Race and Class Friction in North Carolina Neighborhoods: How Campaigns for Residential Segregation Law Divided Middling and Elite Whites in Winston-Salem and North Carolina's Countryside, 1912–1915

In 1913, W. E. B. Du Bois looked back on the deal African Americans had made with white southerners and declared it a mess of pottage. In return for giving up claims to political rights in the South, African Americans were supposed to have been given "educational and economic rights"—that is, schools and jobs. In 1895, Booker T. Washington had brokered this deal, urging white southerners to offer work opportunity to "these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth." But southern whites had not carried out their side of the bargain, Du Bois argued. As it became clear that the schools that educated black children would remain "wretched and inadequate," observers comforted themselves that "at least the economic rights of the Negro are secure." Arguing that not even these were safe, Du Bois pointed to recent developments in North Carolina.¹

In North Carolina, as in other parts of the post–Civil War South, determined black farmers had acquired significant amounts of land.² African Americans in the Piedmont had opportunities not available in many parts of the South. They earned money for the purchase of farms through skilled jobs producing bright leaf tobacco and through off-farm jobs like stemming in tobacco factories, and they found credit to be at least somewhat available to them.³ "Has this [the success of black farmers] caused any rejoicing in North Carolina?" Du Bois queried:

I regret to say it has not. On the contrary, it has led to widespread proposal for the most vital attack on the economic rights of the Negro ever put forward in the United States. Let no one misconceive the significance of this. The Negro was asked to give up his political rights for the sake of advance. He finds that with the giving up of his political rights his educational rights are curtailed, the right to work is increased but inadequately, his right to hold property in cities is being questioned, and now, finally, there is a movement in the South to curtail his right to own agricultural land. This movement has not started with an ignorant agitator of the [Coleman L.] Blease and [James K.] Vardaman and [Benjamin R.] Tillman type. Its sponsor is Clarence Poe, editor of the Progressive Farmer, and a man representing in many ways the best traditions of the South.⁴

Clarence H. Poe's "vital attack on the economic rights of the Negro" was an attempt to segregate the North Carolina countryside after the model of South Africa, where black people were allowed to own land only in designated areas. Poe led his campaign for rural segregation from his perch as editor of the Progressive Farmer, a farm journal widely read among a group Du Bois described as the South's "most intelligent farmers"—generally, small white farmers with an interest in learning the latest scientific agricultural techniques in order to maximize efficiency. Poe and his readers wanted not a return to slave-run plantations but a new model of smaller farms run by educated, forward-looking farmers. Poe's campaign encouraged moderates on the so-called race question to turn to a program that sharply limited opportunity for African Americans—and led to an upswing in racism—as, according to Du Bois, "a growing mass of white farmers" demanded residential segregation.⁵

Just before Poe began his campaign to segregate the countryside, a number of southern cities had started passing ordinances establishing separate residential areas for white and black people. Baltimore's city council was the first to pass such an ordinance, in 1910. Several cities in Virginia—Ashland, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Richmond, and Roanoke—did the same between 1911 and 1913, as did Greenville, South Carolina, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1912. Atlanta passed a residential segregation ordinance in 1913, as did Greensboro, North Carolina...