The Racial Politics of Place

Abstract

White civic leaders worked with the Federal Housing Administration and Resettlement Administration on the Virginia Peninsula in the mid-1930s to build two suburban subdivisions for poor and working-class African Americans. In an era of “managed” race relations, the developments reinforced paternalistic white rule by extending urban practices of segregation into racially undefined suburban areas. The homes provided opportunity, not equality. However, the houses also challenged spatial boundaries concerning race and class and fractured public conceptions of monolithic racial unity along class lines. The developments were among the first in the nation to use federal tax dollars to support black families’ aspirations for homeownership and middle-class living standards. Their occupancy, expense, and location angered working-class whites who lived nearby. The ensuing conflicts revealed the near impossibility of reconciling cautious federal experiments in racial betterment with expanding black demands for empowerment and white concerns that black gains occurred at their personal expense.