 I want to just let you all know that the lips, our lips lecture are all recorded by our wonderful Jay and they are all up on G-staff's YouTube, so if you missed a lip topic you want to I don't know what the exact thing is, but this video will start towards G-staff's YouTube and you'll find our lips videos up on there. Alright, that's the... So today our pre-authored webinar discusses the recently published works, but it's considered in the United States a strong creative regional history of property, finance, and cultural heritage post-civil war. You can authorize that detail if you want double-edgedness of that American experience under both small-scale and large-scale systemic progression. And so to Ainsley Erickson is our trusted moderator for today's panel, and so she will introduce the speakers. But to introduce Ainsley... Ainsley is a associate professor of history and education at the Teachers College here at Longgate University and a affiliated faculty member of the Quality Department of History. Her research focuses on schooling in 20th and 20th U.S. cities in the West Coast, with a particular interest in how racism and capitalism shape education and equality, and how communities contest this equality. Next month, Longgate University Press will be releasing her own book, New Collective Volume, Educating Harlem, A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community with Ernest Moral. Please. Excited to show them to you. They're beautiful. And I think that they're all from Longgate University Press. You can find them directly on CU Compress' website, and I think there also might be flyers here to help people buy them possibly even with a discount. So we'll do that. Advertise a business first. So I am pleased to get to be here and think about this notion of double-edgedness. And I was thinking this morning about the title for this session and talking with a friend and colleague, Karen Taylor, who's a public historian in Harlem and the founder and co-director of the organization while we were still here. And she and I were talking about something else also related to the history of African-American life in the U.S. And she said some beautiful sentences that I asked her permission to write down because I thought they captured in a lot of ways this phrase, this term double-edgedness. She said, you have all the time, this beautiful movement and energy of the people, and then this horrifying suppression and this violence. You have this every day in Black America. And we continue to talk about how you don't have one without the other in this country, in this history. And so that really is what we're here to think about in the context of finance and the work that Black women did to create financial networks for themselves and their communities in thinking about residential segregation. And it's interrelatedness with the quest for Black land ownership. And in the idea of the ghetto as a place that is, as Lance Freeman's book helps us see, both a haven and a hell at once in various configurations over the 20th century. So I want to thank Karen for those great and timely sentences. And I want to move on now to introduce the panelists. I'll do that in the order in which they will speak. And each person is going to speak for about 12 minutes. And then I'll ask a couple of questions of the panel as a group, and then we'll open it to Q and A for everyone. Betsy Perventrion is a graduate of Columbia's PhD program of history. Her advisor was Eric Loner. And she is currently an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Threatening property is her first book. She has published scholarly articles in the Journal of Southern History and Agricultural History and op-eds and venues including the Washington Post's Made by History Law. Shannette Garrett Scott is an associate professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. Her research focuses on race, gender, and capitalism in the late 20th and 19th and early 20th century. Her book, Banking on Freedom, recently won the Association of Black Women Historians Latisha Woods Brown Prize. Congratulations for the best book published in Black Women's History. She has worked on a few short projects that include free women, racial capitalism, and industrial sewing schools, and another on the economic activism of the Dallas Negro Housewives League in the 1930s and 1940s. Her next book project tentatively titled Horror Island will explore peonage and bootlegging in the 1920s South. And you can follow her on Twitter at ebunrebel, e-b-o-n-r-e-b-e-l. That's the handle, right, crucially. And finally we'll hear from Lance Freeman, who is a professor in the urban planning program at Columbia University in New York City here. His research focuses on affordable housing, gentrification, ethnic and racial stratification, housing markets, and a relationship between the built environment and well-being. Professor Freeman teaches courses on community development, housing policy, and research methods. And for me it's been a pleasure to have a chance to read each of these books, and I'm thrilled to get to be in conversation with these fine authors. So I'll turn it first to Betsy. Thank you all. I just wanted to point out a few reasons why people might want to move out of this neighborhood straight. You see the houses are on stilts because the creek here is prone to flooding. There are mosquitoes, there are snakes. It's near the R.J. Reynolds tobacco factory, so there's sort of pollution from that. There are railroad tracks coming near this neighborhood. So I just wanted to start out with this as kind of the part of the story that I'm telling. So I'm looking at laws for attempts to put into law residential segregation, and you can see kind of an ad, essentially, for residential segregation laws here. And this is referring to Louisville. So it's saying vote for segregation, right? So people got behind this, and I wanted to understand why, right? I wanted to get the people and the ideas behind policy, right? So who is it who wanted residential segregation laws? And I, um, residential segregation laws ordinances weren't more successful, right? Given the fact that there was so much, um, there was so much support for other types of segregation, I mean the segregation of public accommodation. So, you know, um, theaters, buses, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, given that, that so many southerners were behind that, why is it that residential segregation laws, even though the cities were undone, right? And so some of the cities where residential segregation laws were put into place were Baltimore, that's the first to do so in 1910. And it can plus the whole bunch of them, a couple more are enriched in Winston-Salem, Greenboro, Atlanta, Louisville, St. Louis. But in some cases, the states themselves got rid of these laws, um, like in the case of North Carolina, which is the state that I focus on. And in cases where the states themselves didn't undo these laws, the U.S. Supreme Court did with the case of Buchanan, New Orleans, which was decided in 1917. So in trying to get this question of why residential segregation laws weren't more, you know, successful, I mean that's a strange term to use, I started by looking at who supported these laws and who didn't, right? And I found that it's a group of people that I call middling whites who are behind these laws. Middling because