina's geography and large population of independent, yeomen farmers meant that a significant segment of white farmers embraced a vision of self-sufficiency, democratic engagement, and individualism. These small white farmers acutely felt competition for property from increasingly successful Black farmers. At the turn of the twentieth century, Black farm ownership was expanding and white land ownership was diminishing, a fact that many whites attributed to African Americans' willingness to accept “lower standards of living” (37). Migration to urban areas, too, produced racial tensions. In cities such as Winston, middling whites grew alarmed by growing numbers of Black workers seeking homes in historically white neighborhoods near employment centers. Resentment from working poor and middling whites produced violence and experiments with property segregation that took the form of restrictive covenants and, when those measures failed, racial zoning (which was soon ruled unenforceable).Clarence Poe, the young editor of Progressive Farmer, eventually the largest circulating farm journal in the Southeast, followed such urban segregation practices and the writings of South African apartheid architect Maurice Evans closely, considering how property segregation might be used to advance white small farmers' interests. Embracing populist ideals, Poe promoted yeomen self-sufficiency and the idea that white farmers should work together to benefit white farmers as a group. He sought a successful recipe for land segregation that would strengthen white farmers' economic opportunity and withstand challenges in court, and he regularly promoted the advantages of property segregation in his journal and in other venues. However, elite whites (whether urban industrial interests or rural planters) saw few advantages in property segregation: they saw no reason to hobble Black economic achievement, particularly because it did not threaten their own economic standing. They did not want to encourage migration by stifling Black success, as they depended on easy access to low-cost Black labor, and some thought individuals should be able to dispose of property as they wished. Thus, elites thwarted the property segregation efforts of middling whites in towns and the countryside.While there are already a number of scholarly works examining housing segregation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Threatening Property makes several important contributions to the subfield. Herbin-Triant shows that property segregation was an evolving conversation between urban and rural areas, and at least some white leaders saw advantages to implementing racial segregation in nonurban spaces. Furthermore, she outlines how this North Carolina story is both locally contingent and illustrative of national trends: North Carolina had a white independent, yeomen tradition that meant that farmers who owned (or had owned) small farms felt particularly threatened by and had the potential to be mobilized against Black economic success, a situation that Democratic political leaders took advantage of and that resulted in, among other things, Black disenfranchisement. At the same time, Winston reflected national engagement with racial segregation practices: it mimicked other cities in its attempts to confine Black families to neighborhoods lacking in resources or with fewer advantages. But the author is particularly successful in demonstrating how elite and middling whites experienced and responded to the “threat” of Black economic success in different ways. The elite white inclination to allow some measure of Black economic progress prevailed because elites held significantly more power. Thus, within the white community, conflicting class desires meant that some white supremacist agendas failed, even while white supremacist infrastructure (such as de facto social segregation) endured. And at least in the instances described, the failure of the middling white agenda benefited Black families who owned property or sought to, even while white racist terror continued.