Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South (review)

As Leslie Brown is quick to note Durham, North Carolina is one of the few cities in North America in which W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington could come together and agree. Writing in 1912, both Washington and Du Bois praised the African American sections of Durham, North Carolina for the opportunities and economic advances seen by the city's black residents in the first half-century since emancipation. Utilizing the concept of 'Upbuilding,' defined by Du Bois as the process of "social and economic development of black communities after slavery, upbuilding was the literal and figurative construction of the structures African Americans used to climb out of slavery" (p 10), Brown explores the process of creating successful African American urban communities in the face of Jim Crow segregation. Brown notes that the imposition of segregation and the creation of Black Durham both provided a basis for black community engagement with wider normative society and forced a reformulation of black identity and "accordingly that [the African American community] sort out the meaning of gender and class in determining the roles that each one should play" (p 10) in greater Durham. It is the unique view of the process of upbuilding through the lens of gender and class which marks Upbuilding Black Durham as a useful scholarly contribution. While there has been an explosion of academic work on the creation of black communities in the early 20th Century (e.g. Hahn 2003; Litwack 1998; Pomerantz 1996) much of this work misses the subtle ways Jim Crow segregation forced "black people to encounter the color line differently" (p 11) and that segregation "caused tension in [men and women's] relationships with each other" (p 11) through assaults on black womanhood and the denial of black manhood. This work explores those relationships, the tensions, compromises and frustrations wives, husbands, children and black communities endured in the face of American Apartheid (p 11). In this way, the concept of upbuilding is not only useful for thinking about the creation of black urban life in early 20th Century US society; up-building also becomes a metaphor for the ways black institutions became central in 'upbuilding' gender and class roles and the ways those concepts inform African American political, cultural, social and economic life well into the 21st Century.

The meat of the book begins in Chapter One with a description of the brief interregnum after the end of Reconstruction and before the imposition of segregation, when black people had a taste of freedom's fruit. Seen through the eyes of the African American family, the Spauldings, this chapter traces moments of triumph and frustration in an increasingly violent South. As Brown notes, "the end of slavery provided African Americans with the possibility of benefiting from the fluidity—or chaos—of emancipation, but white hostility caught up with the people of freedom road" (p 53). Chapters Two and Three argue that as white society legally and violently imposed its will on Black Durham, the African American community began to create economic, social, and cultural institutions to meet those challenges. Leslie Brown rightly points to the Wilmington Race Riot as a seminal event in the lives of black people in all of North Carolina. The Wilmington Race Riot served as a warning to blacks across the South, but also served to motivate black communities to organize in the face of racism. In the process a conservative approach to race relations emerged amongst the business class in Durham. This is perhaps best illustrated through the "North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association"—an African American owned insurance company located in Durham. "The Mutual" as it was known, had the overarching goal to "make financial capital out of social capital and in so doing to garner political capital" (p 117) and strove to uplift black communities financially, culturally and...