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.