they're kind of precariously in the old class, right? They're fearful of defining a status. And I found that elites didn't put their full support behind residential segregation laws because it wasn't in their economic interest to do so. And so I ended up making this argument that, um, what middling whites and elites wanted out of white supremacy differed, right? Like some historians have talked about a solid self, right? This idea that all white supremacists kind of see things in the same way that there's this monolith, right? And I think that that's not the case, right? I'm arguing that for middling whites, what they want out of white supremacy is protection from competition with blacks over jobs, over, um, over housing, generally over economic opportunity. Whereas elites want access to black labor, right? They want cheap labor that they can exploit. And residential segregation laws are going to be in their interest because this is a, you know, these laws would take workers who they consider to be valuable and put them out of reach. So anyway, those are the arguments that I make in the book. And then I just wanted to give you a few more images and point out some of the examples that I focus on. One person who's a key figure in the book is RJ Reynolds, who's in the photograph here. He put Winston Dale on the map, right? With his tobacco factory. And the big product here was the candle cigarette which came out in 1913. And the reason I put this ad up here is so that you can think about his relationship to middling whites, right? So even while he wants these black workers here in his factories, he's going to use his black labor, he also wants to sell his cigarettes to middling whites, right? And that's why these this ad focused so much on price, right? To cigarette smokers in America who smoke five cents, ten cents. He's very focused on the cost of these and the fact that they're cheap. So he's not looking to turn off this group of consumers. He doesn't care about residential segregation himself because blacks aren't moving into his neighborhood, right? This is his home in Winston Dale. This is an exclusively elite neighborhood. And so an elite person like Reynolds, he's a white supremacist, right? He has this hierarchy in which blacks are at the bottom and they play an important part in his system that he's a part of. You can see this black room, right, holding his child. He's quite happy to have blacks around him, you know, surrounding him as long as they're sort of in the proper place at the bottom of his hierarchy. And, you know, as long as they're not blacks moving into his neighborhood as equals, which there weren't, you know, he's not interested in segregation ordinance. So he'll do things like help with the ironing of lawyers to combat Winston Salem's residential segregation ordinance. And he'll be the person that the Chief Justice kind of be thinking about what he rules against Winston Salem's residential segregation ordinance, which I'll get to in a moment. Then the group that's pushing the ordinances forward, as I mentioned, is Middling Whites. These are people who generally own their own homes, but they're possibly in danger of looting their homes, right? They're thinking about economic opportunity as a zero-sum game, right? They're very fearful that as blacks rise, their own group will decline. Here's a quotation from a newspaper talking about why this group of people supported Winston Salem's residential segregation ordinance. And, you know, what they're saying is that blacks can pay more for property than they can, right? They're thinking of themselves as average sort of in economic status. And they need to come up with some system that will, you know, that will give them the advantage over economically successful blacks. So we have the segregation ordinance in the city, right, with Winston Salem being an example. Then there's also, at the same time, an effort to add residential segregation to the North Carolina State Constitution that's put forward by Clarence Poe, the editor of the depressive farmer. So he's a person who thinks of himself as speaking from Middling Whites for small white farmers. He sees the trends, like he has articles in his journal, which is the most widely read farm journal in the South, noting the fact that black farmers are, you know, buying farmland at higher rates than black farmers. And again, he's anxious about this, but he's not happy about it. And he presents adding an amendment to the state constitution as a reform, as a progressive reform that will improve the situation for small white farmers, right? It will give them the chance to access farmlands, to build these sort of rich and vibrant white farm communities where they will find that so many of their neighbors are African-Americans. And he looks to South Africa as an example, particularly the Native Land Act. And he spoke with the architect of the Native Land Act and was really inspired by the idea that you can limit access to land. And so this amendment that he's pushing forward allows the majority of the presidents of an area to vote to restrict land sales to the other race. So those are kind of two quick examples that I look at in the book. I wanted to just mention the case of state B Darnell, where here we have a black tobacco worker who breaks Winston-Salem's ordinance, moving into a light neighborhood. And so the state Supreme Court rules against the ordinance, actually, ruling in favor of this man, because of technicality, but focused on people like R.J. Reynolds, saying that we need to retain this group of laborers, and then also talking about segregation in the countryside, again pointing to this need to hold on to a group of value laborers. So here I just want to get people thinking a bit about racial capitalism and elite's role in it. And so elites are sort of pushing for their supporting race to them. They're stirring up racism, because racism is a key part of capitalism to getting this class of workers who they can underpay. Yet, when middling whites sort of grab onto that and try to run forward with something like presidential segregation law, which seems to be a natural extension of the racism that elites are pushing for, they kind of draw this line in the sand and they say, you know, this isn't benefiting us, right? So I do then look at, you know, obviously these presidential segregation laws were spelt, but there are other ways, obviously, to bring about presidential segregation. So I look at some of the other things that people turn to. For example, that's Clarence Poe's house in the Raleigh area on the left. So he created this subdivision to which he attached restrictive covenants. Of course, there's redlining, so the federal government steps in to help out segregationists who are committed to having a segregated city. And then, of course, there's, you know, urban renewal, highway construction, et cetera. And I just wanted to leave you with a quick image of Eastwinds in today, right? So even as these segregationists didn't get their laws, that, you know, their goal was achieved, and that East Winston is a place that, and I talk about this so much in the book about today, but East Winston is a place with, you know, it's a food desert. It's cut off from jobs and other types of economic opportunity. And there's a study by Raj Chetty that shows that the county that Winston is sailing is in is just below these