Over the next decade, my research on suburban gentrification and erasure exposed me to more stories about the Black women who cleaned homes and who helped to raise generations of middle- and upper-class white children. In my oral histories with whites who had moved into suburbia and the African Americans who lived in rural hamlets on suburban margins, I began looking for the stories of these women. Historians of Black suburbanization and Black communities affected by white suburbanization have noted the parallel work worlds of men and women in these spaces.[2] The women’s stories are not easy to find, but they exist.
Many twentieth-century American residential subdivisions were segregated. Most of those were neighborhoods where racially restrictive deed covenants enforced ethnic and racial homogeneity. Others were conceived by Blacks to create communities free from white surveillance and violence.[3] The covenant-restricted subdivisions were mini-sundown towns—white spaces where Blacks could not live unless they were employed by white homeowners. The Black women and men who worked and who slept in these homes are mostly invisible in the histories of suburbia. This post explores the research potential of looking for Black history in white spaces.
White Spaces and Black Spaces
The Black space and the white space are very different products of segregation that have outlived Jim Crow. “White spaces vary in kind, but their most visible and distinctive feature is their overwhelming presence of white people and their absence of black people,” wrote sociologist Elijah Anderson.[4] Residential subdivisions became white spaces through the creation of a white spatial imaginary—spaces defined by exclusion where the exchange value of housing becomes a dominant principle.[5] Whites go to great lengths to protect their investments in identity and wealth, erecting real and symbolic barriers to exclude Blacks and others considered non-white by virtue of race and religion. Place attachment and the blurred divisions demarcating domesticity and work spaces (use values) are subordinated in suburban America, where the value of land supersedes all else.[6]
Few instruments have better reinforced white spaces than racially restrictive deed covenants. Deed covenants comprised an essential link in an exclusionary chain blocking Blacks from white spaces. They were the cornerstone of sundown suburbs, sundown towns’ carefully planned kin.[7] Until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that they were unenforceable in 1948, racially restrictive deed covenants enforced housing segregation beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century.[8] Housing segregation, in turn, contributed to an array of inequities, from uneven access to education and employment to the loss of intergenerational wealth.[9] The segregated subdivision was segregated housing’s cornerstone and the ultimate white space.