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

Historian Leslie Brown tells the story of Durham, North Carolina’s black community in the years between emancipation and the 1930s. Brown points out that because Durham was just a small railroad station up through the Civil War, it lacked an entrenched planter elite and provided a relatively blank slate for community building on both sides of the color line. As the tobacco industry expanded, it drew labor migrants, including a disproportionate number of black females. Other free and freed blacks arrived to start businesses serving the budding black enclave in Hayti; segregation ensured their customer base. Though there was some opportunity for social mobility in the decades before the turn of the century, class lines gradually hardened. Billed as the “capital of the black middle class,” Durham actually hosted a black community deeply stratified by class and gender by the early twentieth century.

In addition to material wealth, another important class marker became a family’s distance from an ideal gender role where women’s outside labor was not required to sustain the household economically. For the majority of Durham’s black residents, poverty made this ideal unattainable as women’s wages from the factories or domestic work helped to support their families, while also providing a crucial market for black businesses. Class status also paralleled the amount of daily contact that black families had with whites and the accompanying injuries of racism. While factory workers and domestics usually labored under white authority, black business owners, ministers, and their families had the option of remaining within a black world. It was no coincidence, then, that the elite ideal of keeping females at home also kept them away from whites and the sexual danger that had prevailed during slavery.

Black male elites in control of institutions such as North Carolina Mutual and Mechanics and Farmers Bank also attempted to control other members of the black community and relations with whites. Even relatively elite black females who attained professional positions at the Mutual were subject to their bosses’ constant surveillance. Their protective and patriarchal nature was in part a reaction to racial terror in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that wreaked havoc on Southern black communities in Wilmington, Tulsa, and Atlanta. This patriarchy also grew out of a desire to maintain an image of propriety, respectability, and morality, at least among the top strata of the black community, to counter the negative stereotypes held by whites. Their controlling tendencies aside, Durham’s black male elites managed to build upon peaceful race relations to obtain assistance from whites to build Lincoln Hospital and Hillside High School, one of the first black public high schools in the state. Members of Durham’s black elite retained some influence in formal politics and still managed to cast votes after disfranchisement, even registering some of their female counterparts after the Nineteenth Amendment passed. The institutions built by elites also provided secure employment and a chance for female and younger employees to engage in more daring efforts through clubs, churches, and other organizations.

The segmentation of occupations by race, gender, and class undermined labor unity in Durham, making it more difficult for the working class to launch its own efforts for change. Even when working and middle-class blacks joined to support a cause like the NAACP-backed campaign to equalize teaching salaries, they often found themselves at odds with Durham’s black elite. In some ways, these clashes worked to the benefit of elites, who could then portray their strategies as the moderate option to the white community. Indeed, Brown argues that the many divisions among Durham’s black community actually helped the struggle by producing multiple strategies and lines of attack. She also points out the cumulative nature of community contributions: More conservative, earlier generations established the institutions and foundations from which their descendants could launch a more radical assault on...