two counties in South Dakota, so at the very bottom of the list of places where there's economic opportunity. And I think that it's presidential segregation history is a part of that story. So thank you. His relationship with his customers, with his regulators and professionals, Raj Chetty deals with finance about some different of finance companies, including one that was right here in Harlem. So I'm going to leave my talk here. I'm going to try to, you know, frame this talk within the experiences of these two women. So Cherry, she hesitated a moment before she stepped onto the dusty dirt street. What am I doing? She thought to herself, suspended in the streetcar door between her old life that lay behind her and stepping into this awful new place. The smell of this new place, the noise, the people over people, so many moving, pressing, glitting, yes, buzzing now, like flies rising from the mound's poor shit lying in the street. This was 1885 Manhattan in the heart of the Tenderloin, and Cherry paused for a while, the mostly empty seats of the streetcar begging. She glanced back. What would she return to? Eight dead babies and two handfuls of ears, all of them taken from her. One who never took to her breast, another who managed to tattle a few steps, a sweet girl, the color of two young crusts who crawled backwards west of heart. No, there was no there, back in Petersburg, Virginia. So Cherry drew in her breath and planted her feet on the unforgiving ground. She dared not go back at a tiny hand prince the baby's breath, misting them currently off the streetcar windows. Eight dead babies calling her back home, who hesitated a moment before she stepped onto the wooden floor, worn slick by hundreds of dancers, black men with even blacker birdcork faces, clowns, singers like herself, even a man riding a one-wheel cycle who seemed to divide gravity. The stage lights hummed, the people murmured, pressed tightly together in the hard wooden theater seats. They sounded like a sudden roar of wind rushing jostling the leaves. This was Harlem, 1916, and who paused for a while, the full of fear beckoning suspended there between the noisy backstage going on, the expected audience just beyond the lip of the big velvet curtains and the quiet space at the center of the stage, a pocket that she could pour her voice into. So Lulu drew in her breath and planted her feet on the expected floor. As she stepped into the light, darkness swallowed up the side of the stage where she had stood only a moment ago, she did not look back at the emptiness, the nowhere place, hoping on to silence. So Charity Jones and Lulu Robinson Jones, her daughter-in-law, had very different experiences as Michael Winnon, who moved to New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for Winnon, the typical factors that pushed or pulled them to cities like New York included a quest for self-determination or self-definition, important in common. They shared not just Charity's only living, surviving child, Charity's son became Lulu's husband, but they also shared a devotion to the independent order of St. Luke, a secret society founded in the mid-1800s by a free black woman for black women. Now, St. Luke would become one of the most successful black controlled and one of the very few women controlled financial institutions in the country. At its peak in the 1920s, the order boasted 90,000 members in more than 20 states, nearly 200 employees, almost all of them women of bank, and assets equivalent to $31 million in modern day dollars. In my brief time of this afternoon, I will talk about an adventure that involved both Charity Jones and Lulu Robinson Jones, the St. Luke Finance Corporation. So, headquartered in Harlem and organized by the New York District of the Independent Order of St. Luke and the late 19th teens, the St. Luke Finance Corporation reflects the various opportunities that opened for women in U.S. finance by the 1920s, both the luxe dreams and hard-scrubber realities of newcomers to New York City, as well as well established communities with groups in the cities, in the city generations deep, shaped the mission of the St. Luke Finance Corporation. By the 1920s, a complex tapestry made up of thousands of black controlled financial institutions, including formal banks along with thrifts, insurance companies, fraternals, savings clubs, investment associations, and even finance companies controlled millions of African-Americans dollars and expanded the boundaries of their dreams. During the first rate, migration around the world's world won, however, and increasingly urban and northern black population taxed the capacities of these financial institutions, revealing the tapestry as frayed and worn in places and the boundaries fixed. For the St. Luke Finance Corporation, the strategy it chose to promote amplified black New Yorker's anxieties about black women's bodies and urban spaces is investment policies reflected conflicting attitudes that saw black women as both the victims and the sources of social disorder as both in need of financial protection as well as new economic opportunities. Working women, however, rejected efforts to release their behavior and these are choices. They weary of pitches that promoted investment as a marker of citizenship, but implied and sometimes stated that men were the proper producers and consumers of these investment products and these opportunities. But natural institutions that women led and controlled experimented with innovative ways to raise capital, but they really struggled with, somebody came up with struggled, with experience and the intractable problems of racial and sexual discrimination. So I explore these angles in my book, maybe on freedom, but here I just talk about when the St. Luke Finance, one of the St. Luke Finance Corporation's projects, and that is St. Luke's Hall. So the corporation, St. Luke's, St. Luke's Finance Corporation experimented with creative financing schemes to raise money to buy and renovate the St. Luke's Hall here in Hartwick and Harding. Ultimately, however, the Hall of St. Luke's failed to sustain the economic security envisioned by the workers, the entrepreneurs, the professionals and activists who made of both its membership and animated its efforts. It failed in part because it inadequately reckoned with structural barriers that made it difficult for black women and black communities to maximize these new investment opportunities. It failed to reckon too with backlash from neighborhood groups and pastors committed to protecting what they imagined was a flower of black womenhood. So in 1960, Dennis Rice took the helm as president of the Harlem St. Luke's. The Harlem St. Luke's had $3.45 in its coffers and more than $400 in debt. Now, Rice may have been the former head at the wheel, but an ambitious group of women controlled the leaders. In 1918, 21 members incorporated the St. Luke Finance Corporation and set their sights on investments in real estate. Women made up six of the seven members of the board. Louis Robinson Jones, who was a widow by 1909, chaired the advisory committee. The revived Harlem St. Luke's turn to charity Jones to help recruit new members. She solidified her status as, quote, the mother of St. Luke in New York, end quote. Membership in the New York district soared and in the midst of the great migration. It was not Jones's charms alone that fuels her resurgence