Description:
A World More Concrete argues that Americans, immigrants, and indigenous people of all colors made tremendous investments in racial apartheid in the twentieth century, in order to regulate city growth and to maximize the value of land. Focusing on South Florida, the book illustrates how entrepreneurs used land and debates over property rights to negotiate the workings of Jim Crow segregation. Over the course of several decades, property ownership became an important feature in the development of cities and suburbs, in the articulation of civil rights reform, and in the general failure of civil rights activism to end residential segregation and black poverty. As a result of the privileged legal and social position granted to property ownership, Jim Crow culture became American culture - politically, economically, and in the built environment.
Brief description: N. D. B. Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. His first book, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida, which was published by the University of Chicago Press, received the 2014 Kenneth T. Jackson Book Award from the Urban History Association, the 2015 Liberty Legacy Foundation Book Award from the Organization of American Historians, and the 2016 Bennett H. Wall Book Award from the Southern Historical Association, among other awards. He was a cohost of the popular history podcast BackStory.
Review Quotes: "Just when scholars of the twentieth-century United States might reasonably assume we know plenty about how residential segregation in the North and South, in cities and suburbs, was created and defended, Connolly has shown us in this complex, multilayered, and engagingly written work that there is still more to learn about that story. . . . Connolly has a flair for language, metaphor, and character development that propels the narrative and renders it continually engaging. From those kids under the bridge to conflicting eulogies upon the death of Luther Brooks, the most prominent white property manager in the slums, Connolly draws out the contradictions that augment our understanding of how people built housing segregation and its impact. His A World More Concrete is a significant contribution to modern U.S. urban history and the history of race relations."
-- "American Historical Review"