White supremacists determined what African Americans could do and where they could go in the Jim Crow South, but they were less successful in deciding where black people could live because different groups of white supremacists did not agree on the question of residential segregation. In Threatening Property, Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant investigates early-twentieth-century campaigns for residential segregation laws in North Carolina to show how the version of white supremacy supported by middle-class white people differed from that supported by the elites. Class divides prevented Jim Crow from expanding to the extent that it would require separate neighborhoods for black and white southerners as in apartheid South Africa.

Herbin-Triant details the backlash against the economic successes of African Americans among middle-class whites, who claimed that they wished to protect property values and so campaigned for residential segregation laws both in the city and the countryside, where their actions were modeled on South Africa’s Natives Land Act. White elites blocked these efforts, primarily because it was against their financial interest to remove the black workers that they employed in their homes, farms, and factories. Herbin-Triant explores what the split over residential segregation laws reveals about competing versions of white supremacy and about the position of middling whites in a region dominated by elite planters and businessmen. An illuminating work of social and political history, Threatening Property puts class front and center in explaining conflict over the expansion of segregation laws into private property.

"Herbin-Triant provides significant insight into the broader national landscape during the Jim Crow era . . . Recommended." - Choice

"This book is a must read for anyone interested in civil rights, urban development, or social policy in the South. It introduces ideas and areas that researchers can mine in future projects, and presents a model for studying public and private spaces in other states." - North Carolina Historical Review

"This highly readable book should be of interest to many disciplines (urban sociology, geography, history, city planning) and to many lay readers as well." - Journal of Urban Affairs

"Uncovering the conditions that have long produced White backlash against Black property ownership, Threatening Property has much to offer as well to those seeking to understand the forces that continue to spark racist foment today." - Journal of African American History

"A well-documented, well-written account of efforts to segregate Black and white people in towns and cities across North Carolina. . . . Threatening Property is a welcome addition to our understanding of the intersection of race and economics, and how it fueled decades of restrictive covenants to separate Black and white residents." - The Journal of Southern History