in St. Luke's Harlem membership. The square focus on addressing the needs of Black women sparked the resurgence as well. Robinson Jones understood the new Negro woman very well. New Negro women tested and expanded the boundaries of modern Black womanhood, and they and their families desperately needed housing. Robinson Jones understood this dilemma intimately, I suspect. I have a suspect and cannot know the certainty because Robinson Jones was hard to find in the record. In the midst of late 1910s, like most women, she was rightly struggling with squalid housing conditions, skyrocketing rents, over-policing and overcrowding and segregated sections of the city. Like other Negro women, she tapped into traditional avenues and sometimes found them wanting. Robinson Jones understood that the New York innovative order of St. Luke members saw them not just as members, but as potential investors. An opera singer of some renown, she also understood the business of leisure in Harlem. She arranged the theaters that combined enterprise and entertainment. For example, she organized a fundraising reception at the Manhattan Casino in James, East Europe's orchestra provided for music. In just a few months, the Harlem St. Luke's purchased a former convent on West 130th Street. In 1921, it bought a 24-room apartment building on West 129th Street. In 1924, it purchased a combination apartment building, restaurant, and retail store on West 139th Street, just west of Stuyves World. So by 1929, in little more than a decade, the New York St. Luke's went from being nearly $400 in debt to having more than $4.5 million in assets as a conservative estimate of modern-day dollars. So the $1,000, $5,000 loan that it got from St. Luke's made, and his swanky affairs, though, could not explain on their own the dramatic rise in the Harlem St. Luke's fortunes. A little bit of creative fundraising, the dancing, certainly helped. In 1921, it remodeled its first acquisition, the former convent, on 130th Street, into the St. Luke's Hall, the New York St. Luke's District's care quarters. It spent the equivalent of a million dollars to remodel the hall. Located in the heart of Harlem's black community, St. Luke's Hall became an important center for business, community activities, and entertainment, and vice. So Reverend Richard Baldwin, a first and manual in the church, called out St. Luke's Hall as a place where, quote, bootnegging bold prostitution and calories in, quote, belied its stately name. Frederick Asbury Cullen, the Reverend of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, and Dr. Father of Harlem Renaissance Poet, Count Cullen, called St. Luke's Hall nothing less than one of the, quote, hell holes of God, end quote. It is also very likely that tenants in the restaurant, stores, office spaces, and the few apartments that were maintained in the St. Luke's Hall ran numbers games, an extra-legal and highly profitable lottery gambling game. As the country slid toward economic decline, the board's failure to sell all of the corporation's stock, left it under-capitalized and with inadequate funds, to help keep the capital flowing, the advisory board instituted a bond offering. So these member investors you would purchase, let's just note, in five dollar denominations and the finance company would repay you at 5% interest once a year for five years. So the refunding notes, that's what they were called, also doubled its membership certificates. So holders became members of the New York District of the Independent Order of St. Luke and they loaned money to the order at the same time. The district raised the equivalent of $1.2 million from this offering. The incredible amounts raised, the incredible amounts raised, highlight the demonetization of investing in black communities and the commitment of the working and middle classes to self-help. The large amounts might also reveal some duplicitous extra-legal financialization. The New York District's membership numbers did grow during the mid-1920s, but it seems very unlikely that its few thousand members purchased such a significant number of notes in such a short time. The notes may have been such a huge for money borrowed from a numbers banker such as Casper Holstein to whom millions of dollars flow by in cash flow each month. And then some of the squantle members complained to city officials about the New York District's finances. The country's economic downturn, coupled with investigations into the UNIA finances a few years before, left the creative finance screen schemes of lack of term groups vulnerable to scrutiny. In 1928, the state attorney general began an investigation into the order. After two hearings, a judge determined the order insolvent and appointed a receiver who ordered the Districts to sell district state holdings. Just as I'd imagined how Cherry Jones and Lulu Robinson Jones might have felt moving to and brewing New York City at the beginning of my talk, I could only ponder how they must have felt when their beloved order lost its crammed jewels. So as I tell my talk to the close, I have to wonder too about the motivations of the state attorney general. Throughout banking on freedom, I discuss the effects of state surveillance and bureaucratic harassment directed against these symbols of lack of financial achievement, like the St. Luke bank in Richmond. So members of the independent order of St. Luke, they did get small loans from the bank, but they also explored finance and investment options beyond St. Luke bank. Like other investors and others, by other investors looking to strike it rich in the heavy years that made the 20s roar, the New York independent order of St. Luke used the tools of finance to respond to the exigencies of life in Harlem that made it difficult for black women to achieve their freedom dreams. The St. Luke Finance Corporation represented the order separate for-profit investment and real estate development arm. Controlled margin by black women, it made their concerns central. Safe, affordable housing, access to reliable goods and services, but to reliable quality goods and services, and autonomous spaces for nation building, charitable work, community work, in addition to leisure and autonomy. Thank you. Talk about what I'm going to do. We can overview with one angle of the book, one angle that I address in the book. And I sit by saying that my interests are my writing book. In part, I move out of my experiences doing research on judgeification and some of the things I found in doing that research. I'll share with you a slide that kind of sums this up. If you see it on the left, it's a quote by a sociologist. He says, on the one hand, little urban specialist, rail against the suburbanization of America and the abandonment of the cities by the nation's whites. On the other hand, when a very few and highly selected whites buck the trend and stake a claim in the city, they are rated as opportunists and decried by gentrifying and interceding. And on the right is a caption from New York Times, an article that was written belonging the end of Black Harlem. Now, if you think about Black Harlem or the ghetto, you think about the legacy of history that creates ghetto. Many of these things that we have discussed in classes in urban planning Richard Rothstein came here a few weeks ago to talk about redlining and treatment of covenants, urban renewal and the like. Things