White supremacists determined what African Americans could do and where
they could go in the Jim Crow South, but they were less successful in
deciding where black people could live because different groups of white
supremacists did not agree on the question of residential segregation.
In Threatening Property, Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant investigates
early-twentieth-century campaigns for residential segregation laws in
North Carolina to show how the version of white supremacy supported by
middle-class white people differed from that supported by the elites.
Class divides prevented Jim Crow from expanding to the extent that it
would require separate neighborhoods for black and white southerners as
in apartheid South Africa.
Herbin-Triant details the backlash against the economic successes of
African Americans among middle-class whites, who claimed that they
wished to protect property values and so campaigned for residential
segregation laws both in the city and the countryside, where their
actions were modeled on South Africa's Natives Land Act. White elites
blocked these efforts, primarily because it was against their financial
interest to remove the black workers that they employed in their homes,
farms, and factories. Herbin-Triant explores what the split over
residential segregation laws reveals about competing versions of white
supremacy and about the position of middling whites in a region
dominated by elite planters and businessmen. An illuminating work of
social and political history, Threatening Property puts class front
and center in explaining conflict over the expansion of segregation laws
into private property.
