towers2023

@Article{ towers2023,
    author = {Frank Towers},
    title = {Rediscovering Reconstruction in the Urban South: Achievements and New Opportunities},
    journal = {Journal of the Civil War Era},
    volume = 13,
    number = 2,
    month = {June 2023},
    pages = {214--238},
    year = 2023,
}

p. 215:

ALthough not always explicitly articulated, recent studies set in Southern cities also reveal aspects of urban life that made Reconstruction look different in cities and suggest how cities shaped the larger outcomes of the period. Historians can build on this work by thinking more about the autonomous role of urban spaces to make some things possible, preclude others, and change the scale of almost every kind of human endeavor.

p. 219: Notes Gavin Wright’s argument that emancipation changed “laborlords” (who had not invested heavily in urban services to recruit migrants) into landlords newly interested in investing in interior towns and transportation networks

On migration of African Americans to cities, Ransom and Sutch find an increase of Black urban population by 72 percent between 1860 and 1870, and also increasing their share of the urban population from 29% to 43%, while urbanization itself (according to David Goldfield) shrunk from 1860 to 1880. How does Houston compare?

Shift from dominance of cotton factors in port cities to smaller storekeepers in crossroads towns.

Moving beyond debates over Woodward’s continuity/change thesis, “further research could explore urban path dependency, or the ways preset material and social constructs constrain future innovation” (222).

p. 224:

Over time, histories of Black urban life in the postwar South shifted focus from the prewar elite to the freedpeople. This change in attention has diminished the significance of the formal political realm of elections and government, where the antebellum elite had its greatest influence, and magnified the importance of a broader politics aimed at securing everyday liberty and equality in public life, where freedpeople could get past suffrage and citizenship barriers to exert their own claims to power.

Also an increasing interest in intraracial conflict resolved only by a “pragmatic unity” (Michael Fitzgerald) forged after Redemption.

Jacqueline Jones on Savannah: a “two-pronged campaign for self-determination in their churches and schools, and for integration into the larger political process.” More recent studies, like Kate Masur, focused on “battles over access to municipal services and public spaces” as “closely tied to the fight for legal rights.”

p. 228:

Rural Black in-migrants found overcrowded housing, minimal public services, and scarce jobs. Controlled by whites who associated Blacks with vice and poverty, municipal governments opposed measures to alleviate these strains. The resistance left providing for the freedpeople to the prewar Black community, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and Northern aid societies, none of which had the taxing and borrowing powers necessary to equalize city infrastructure. Even when Republicans controlled city governments, limited taxable property, another product of path development, blocked anything like the kind of massive public works projects needed to equalize housing stock. Significantly, as southern cities expanded in the 1880s, white real estate and transportation developments pushed Blacks into the outskirts while most city governments confined new services to the central business district and white neighborhoods. Over time this process resulted in a highly unequal, residentially segregated city. A study of urban housing in the Reconstruction South would reveal a great deal about the negotiation of identity and power.

p. 230: Citing an essay by Masur in Remembering the Memphis Massacre, notes that ex-Confederates often allied with city police, making “southern cities highly combustible” (Masur’s words).

Memphis and New Orleans as examples of importance of space: “Often implicit in these studies, the role of urban public space screams out as a crucial factor shaping urban political violence. The Memphis massacre erupted after four white police officers tried to break up a mustering out celebration by Black US veterans held on a city street and adjacent greenspace” (231).

p. 231: Other cases of violence also

started over claims to public space that were unique to urban settings. African Americans understood that if they were to exercise their rights as free people, equal access to the physical terrain of the city was as important as winning a court case or a municipal election. If whites could continue to regulate where African Americans went and how they acted, then most of the other rights they claimed would quickly be disrespected by those who had driven them into the shadows. This perspective on the city as a physical site for asserting political claims helps explain the numerous parades and annual celebrations staged by African Americans as well as everyday actions, such as refusing to yield the sidewalk, dressing fancy, and speaking loudly.

Mentions Fourth of July celebrations as examples noted in the scholarship, but not Juneteenth.

Notes that the tendency to see cities as more cosmopolitan and progressive spaces “that offered more opportunity and more physical safety for African Americans than the countryside … corresponds to the modernist binary of urban vs. rural” that more recent urbanists have challenged (p. 233).

p. 234:

Another path forward could analyze urban space as the producer of new sources of solidarity and conflict. Thus, rather than simply change the variables in the Reconstruction’s [sic] battles over freedom and equality, cities—acting through their physical, economic, and administrative structures—also created new identities and power dynamics that transcended those of the prewar era.

p. 221 mentions Dallas as an example of a town made into city by the railroads. Otherwise, Texas absent. So, largely, are mentions of debates over municipal covernment, definition of city limits and relationship to tax base, and criminal justice at the city or county level.