that white supremacy created the black ghetto. And if you even think about the name or how what ghetto symbolizes, the term comes from 16th century Venice. When Jews were confined to certain parts of that city, it was then resurrected during World War II by the Nazis. When Jews again were confined to certain spaces. And then the term crossed in Atlantic after World War II because Blacks saw it as a tool to sort of prep the conscience of whites that here was a country that was fighting for freedom, yet it was practicing some of the same things that were done by fascists in Europe. So when you think about the term ghetto, you think about the legacy of history of how the ghetto was created, this does pose something in my view of a dilemma. Instead of bemoaning the end of Black Harlem, that could be something that we should celebrate. It could simply be something that was created due to white supremacy that simply is the result of redlining, treatment of covenants and the like. I'll share with you another slide that kind of gives you another example of this what I call one part of the dilemma that sort of motivated my research here. In a few years ago, Washington, D.C. adopted a policy to attract the creative class, the term coined by Richard Florida, described young, highly educated, upwardly mobile urban professionals. They saw it as a way of improving the fortunes of that city. Many of the people that lived there though did not necessarily see it that way. They saw it as a force of justification, something that would push them out of the community. So to me, on one hand you have one image of the ghetto that I just talked about in terms of the forces that created it. On the other hand, you have this resistance to justification which at a surface level would seem to address that. It's bringing whites back into these spaces, it's resurrecting these communities. So it seemed to be something that would be celebrated. But as this example suggests, as the previous slide suggests, that is not necessarily the case. And so I got interested in thinking about how blacks think about these neighborhoods. Not only today, but how have blacks thought about these neighborhoods in the past and how have they experienced these spaces? What have these spaces meant to blacks as a community? And I'm going to focus today on talking about how blacks have responded to the experience of ghettoization and what these spaces have meant. And I will focus on the haven aspect for it. And I'll talk about three things in particular, the Negro Renaissance, the Black Power movement and justification. In the book, I talked more a little about this sort of duality, but given the limited time and the fact that I think we have spent a lot of prognosis audience has read about or heard about some of the other facets of the ghetto in terms of being a hell, I thought I would focus on this part just to highlight this duality. So first, the Negro Renaissance. And Jeanette talked a little about this in her talk to some extent. But I think the context is important. So we go back to the late 19th century, early 20th century, before the great migration, before blacks had urbanized and great numbers. This is a time where blacks were mostly in the South. They were just in franchise. They were living through Jim Crow. Very few could vote. Some of the blacks in the North could vote, but the vast majority of blacks are in the South and they cannot. This is a time of uncontested white supremacy. This is a time where most blacks are living in a semi-circum as sharecroppers. If you look across the globe, this is a time where white and curious are conquering much of the globe, including virtually all of Africa, the exception of a few countries. So that's sort of the backdrop. And so Jeanette had mentioned the new Negro woman. And what the new Negro movement was, you can think of it almost as a social movement, it was a time for blacks who were responding to this white supremacy. They were responding in a number of different ways. They started civil rights organizations. They started financial organizations, such as what Jeanette talked about just previously, but part of what they also did was the great migration. And they moved to cities like New York, Harlem, Chicago, and they created institutions. Jesse Binda was held up as a sort of the epitome, the ideal type of new Negro, because he came to Chicago relatively poor. And what he did is he acquired real estate property and he created a bank, he created an insurance company. And so through his actions, he helped create what was then called the black belt. He would purchase properties that were formerly exclusively for whites and turn them over to blacks. So from the vantage point of blacks in Chicago at that time, they saw him as a hero because he was acquiring housing for them to live in, housing that was much better than the housing that they otherwise had occupied. So he was sort of this symbolic institution of a new Negro. This is someone who is looking out for his race. He's someone that's not looking for whites to decide what he can be allowed to do. He is creating his own path so that the environment of the new Negro. And this is also the time where there was a cultural movement as well, both among the elites, the Harlem Renaissance or the Negro Renaissance, where blacks tried to use art to improve their humanity as a way of being in the vanguard of the civil rights movement. But then also for the mass of blacks too, the United Negro Food Association, also known by Marcus Garvey, both of these movements, both of these cultural artistic movements were telling blacks to be proud, to be black in the early 19th, early 20th century, to resist white supremacy and do it by taking pride in their origins in Africa and taking pride in being black. And again, this is something that tended to happen in the ghettos of the North, places like Harlem, South Side of Chicago, parts of Philadelphia and the like. And you also see it in terms of political power as well. Briefly recap the idea, as I said earlier, blacks were denied the right to vote by coming to the North. They were able to elect black politicians. And these politicians went on to represent not just the districts that they represented, but the entire race of blacks throughout the country who remember were mostly disenfranchised in the South. So another, I'll talk about another example briefly, the black power movement of the 1960s. Okay, this was the time when you also had another resurgence of black nationalism. The idea being that blacks tried to achieve some autonomy, some ability to direct their own interests. And the key here is that these spaces, these residential neighborhoods provided a space where blacks could achieve some autonomy in terms of politics. It was not, it did not manifest itself in the sense of a separate black country, but it did manifest itself in terms of blacks achieving some autonomy over institutions within their neighborhoods, such as schools, for example, we know here in New York City, it was a new, old enough to remember, which we know I used to probably be a few of you. That was the time when New York City's public schools were granted local autonomy. And part of that, again, is connected to the black power movement as well. So the point here is that some of these other ideas for creating a black nation, they were totally fantastic, very little