Jim Crow in the City: Spatial Segregation in Columbus, Georgia, 1890-1944 by Anna Michele Traylor A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Auburn, Alabama May 7, 2016 Copyright 2016 by Anna Michele Traylor Approved by Reagan Grimsley, Chair, Assistant Professor of History Keith Hebert, Assistant Professor of History David Carter, Associate Professor of History Abstract Between 1890 and 1944 thousands of African Americans moved to Columbus in search of greater economic and social opportunities. Despite Jim Crow laws and the threat of violence, African Americans built a thriving black community, largely separate from white public life, that affected the city’s geographic development. Using city directories, census data, Sanborn maps, and oral histories, this thesis tracks the changes in Columbus’s spatial patterns. As geographic segregation in the city increased, African Americans created their own discrete community within the city through the development of two black neighborhoods, Liberty and West Highlands. Race, not class, organized Columbus’s black population. Columbus’s growing black middle class lived on the same blocks as its poorest black citizens. As the separation between black and white grew in the city, Columbus’s black businesses relocated from the central business district to black neighborhoods. Black businesses that served the black community thrived and helped transform Liberty and West Highlands into a mixed residential-commercial area. ii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii List of Figures .................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Creating “Colored Columbus”: Everyday Life Behind the Color Line ...........7 Chapter 2: Race and Residence: The Geography of Segregation in a New South City ...29 Chapter 3: The “Golden Age” of Black Business in Columbus, Georgia .......................53 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................82 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................85 iii List of Figures Figure 1: Total Population of Columbus, 1880-1930 .......................................................13 Figure 2: 1900 Black Residences by Percent Population .................................................36 Figure 3: Race of Residents, Rogers Block, 1900 ............................................................38 Figure 4: Race of Residents, Spencer Block, 1900 ...........................................................39 Figure 5: Race of Residents, Rainey Block, 1900 .............................................................40 Figure 6: Race of Residents, King Block, 1900 .................................................................41 Figure 7: 1910 Black Residences by Percent Population ..................................................42 Figure 8: 1920 Black Residences by Percent Population .................................................46 Figure 9: 1930 Black Residences by Percent Population .................................................50 Figure 10: Black Businesses in Columbus, 1894-1931 ....................................................61 Figure 11: Black Businesses in Columbus, 1894 ..............................................................63 Figure 12: Black Businesses in Columbus, 1900 ..............................................................66 Figure 13: Black Businesses in Columbus, 1910 ...............................................................69 Figure 14: Black Businesses in Columbus, 1921 ..............................................................72 Figure 15: Black Businesses in Columbus, 1931 ..............................................................73 Figure 16: Black Businesses by Industry in Columbus, 1894 - 1931 ...............................78 Figure 17: Types of Businesses within Each Industry ......................................................79 iv Introduction In an interview during the 1970s, Samuel P. Charleston reflected on his family’s experiences moving to Columbus, Georgia. Although not educated herself, his mother Sarah A. Gaines Charleston “saw the need for it” and wanted her children to be able to go to school. 1 Sarah “felt that traveling around from place to place…would prevent her children from getting a proper education. And so she decided to just move the family here to Columbus.”2 As a result, Samuel and his six brothers and sisters were able to gain an education at Columbus’s black Fifth Avenue School. After completing the ninth grade, Samuel graduated from Morris Brown College in 1928. African Americans like the Charlestons came to Columbus looking for opportunities; they found them to a limited extent as they also faced the harsh segregation of the Jim Crow South. Between 1890 and 1944 Columbus was a thriving New South city. During this time period, the city experienced significant economic growth and city expansion. Columbus’s population increased from 17,303 in 1890 to 53,280 in 1940 as both whites and blacks moved to the city from the surrounding countryside. Columbus developed its public transportation, education, sanitation, and electrification systems. However, the majority of these improvements were aimed at Columbus’s white citizens.3 Between 1 Becky Matthews, “Interview of Samuel P. Charleston,” January 23, 1975, General Oral History Collection, Columbus State University Archives, Columbus, Georgia. 2 Matthews, “Interview of Samuel P. Charleston.” 3John S. Lupold, Columbus, Georgia 1828-1978 (Columbus: Columbus Sesquicentennial, Inc., 1978), 83-5 and 90; Lynn Willoughby, Flowing Through Time: A History of the Lower Chattahoochee 1 1890 and 1944, segregation increased in cities across the South.4 This thesis examines how race, and in particular segregation affected the spatial development of one medium- sized Southern city through business and residential patterns from 1890-1930. Historians have looked at various Southern cities to determine large patterns of development. Howard Rabinowitz argues that race is the defining characteristic of Southern cities. He writes that Southern cities established the patterns of segregation that expanded in the countryside. Rabinowitz is less concerned with the history of individual cities than with how they deal with the “Negro question,” but argues that Southern cities’ responses to African American citizens shaped the city development. Rabinowitz focused on five capital cities: Montgomery, Atlanta, Nashville, Raleigh, and Richmond. Although these Southern cities vary by size, age, growth rate, region, economic structure, and demographic makeup, they all moved from excluding blacks, to separating them from whites, back to exclusion. It is this pattern, according to Rabinowitz, that distinguishes them from northern or western urban areas.5 David Goldfield similarly emphasizes the importance of race on Southern cities because it created a “biracial society” in which blacks and whites occupied different hierarchical status and geographic space.6 Goldfield writes that historians cannot River (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 149 and 159; 3 Faye Jensen, “’Let Us Not Be So Far Behind’: Columbus, Georgia, and the Struggle of a New South Town” in Paul Cimbala and Baron Shaw, eds. Making a New South: Race, Leadership, and Community after the Civil War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 39; and Joseph Mahan, Columbus: Georgia’s Fall Line “Trading Town” (Northridge, California: Windsor Publications, 1986), 108. 4 Howard Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) argues that 1890 marks a turning point from de facto to de jure segregation, 331. 5 Rabinowitz, Race Relations, xiv, 3, 17, and 330. 6 David Goldfield, Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607-1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 3. 2 understand Southern cities without understanding the South. Region affected Southern cities’ development because urban areas in the South were originally markets for the staple crops from the rural areas around them. As a result, the South had a rural model of urbanization where the city cannot be separated from the countryside. Economic subordination in addition to a biracial society and reliance on staple crops defined Southern urbanization.7 Goldfield stresses the continuity of Southern urban history by pointing to the colonial and antebellum periods especially as the major moments for Southern cities. He argues that the early periods of Southern city building set patterns that continued through later stages. Goldfield writes that Southern cities did change to an extent during the Civil War and World War I, but the antebellum period established the cycles of race, region, and economic dependence that pervade his explanation of Southern city development. Louis Kyriakoudes built off of Goldfield’s ideas about regionalism in The Social Origins of the Urban South.8 He agrees that the urban-rural relationship in the South made southern cities unique. Where Goldfield