Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South

In the 1910s, both W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington praised the black community in Durham, North Carolina, for its exceptional race progress. Migration, urbanization, and industrialization had turned black Durham from a post–Civil War liberation community into the “capital of the black middle class.” African Americans owned and operated mills, factories, churches, schools, and an array of retail services, shops, community organizations, and race institutions. Using interviews, narr...