likelihood of coming into fruition. But blacks were able to achieve a certain amount of autonomy in terms of inside the ghetto neighborhood. And then finally, I'll talk about, I'm going to fast forward because I'm running out of time, justification. And if you look at black gentrifiers, so justifications often held up as a racial thing, whites moving into predominantly black or brown neighborhoods. But if you look at black gentrifiers, you can also, again, see some elements of people looking to these neighborhoods as spaces where they can feel at home, as spaces where they can contribute to their community. So it's not simply whites who are always the ones that are triggering gentrification. You have instances where blacks do too. And if you examine their motivations, you see this notion that these spaces are viewed as a haven for some black professionals. In contrast to the way you typically view gentrification solely as a black, white, or a black, brown, or a white, black, brown perspective, you can also look at it in this perspective as well. So I think when we think about the ghetto and what that means, I think there is a duality there. And I think it's, I'm not trying to say that we should ignore the role that white supremacy or racism has played in creating these spaces. But we should also remember the other role, right, that blacks have agency too, right, even in the face of white supremacy, and how that manifested itself. I'll ask some ideas for how, more specifically, for planning and posthumifications, but I'll need that question and answer in it since I'm just about to do my thing, right? Okay, thank you. I'm going to hear about these pieces. And what I would like to do is just ask one question for us to think about collectively, while everybody else puts their questions together, and then we'll shift the Q&A, okay? So I was thinking about these works and their geographic scale, right? So I was thinking about the Chanel story of a national network of people in locations that are both south and north. I was thinking about Betsy's work rooted very deeply in North Carolina and Winston-Salem specifically. And then I was thinking about Lance's work looking at the idea of the ghetto in multiple places, but you're very careful in the introduction to define that as a northern and western story and not so much a southern story. So I was thinking about that and wondering then how you all think about region in your projects and how you think of these as stories that are bound by a particular conception of region or whether you thought of them as stories really about the nation. Because I'm sure that people are thinking both at once about New York as a particular place, but also might have connections to other places that they're imagining. Well I'll just say for me, most of my work takes place in the south, but just like I always teach my students that the north and the west were no promised land. So it is thinking about the issues of how white supremacy just re-articulates itself in different spaces. So for me, the National Network that the Independent Order of St. Luke creates in the, I think it's about 26 states is at its height. It has branches in 26 different states. It does kind of show how a vision of economic autonomy and the creation of black business and economic development focused on communities and families respecting and kind of helping to preserve African American women's economic contributions to their families and their community is a vision that is that one of the leaders of the Independent Order of St. Luke, which is headquartered in Richmond, kind of projects out to all the other networks, initially in the early years, for example, Charity Jones, you know, was very close with Megan Walker, who was the president of the St. Luke Bank and who also was the secretary treasurer, which was a position that was more powerful really than the president. And she held that position for over 30 years. And it was her vision that really guided the St. Luke's in the early years. But at the same time, I think by story, what I try to say to, especially as I get to the end of my book, is that the exigencies of place, the differences, the uniqueness of the people's experiences in different places allow that vision was expansive enough that it allowed them to experiment with other ways of doing business and trying to achieve this vision and this goal. And I do have to say that in most places, it ended up not quite working. But it's really not a story of failure. I always try to think of that. It's just a story of that African Americans, you know, never stopped trying to fight supremacy, racism, sexual discrimination. And so region is important, but this is, I think, a story of a nation, a national story. So I focus on North Carolina. And I think of mine as a North Carolina story because you have what's going on in Winston-Salem, which, as I mentioned, is happening in a number of other southern cities. But this story about segregating the countryside is unique to North Carolina. This is the only state that has someone agitating to segregate the countryside. Poe's vision was, though, that once he passed this amendment to the state constitution in North Carolina, it would spread to other southern states. So that this would be a regional reform. So it's a North Carolina story in that sense. But it's also a regional story in that the story I'm telling is one of black economic success, right? Of blacks buying farmland, of blacks buying property in cities. And that's happening throughout the south, but more in the upper south than in the lower south. So Virginia, North Carolina are seeing a lot more black farmers buying farmland than some places in the deep south. So it's a regional story of backlash against black economic success. And then just sort of thinking about the story is an international story, right? I have a chunk of a chapter about South Africa, what's going on there, and thinking about ways that white supremacists globally are grappling with this problem of how to sort of reinforce their own power in a world in which blacks are sort of gaining more rights. So I'm thinking of like Maryland and Lake and Henry Reynolds' work on drawing the global color line, talking about sort of forgetting the phrase that they use, but sort of talking about how to strengthen white supremacy in this particular moment. And so I think the story that I'm telling is a part of that. And then just sort of, I know I've sort of gone local, then gone international now, just to go back to the national scope. I think many of us are interested in the story of why blacks have less wealth than whites. And I think that residential segregation is a big part of it, right? Being kept out of the neighborhoods where property increases in value the most. That's a big part of the story. I know you two talk more about particular types of loans, like the ghetto loans that you talk about. So there's a larger story here, but sort of one angle that I just wanted to mention is the fact that if you can't buy in these neighborhoods, it's going to be harder to acquire wealth and pass that wealth onto your family. Yeah, for me, I struggle with the issue of region and a practical sense in terms of how do you define the south, for example. There's the census, gurus definition of the south. There's the Mason, so-called Mason-Dixon line. There's the old federal receipt and they don't neatly overlap. So I struggle with that. And I also struggle with whether or not I should the south distinctive. Because I think what happened in thinking about black spaces, probably around the era of World War I, part of World War II, I think there's some significant distinctions between the south and the rest of the country. After that, there tends to be a convergence between the south and the rest of the country. And so if I had to do it again, I might remember the book differently. I would have just dealt with that convergence, but at the time I decided to sort of set it aside and maybe leave for someone else to write about or maybe write about it myself later. That's the next one, right? Thank you. So we have some time for questions. And I think if you'll just speak loudly so that everybody can hear, that would be wonderful. Thank you all for your presentations. Really interesting. I have two questions, three quick ones, for Sir Herbert John. So the first one is what about the elite white real estate developers who might be, you know, subject to less valuable developments if blacks were to move in? Was there a distinction between the elite group and the other elites that you looked at? Were more comfortable with integration of blacks moving into neighborhoods? And the second quick one was did you explore kind of the historical distinction between slave holding whites and more middle or lower class whites back in history and how that relationship difference might have carried on to the period you were writing about? Well, regarding elites holding property in the city, selling property, renting property, I mean what I really saw is that that group of people wanted to be able to rent their property to blacks. So for example, the lawyers that were connected to RJ Reynolds who argued William Darnell's case in the state supreme court. So you're thinking, okay, these are members of the elite, right? They're lawyers. They're arguing the case of this man who's broken the segregation ordinance. They, you know, they must have some reason for wanting to do this. I mean one fact about them is that between them they owned literally thousands of properties in Winston Salem. So they were huge property owners and, you know, some of these properties they would sell, but by far the most of the properties they were renting out, right? And so presumably it's not just a question of, you know, what they consider to be fair, you know, it must be that their own, you know, financial interests are aided in not having a residential segregation ordinance. So I mean another person that I'm thinking about is Charles Buchanan of the supreme court case of Buchanan v. Worley. So he, the case is about this man, a white man who's in real estate, who wants to be able to sell his property to a black man, right? And again it could just be that he's focused on what's right, but what he's arguing is that, you know, here I have this property. It's near properties that blacks are living in, but it's still a majority white neighborhood, so I'm being prohibited from selling this property to other whites. And there are no whites, I'm sorry, I'm being prohibited from selling it to blacks, yet there are no whites who are willing to buy it because there are blacks in this neighborhood. So I'm stuck with this property and I just have to hang on to it, right, until the rest of the neighborhood somehow, you know, until people are leaving their properties vacant and then the neighborhood might eventually flip or not, but I have to wait, right, as what he's arguing until it's considered a black neighborhood at which time I can sell to blacks. And so he's really being harmed, he's arguing by the fact that he can't sell, you know, he can't dispose of his property in the way that he wishes. So I don't know, maybe that's kind of a long, I don't know if that directly answers your question, but rather than seeing whites in real estate who are in favor of the ordinance, I guess I was seeing the opposite. And then your other question was, tell me more of what you're trying to understand about people from slaveholding backgrounds. I think I just know the elite whites was that they want cheap labor and how sort of there's a big distinction between those who sell blacks as economic competition versus those who control the labor of workers. And so I'm thinking back to some other books that I've read that talk about the distinction between slaveholding whites and whites who are also farm, you know, small-scale farmers or don't you try to own their own land or also sharecroppers and how that distinction seems to maybe carry through to these elite whites that are seeing blacks as just labor in your book. Yeah, I think that what I saw probably matches what you saw in that someone like R.J. Reynolds, he came from a Virginia family of slaveholders and a number of the other elites came from families of slaveholders too. And these people, like many of them are educated at UNC. They're sort of in the same social world. Whereas the middling whites, that's more of a story of people whose families had origins in the countryside. Maybe they were yeoman farmers before the Civil War. They lose their land in the Civil War. They move to cities, you know, thinking that working in industry will help them out. And the industry that whites were working in is textile factories, right? So whites work in the textile factories, blacks work in the tobacco factories in North Carolina in this period. And so yeah, this is a group of people who are trying to pull themselves up through this really treacherous system, right? They were potentially sharecroppers, industrial workers. They've managed to get some small property and they desperately don't want to lose that. It'd be great to hear your questions. Yeah, great. Wonderful. Please. All right, thank you for your presentation. And I have a question about the Professor Freeman. So I've heard that the success of Jesse in North Carolina happened in Chicago and still are licensed as a part of the culture, also happened in Hauler, New York City. So do you think the similar success would have been being mass urbanized by neighborhood groups? Yeah, that's a great question. New York and Chicago have attracted a lot of attention, probably because the numbers, you know, there simply were more blacks in New York and Chicago than in many of the other smaller cities. I think, though, I would say certainly in urban areas in general, I think blacks had more success than in rural areas. The racial restrictions tended to be less, tended to be weaker in cities than in rural areas, right? Which is not to say you didn't have racism, but race relations tended to be a little bit more fluid, even, I think, in the south. If you were to compare cities to, you know, the more rural areas, blacks, again, had a little bit more freedom of movement, association in urban areas than they did in rural areas. So I think, generally speaking, I would say, in cities, there was more success. And two of you could chime in, because I think you probably have some ideas about this as well. And so, yeah, I would say, in general, if you look at other cities like Washington, D.C., for example, Philadelphia, those are other examples of cities where you saw similar things happen. You know, you didn't have necessarily a harm medicine, something on that scale, but in terms of black businesses or things