Sorting Out the New South City, Second Edition: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975

Hanchett, Tom

ISBN 10: 1469656442 / ISBN 13: 9781469656441

Published by University of North Carolina Press, 2020

About this Item

Pages are clean and are not marred by notes or folds of any kind. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.

Seller Inventory # G1469656442I2N00

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Sorting Out the New South City, Second Edition: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1469656442
• ISBN 13: 9781469656441
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: 2nd Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Weight: 1.32 pounds

About this title

Synopsis

One of the largest and fastest-growing cities in the South, Charlotte, North Carolina, came of age in the New South decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, transforming itself from a rural courthouse village to the trading and financial hub of America’s premier textile manufacturing region. In this book, Thomas W. Hanchett traces the city’s spatial evolution over the course of a century, exploring the interplay of national trends and local forces that shaped Charlotte and, by extension, other New South urban centers.

Hanchett argues that racial and economic segregation are not age-old givens but products of a decades-long process. Well after the Civil War, Charlotte’s whites and blacks, workers and business owners, lived in intermingled neighborhoods. The rise of large manufacturing enterprises in the 1880s and 1890s brought social and political upheaval, however, and the city began to sort out into a “checkerboard” of distinct neighborhoods segregated by both race and class. When urban renewal and other federal funds became available in the mid-twentieth century, local leaders used the money to complete the sorting-out process, creating a “sector” pattern in which wealthy whites increasingly lived on one side of town and blacks on the other. A new preface by the author confronts the contemporary implications of Charlotte’s resegregation and prospects for its reversal.

About the Author

Thomas W. Hanchett taught urban history and history preservation at Youngstown State University and Cornell University before becoming the staff historian at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte.