Housing is Like the Ballot: The Southern Freedom Struggle in the Age of Urban Renewal

This dissertation examines the intersection of the modern civil rights movement and urban planning in the U.S. South through the case study of a mid-sized Alabama city. Following World War II, the city underwent significant development. Planners and elites sought to accommodate industry and respond to the housing needs of rural migrants. The city developed new roads, constructed a bridge, built municipal buildings, erected public housing, and undertook urban renewal, all part of an ambitious planning agenda. These post-war transformations spatialized Jim Crow through black dispossession and residential segregation subjecting some black residents to environmental harm. This dissertation considers how urban and environmental concerns generated by these activities informed black residents during the classical period of the civil rights movement and how development produced the movement’s geographies.

After emancipation, industrialists leveraged the labor of black women and men to capitalize on the timber, water, and mineral resources near town. Much to the chagrin of local industrialists and leaders, black laborers took part in electoral politics, organized their labor, and engaging in politics of refusal. In the 1920s, a major employer would exclude black laborers in a decision that would shape the city’s future planning decisions. In the 1930s, the city eagerly pursued development and real estate schemes with the help of New Deal programs. In the late 1940s, the city adopted a master comprehensive urban plan without participatory planning that subsequently shaped future development in the city. Public housing became one of the first initiatives to emerge after the master plan. Like the urban plan, public housing lacked significant public input and its construction in the early 1950s contributed to racial residential segregation. As public housing complexes opened, the city pursued an urban renewal initiative which targeted a large black community. During the mid-to-late 1950s, urban renewal initiatives in the city, and around the state, alarmed the NAACP. Black residents in the city, and other Alabama cities, turned to the court system in attempts to stop urban renewal. But their lawsuits were largely unsuccessful. The dissertation closes in the early 1960s by demonstrating how the built environment and urban and environmental concerns intersected with the local movement.