William E. O’Brien. Landscapes of Exclusion

With Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South, William E. O’Brien has filled a void in the literature involving New Deal parks and recreation planning and regarding Jim Crow laws, practices, and restrictions on public lands in the American South. In this first detailed account of such practices, O’Brien illustrates how these restrictions denied southern African Americans entrance on federal and state properties that were intended to be shared park spaces, while also demonstrating how advocacy groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which filed federal lawsuits that demanded park integration, as well as religious leaders such as “W. J. Faulkner, president of Nashville’s Inter-Denominational Ministerial Alliance, an organization of African American clergy” who pressured “Tennessee’s Department of Conservation, wanting to know whether the new Montgomery Bell RDA would be accessible” to African Americans (76). State park officials and the National Park Service were able to identify a few racially segregated locations that could facilitate services for African American youth and adults on existing large reserves. The pressure forced park agencies and officials to designate other segregated spaces strategically in park areas to demonstrate that they were meeting separate but equal standards. O’Brien illustrates how the designated spaces grew each year after the mid-1930s. During “the life of the Civilian Conservation Corp” the Park Service “intensified its push for African American recreational access” (78) in order to prevent the discontinuation of the Resettlement Administration, and give the National Park Service greater control of the Recreational Demonstration Area (RDA).

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