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Nathan Connolly
Assistant Professor The Johns Hopkins University Department of History 2850 N. Charles Street Baltimore MD 21218 Telephone: 410-516-7983 Email: nconnol2@jhu.edu Office Hours:On leave for the 2009-2010 academic year Dell House 1502B In its broadest strokes, my scholarship posits a central thesis: to understand the American city, one must understand America’s large- and small-scale dependence on racial segregation. My research and teaching interests include the historical role of land in the making of racial categories; the intersection of Jim Crow segregation and capitalism; American liberalism and conservatism as reflections of black class politics; comparative racisms; and black encounters with postmodernism, with an emphasis on the economic and cultural consequences of late-twentieth-century “diversity” discourse in the United States. I have entitled my book manuscript “A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida.” In it, I tell a story of how entrepreneurs in mid-twentieth-century America used Greater Miami’s real estate and commercial infrastructure to segregate workers and consumers into profitable niche markets, particularly in illegal gambling, international trade, and the federally subsidized housing and tourism markets of the New Deal era. Despite the constancy of Caribbean in-migration and the attendant complexities of skin color, culture and language, South Florida’s segmented real estate markets helped establish economic rules about who could live and buy where. They provided the financial and, indeed, spatial foundations for what it meant to live as “white” or “colored.” And over time, these real estate markets would feed a powerful, interracial network of rental property owners and vice lords who became increasingly adept at securing and expanding their power, first in black neighborhoods and, then, outward over Florida’s entire economy. Through grassroots racial paternalism, political bribes, and city and state lobbying groups, these licit and illicit businessmen successfully opposed housing code enforcement, slum clearance, and nearly every other government effort that threatened their economic bottom line. Opposing these interests was a fragile coalition of black and white boosters, homeowners, slum dwellers, and housing reformers. They cobbled together their political agendas in hopes of unmaking the Jim Crow city, expanding the state’s powers of zoning, public housing placement, and, most important, eminent domain – the government’s ability to expropriate private property for a public good. By the late 1960s, their efforts would break slumlords’ hold on downtown Miami and help usher in a new era in race relations and urban growth. Black people secured greater civil rights and South Florida, as a region, began to enjoy greater insulation against the kinds of negative race-publicity that once threatened its tourist economy. “A World More Concrete” shows, however, that the expansion of direct state power over the land and the dissolution of a formal Jim Crow system did not undo deep social assumptions about the profitability of racial segregation. The public housing projects, interstate highways, suburban subdivisions and other massive land projects of the 1960s, only possible through expanded uses of eminent domain, provided new boundaries through which the divide between blacks and whites – haves and have-nots – would harden. In short, the social divides of Sunbelt Miami would become less visible and yet more concrete than any found during the years of Jim Crow.
Course Offerings: America after the Civil Rights Movement The U.S. City in the Twentieth Century
“Timely Innovations: Planes, Trains, and the ‘Whites Only’ Economy of a Pan American City,” Urban History 36, no. 2, Special Issue on Transnational Urbanism in the Americas (August 2009): 243-261. “Sunbelt Civil Rights: Urban Renewal and the Follies of Desegregation in Greater Miami,” in Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region in the American South and Southwest, Michele Nickerson and Darren Dochuk, eds. (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).
“A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida” (under contract, University of Chicago Press).
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