of that nature, you see that. And again, I think you see it also in terms of other cities, just in general, compared to rural areas. Because remember, at this time, the majority of blacks were still living in rural settings. So I think it's, that's why blacks were leaving rural areas, because there were more opportunities in urban areas. And I can say, before the 30s, before the Great Depression, this again is getting some kind of to that question about region, that even intra-regionally, especially in the south, you know, the political economy of the area says, probably determines more the kind of black economic development that goes on versus just being in the south. So I didn't mention it in my introduction, but I also have an article that I work on on Mississippi banks in Mississippi. So Richmond is kind of known as the cradle of black capitalism. And so in my book, I explain, you know, why it is that coming out of the Civil War, Richmond is this really unique place where you get the first formal insurance company, you know, the first black bank, et cetera, et cetera. But interestingly, Mississippi and Virginia tied at one point for the most black banks at about a dozen, about 12. Some people said there was 14, but I only could count 12. About 12 banks. And in Mississippi, most of these banks were in rural areas. Of course, you have some in large cities like Jackson and Natchez, but in small towns like Indianola, you know, one of the most famous, you know, of successful banks was the Delta Penny Bank in Mount Bayou, which was an all black town in Mississippi, really successful bank. And I think, as I try to explain in this article that I've been writing for years and years, that I think that one of the reasons that Mississippi has so much success with black banks is in part because of, well, sharecropping. So these banks are able to offer farmers credit and kind of help to loosen their or weaken their or attenuate their dependents on white planters. But that also makes them incredible targets of state violence and surveillance. And so, you know, that's, so for example, the 19, so 1915, Mississippi, you know, has this, creates this total reform of its banking system 1914, 1915 with the banking law. And it basically wipes out all but two of those African-American banks. And then even then, one falters very soon after. And so one of the reasons I think they target them is, like I said, because of the fact that they are allowing sharecroppers and farmers and tenant farmers an alternate line of credit on easy terms, you know, much cheaper than they are getting from white banks and planters, but also because pretty much on every one of the boards of these banks, you have black Republicans. And so it's really weird in Mississippi that it's just a Republican stronghold. The party is kind of a paper tiger party, but blacks have an incredible control over patronage in the state. And so I see this reform law as a way to kind of erase these, or to, you know, erase out the face of the earth because that's basically what they do. These, you know, symbols of black economic progress while at the same time achieving multiple aims of undermining black political power, undermining African-Americans access to credit, and, you know, continuing to, you know, put a stranglehold on black economic autonomy and opportunity. I will admit, I didn't hear some of your questions. So what I might do is just sort of give an answer that's sort of inspired by some of what I'm hearing the other panelists saying. So I guess what I'll kind of address is the question of what white supremacy looks like right in the countryside versus the city. And I'm thinking about Mark Schultz's book, The Rural Face of White Supremacy, which is focused on Green County, Georgia, which, and so he's arguing that that sort of rigid segregation laws don't really make sense in the countryside because their, their relations are more personal, right? You know, you know everyone in the family, you've known their, or I'm sorry, you know everyone in the community, you've known their families for generations. Everyone sort of knows their place in the hierarchy. So in a sense you don't need these, these laws, you know, to, you know, to, to, to shape that. And I guess where I disagree with, with Mark Schultz is, you know, I think he's looking at, at a county that's more shaped by elites, right, who, who are thinking about their relationships with their sharecroppers. And so I think that dynamic is quite different from what I'm seeing in North Carolina, where there are more of these sort of middle class, middling whites who, who are viewing segregation not so much as like symbolic, as protecting their economic interests, right? They think that this is a route to help them access and control land. So anyway, those are some thoughts about the countryside. Then, then the city, you know, a number of scholars like Grace Elizabeth Hale have talked about segregation in cities as partly about helping people deal with this new problem of anonymity, right? How in the cities you have, you know, blacks, and often it's hard to tell who is black, right? I mean, you see that in some of, actually I was looking at some of Shannette's images in your book, right? A lot of the black people in your book look like they're white, right? And so that's, you know, a problem for whites in cities who want to hold on to sort of these hierarchies, but they're not sure, you know, and I have a quote in my book where someone's complaining, like, you don't know if you should tip your hat to a lady or not, because she might be, you know, an African-American woman, right? So, so what to do, you know, you need these laws to help people distinguish, you know, who's white and who's black, and then to make sure that blacks are, you know, sort of in their, in their spot in the hierarchy. So anyway, just some thoughts, I don't know if I, I probably didn't address your question, but some thoughts about the city versus the countryside. And I'll just say as a historian of education that one way to think about this is, where do people have access to high school, for example, right? Which is both north and south, African-Americans have access from the 1880s through the 1930s to high schooling in the south in urban areas with all the constraints of Jim Crow inequality, but still there are more, if you're going to find a high school, it's more likely to be in a city in the south or the north than it is in the rural, in the rural surround. So as a feature of, like, what creates opportunities for mobility, like BINGA, we could think about the question of where education plays in that as well. And can I mention, I mean, one way that segregationists after you can be warly, so people who want to bring about segregated communities, one thing they'll look at, right? And this isn't from my own research, but I think her name is Karen Benjamin, but I'm having a blanking moment. So she looks at where schools are cited as a way of creating a segregated community, right? So Clarence Poe is actually on the Raleigh School Board, and one thing that they work on is, you know, moving the new white school to this area and the black school to this area, knowing that people will kind of move to where the schools are. Thank you all. I think we're supposed to close at this point, but thanks very much for being here. Can we give everybody a round of applause?