Nathan Connolly, an assistant professor of history at Hopkins, launched his new book, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida, on Sunday at Red Emma’s Bookstore and Coffeehouse.
A South Florida native, Connolly witnessed the lingering effects of Jim Crow in the American South throughout his life. Growing up in the isolated suburb of Miramar, Connolly admitted to feeling a sense of disconnect from the rest of America, due to both geographic and racial isolation.
“I approached my work with a general desire to leave South Florida as fast as I could,” Connolly said.
It was only after he left Florida that Connolly began to take a deeper look at the political culture of segregation. He returned in 2003, when he began his research on this project with a visit to the Black Archives History and Research Foundation of South Florida, Inc.
A World More Concrete argues that real estate and property ownership expedited racial segregation, using the greater Miami area as a lens through which to view the Jim Crow South in the first half of the 20th century.
Divided into three parts, the book employs the analogy of a house to mirror the development of Jim Crow segregation; the first part is titled “Foundation,” the second “Construction” and the third “Renovation.”
“In the first section, I spend a lot of time talking about violence and Jim Crow violence especially. There was a way in which Jim Crow functioned that I think we don’t tend to appreciate,” Connolly said. “Jim Crow was not necessarily an imposition; it was a fact of negotiation, and it was a negotiation as a kind of regulation on the marketplace… There was a moment when you had to understand that exclusion of African-Americans was the dominant approach to the race problem.”
The second section reveals how Jim Crow was ultimately a profitable enterprise.
“The Federal Housing Administration essentially carved up much of the lands around the country… You can think of it as kind of land distribution,” Connolly said. “So, in any neighborhoods where you’d see African Americans in any kind of majority, you had massive amounts of foreclosures followed by whites coming in and buying the property and creating rental agreements.”
Connolly wrote about how blacks were ostracized in many communities and were also prohibited from using public spaces. In Miami, for example, blacks were barred from the beaches.
“They were not interested in integrating into white beaches per se, but rather they knew they wanted access to the parks, oceanfront and venues for which they as taxpayers already paid. This argument for taxpayer rights provided the foundation for Jim Crow’s evolving racial contract,” Connolly wrote in his book.
At this point, Connolly displayed a replica of a colored-only sign that read “COLORED WAITING ROOM.”
“[The sign] helps to capture what we think Jim Crow’s about and what it was actually about. These kinds of signs were the products of hard political work. Again, the default position on African Americans was exclusion. Up until 1945, African Americans did not have access to the beach at all,” Connolly said.
The third and final section deals with the initial desegregation of South Florida and the fact that the effects of Jim Crow laws still linger, even though Miami is renowned for its diversity; according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Hispanics or Latinos now comprise 65.6 percent of the city’s population, and blacks comprise 19 percent.
“The reality of anger that people are feeling… has to do with the actual suburban communities that never were able to lift the black working class into any environment of financial security. If you look at Miami’s suburbs today — places like Liberty City, Brownsville, Opa-Locka — they are by and large some of the most disempowered communities in the city,” Connolly said.
Connolly also attributed this anger to another phenomenon.
“One of the great ironies of the urban renewal age is that white ownership of black-occupied properties actually went up in the 1970s,” Connolly said. “More whites own land that black people live in now than was true in 1935.”
Even while the real estate and tourism industries touted the region’s multiculturalism, however, segregation remained prevalent.
“The idea was that Miami is the very last place you could go to experience a kind of white consumption and white safety, and then once you went to the islands, you’d get into some interesting kind of foreign territory, and tantalizingly so,” Connolly said. “So, you can go...[to] the black side of town, but by and large you should know that there are going to be all-white spaces available to you at any given time in Miami.”
Connolly holds the belief that at this point in time, segregation was involuntary, maintaining that economics instead often govern in which part of town a person or family will live. This is an issue that transcends South Florida and extends across America, prevailing in Baltimore in particular.
“I can give you a host of examples where my wife and I would be out with a realtor, and they would look at us and say ‘Okay, here’s a black couple, we should make sure we find them a black neighborhood,’” Connolly said. “The minute they find out that I work at Hopkins, they would immediately try and change their itinerary and show us other apartments or houses in different parts of town... There’s actual steering that still very much goes on.”
The issue with these residential lines that result from economic segmentations is that they make it nearly impossible to break these trends, simply because rent is cheaper in the poorer parts of town.
However, profit margins that landlords obtain in these communities are higher than those in more affluent neighborhoods, as landlords can afford to put less money into the upkeep of the buildings in these districts.
“Particularly when black and brown people are living predominately in those neighborhoods, you just don’t invest as much,” Connolly said.
Connolly holds a Ph.D. in history, sits on the Executive Board for the Center for Africana Studies and is a Co-Director of the Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship Program.
