Threatening Property

In Threatening Property, Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant examines campaigns of white North Carolinians to segregate residential property at the turn of the twentieth century. Middling whites, those not poor yet nonetheless “perpetually in danger of losing economic and social status,” lobbied for residential segregation laws in an expression of white backlash to Black success (1). During the period after the Civil War, Black farm operators in North Carolina increased at a faster rate than their white counterparts. At the same time, many Black urbanites acquired property in cities like Winston. As middling whites witnessed these trends, they tried to stop them by pursuing policies to limit African Americans’ access to property.In an important contribution to our understanding of the experimental nature of Jim Crow, Herbin-Triant examines campaigns to segregate urban and rural spaces alongside one another. In much of the existing scholarship, residential segregation in the city and the countryside have been explored separately. But Herbin-Triant shows that middling whites made sense of their interests by a similar logic in communities with large Black populations, whether the neighborhoods of Winston or the rural communities of the piedmont and coastal plain. In both types of spaces, middling whites viewed property ownership as the surest path to protect whites’ social status and ensure their economic stability.Historically specific constructions of white people's class interests are crucial to this story. Herbin-Triant argues that when it came to residential segregation, “a shared ‘whiteness’ did not overcome the division between and among white people in the South” (2). Middling whites wanted residential segregation in order to protect their property values from the presumed devaluation that came along with new Black neighbors. But North Carolina's white elites were not on board. Some saw residential segregation as unconstitutional, since it denied property owners the right to dispose of their property as they wished. Perhaps more importantly, residential segregation threatened white elites’ ability to exploit nearby Black workers in Winston's tobacco factories, on farmland, or elsewhere. “For white elites,” Herbin-Triant writes, “black people were not competitors but valued workers” (9). Thus, elite indifference—or sometimes outright opposition—to residential segregation laws explains their failure. The state Supreme Court struck down Winston's residential segregation ordinance in 1914, and the campaign for a residential segregation amendment to the state constitution narrowly failed the next year.Threatening Property begins by examining the transformation of the North Carolina countryside in the period after the Civil War. The state sought to fund its postwar rebuilding efforts by raising revenue through taxes, pushing many small farmers to sell their land or increase their cash-crop production. Conditions worsened for farmers who didn't own their own land, and many moved to North Carolina's cities for work. In this context, middling whites became hyperaware of which folks climbed out of landless precarity. As Black farmers and urbanites acquired property at increasing rates, middling whites were alarmed.To illustrate that residential segregation was far from an inevitable solution to white anxiety, Herbin-Triant turns to politics. She argues that less racist alternatives for middling whites to achieve security were foreclosed by the decline of the state's Populist movement. Populists’ biracial politics were always problematic and racist on their own right, but their political strategies at least created opportunities to sidestep “the scarecrow of race” and focus on economic problems (64 – 65). During the 1890s and early 1900s, however, North Carolina's Democratic Party doubled down on racial animus to win over poor and middling white voters. In their effort to recruit new white voters, these political leaders played in important role in crafting the discourse that both rural and urban Black neighbors posed a threat to middling white people. Their rhetoric justified proposals for government-mandated residential segregation that were soon to come.Herbin-Triant's research reveals that segregation models from abroad proved crucial in determining the particular policies that middling whites rallied around. Middling whites’ agrarian champion, Clarence Poe, looked to South Africa's segregated countryside as a useful model for his own state. The book then examines two failed efforts to adopt such a system in North Carolina, first in the city of Winston and then in the countryside. In Winston, middling whites feared that Black tobacco workers moving into nearby homes might reduce the value of their homes. They pushed for and won a local residential segregation ordinance, which was, as noted earlier, overturned by the state Supreme Court. Around the same time, Poe pushed a rural segregation amendment to the state constitution, but larger planters’ need for exploitable Black labor played a crucial role in lining up votes against the initiative.Using newspapers, legal cases, and dozens of manuscript records, Threatening Property is a richly researched account that shows the historical significance of roads not taken that will interest scholars of urban history, political history, and southern history. Because the book is so clearly written and provides a concrete example of whiteness as a historical construct, it would make a useful case study for undergraduate teaching. With its fusion of urban and rural history in the Jim Crow South, Herbin-Triant has made an important contribution to the rich scholarship on the history of residential segregation in the United States

Geography · Political economy · Political science · Property (philosophy · Race (biology · Scholarship · Sociology · White (mutation · Gender Studies · History · Law · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies