Reviews

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

me2brett's review

3.0

Leslie Brown does an excellent job of profiling the African-American population of Durham between 1890 and 1950. While she does not describe in-depth the living conditions of the working class, she manages to convey their overall quality of life and contrast it with that of the elites of Durham's African-American community. She supports her argument that intraracial conflicts were frequently grounded in differing responses to the Jim Crow system. Moreover, she manages to explain the the rational behind the positions of the elite, middle, and working classes; not always an easy task when the middle and elite classes took positions which seem in retrospect naive or contrary to their own interest.