Elizabeth Herbin-Triant’s Threatening Property: Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods examines white North Carolinians’ efforts to control the economic advancement of their black neighbors. This work is the most recent contribution to the study of race and property ownership in specific urban centers. The author’s work on Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is another case study on residential segregation efforts, joining works that include Robert Self’s study of postwar Oakland (American Babylon, 2010), LeeAnn Land’s and Kevin Kruse’s respective histories of de facto segregation in Atlanta (The Culture of Property, 2011, and White Flight, 2013), N. D. B. Connolly’s study of cross-racial property owner coalition in Miami (A World More Concrete, 2014), and Kevin McGruder’s documentation of the rise of black Harlem (Race and Real Estate, 2015). Herbin-Triant’s study reveals two findings unique to Winston-Salem’s segregationist efforts. First, the author found class-based nuances among the region’s white population, particularly in regard to their public comments on residential segregation. She explains that whereas “white southerners generally supported a set of policies that fit under the banner of white supremacy … we must be careful not to overstate the extent of their agreement with one another” (2). African American farmers in the Upper South made significant property gains between 1870 and 1910. Herbin-Triant parses that for middling white residents of North Carolina, specifically in the Piedmont region with its relatively high black population, this advancement of black farmers and industrial workers created a backlash of fear. Whereas white elite and middling class members viewed property ownership as a racial privilege, by the 1910s the middling class mobilized to actively protect the advantages they gained from property ownership through pursuing de jure (legally sanctioned) segregation. Herbin-Triant explains that middling whites “viewed property ownership as the best route to stability and prosperity for their families” and that black property ownership meant there would be less room for white people to do the same (5). Simultaneously, the author argues that although white elites saw black people as valued workers and not competitors, they did employ inflammatory rhetoric to “stoke the racism of poor and middling whites for political gain” (12).

The second unique finding of the author’s regional study is the corresponding rural support of de jure segregation. Although North Carolina was one of several states that enacted “urban residential segregation at the behest of middling whites, [it] found itself at the center of the campaign for rural residential segregation” (16). This movement was principally led by Clarence Poe, a strong proponent and eventual leader of North Carolina’s rural segregation plan. As African Americans increasingly transitioned from sharecroppers to farm owners, Poe and his followers clung to Jeffersonian ideals of agrarianism as the means of democracy—a form of democracy, though explicitly for and of the white man. Although white urban and rural residents of western North Carolina did not manage a legal coup, they were undeterred in their efforts to entrench residential segregation. From the 1920s through the 1960s, Poe and his fellow segregationists successfully championed a host of zoning ordinances and “urban renewal” projects to encourage de facto segregation. Poe even developed his own eight-hundred-acre subdivision which he called “Longview Gardens.” Whereas he articulated in a 1939 interview that “‘neither the price of the homesites nor the building restriction are such to present any family of normal income from enjoying the exceptional environment,’” covenant laws specified “non-Caucasians could not own or occupy property in the neighborhood” (243–244).

The work reaches back and frames property ownership, segregation, as well as racialized economic and political friction within the context of the long aftermath of slavery, while principally drawing on the records of intellectual thought espoused by elite and middling whites. A constant character throughout the narrative, Clarence Poe provides many quotations, opinions, and perspectives from both his personal papers as well as his publications. In addition, the author draws extensively from other contemporary published sources, including political speeches, legal cases, meeting minutes, and almost forty newspapers and periodicals. Threatening Property also includes a variety of images, including census manuscripts, insurance maps and zoning maps of Winston-Salem neighborhoods, political cartoons, and a variety of photographs. Although limited to a narrow time frame and a singular city, Herbin-Triant’s work is applicable to many upper division classrooms studying postbellum race relations, American legal and intellectual history, the “New South,” urban history, populism, and local history.