Behind the Second Veil

In the last few decades, scholars of African American history have lifted W. E. B. DuBois's "sombre veil of color" that lay between the white and black worlds of the Jim Crow south, revealing a vibrant world of struggle and survival. ¹ But behind the color barrier lay a second veil of class, woven by elite African Americans to hide the perceived immorality and poverty of the black working class from prying eyes. In her exhaustive study of post-emancipation Durham, North Carolina, Leslie Brown pulls aside the veil of race, but gives us only glances through the second veil of class. African Americans defined class status primarily through the ideology and practice of bourgeois respectability. Public displays of respectability hid not only the working class from sight, but also diminished differences within the middle class and elite ranks of black Durham. What contemporaries saw in Durham was a remarkable community of respectable upbuilders who erected a prosperous and stable façade of black success in the wake of the Civil War. Brown meticulously shows us how that façade was constructed, but not fully what it hid.

In her opening chapters, Brown describes a New South city that was founded after emancipation and thus relatively untainted by the legacy of slavery. At the close of the Civil War, large numbers of African Americans began to settle in Durham, many of them women and children, initially in a community they provocatively called "Hayti." This community became a safe space where an emerging entrepreneurial elite built churches, schools, and protective associations. Brown's aspiring class, a term she borrows from Michele Mitchell, was not part of an older black aristocracy, but like their New South white counterparts gained their status through property ownership and entrepreneurship. ² But the relative stability and prosperity they found "behind the veil" in Black Durham had a cost. Although segregation was good for black business, it marked the race as inferior and cut off opportunities to benefit from public works and city infrastructure. Brown makes it clear that this cost was paid most dearly by those who fell below the aspiring class. In particular, the large female workforce in the city's tobacco factories worked grueling jobs for little pay, reflecting how gender and racial segregation in industry reinforced gender and racial hierarchies in the surrounding community. Segregation on streetcars mirrored segregation on shop floors.

As lawmakers codified Jim Crow at the end of the century, the aspiring class was unable to hold on to the political power they had gained during Reconstruction. In 1888 Durham's whites attacked black Republicans, burning several African American schools, tangible symbols of black equality. By the turn of the century Durham's political landscape reflected the wider terror that gripped the state of North Carolina. Building on Glenda Gilmore's study, Brown emphasizes the power of the 1898 Wilmington riot when white Democrats wrested political power from Republicans by promoting the myth of black male brutality and white female innocence. Throughout North Carolina, whites fabricated stories of rapes and then lynched black men to "protect" their white sisters and daughters. Like Gilmore, Brown highlights the extent to which political power was tied to gender as a result of this tactic. ³ But Durham, unlike downstate Wilmington, saw little violence and, after 1898, became known for its racial peace. Brown, like other scholars of the nadir, views African Americans' retreat from formal politics as an "inward-looking strategy of community" rather than an abandonment of racial struggle (p. 74).

Durham was distinct not only in its relative racial peace. It was also a city of women, at least demographically. Brown traces female workers from countryside to city as the dominant migrant labor group that populated the city's tobacco factories. Here Brown does take us behind the veil of class to glimpse familiar forms of female resistance. As factory workers and domestic servants...