Black Space/ White Space

 In the course of our research about Adamstown, we read James Hanlon's 2011 article, “Unsightly Urban Menaces and the Rescaling of Residential Segregation in the United States.” We were intrigued by his discussion of Adamstown as becoming "out-of-place." We continued to read and think about the concepts of White and Black "place" and "space," but we eventually realized that the concept is broader and deeper than we could do justice to in this website. Below you will find our early attempts to address this topic, raising more questions than answers.

Are Whites Entitled to Control All Community Space?

Some researchers assert that White people in communities view all spaces—especially prime spaces—as belonging to them. In this view, Black people's claims to space have less weight and are valued less. In this view, also, White people see themselves as ultimately controlling all space in a community, and as being entitled to decide who gets to use what space, for what purposes, and for how long.  While no White people in our research make this kind of claim explicitly, consider with us whether the following local examples appear to fit within a framework of White assumption of primary ownership. 

In the 1920s Lexington experienced a housing shortage affecting both White and Black people. At a meeting held in April 1920, the Lexington Board of Commerce considered solutions to the shortage and to the poor conditions in which most African Americans lived. 

From what we read in the Lexington Herald article, the main concern of Board of Commerce members seemed to stem from the possibility that domestic servants might carry disease into the White homes where they worked, and the belief that the conditions in low-income neighborhoods would diminish the value of "residence property of all classes for several blocks in all directions" (Lexington Herald 1920).

According to the same article, a solution was proposed and appears to have been taken seriously. The newspaper image above is a bit illegible; it says:

A possible solution to both the negro housing and domestic help problems has been offered the housing committee of the Board of Commerce by George T. Graves, prominent business man and capitalist. It is his opinion that white residents could be assured steady and efficient negro domestic help by building their servants substantial homes with living comforts tending to make happiness. By the plan the servants could buy the homes, paying for them out of their wages on the installment plan.

    Razing the negro settlements in the heart of white residence territory and the building of substantial homes for negroes, for sale on the installment plan, in the outskirts of the city, would provide more space for white homes and improve negro living conditions, it was pointed out. This plan may be adopted in the campaign for housing relief here. (Emphasis added.)

What first struck us about the story was the phrase "white residence territory." As we discuss in the subsection about African American Communities in Lexington, the "negro settlements" had been established on the outskirts of town before the city expanded around them, so they could not have been interlopers into previously White areas. The implication is that either Mr. Graves or the author of the Lexington Herald article saw the areas in question as "white territory" simply because White people now wanted them, or because the default for all territory is White control.

 James Hanlon discusses the above story in his article, "Unsightly Urban Menaces." He says the Graves proposal did not come to fruition, but in 1920 a new African American subdivision was built, located just where one might expect, given prevailing attitudes:  "Flanking an incipient ghetto on the Lexington’s northern edge . . . between the city’s largest cemetery and the Eastern Kentucky Hospital for the Insane . . . separated from the rest of the city by two railroad lines, a stockyard, and the city crematory" (Hanlon 2011, 742).

Lexington's first Comprehensive Plan, adopted in 1931, includes this language: "Since many of the needed facilities have to be provided separately for the white and the colored population, it was necessary to make a separate study of the probable growth of the colored population" (emphasis added). The same document referred several times to existing "colored districts," although we have found no evidence that White or "colored" areas had ever been officially designated (Lexington City Planning and Zoning Commission 1931, 31).


In the section on future school needs, the 1931 plan identified separate sites for future White and "colored" schools through the year 1970. Similarly, it proposed separate future park facilities, and even though the plan itself predicted that the "colored" population would be 20% of the total population in 1970, it designated (by our calculations) 87.6% of the proposed future park acreage for White parks and only 12.4% for "colored" parks (Lexington City Planning and Zoning Commission 1931, 89).


To be fair to the planners and consultants of 1931, Kentucky law mandated school and other segregation at the time, but the plan carried an unstated assumption that these community resources would always be segregated. It is as if the planners saw segregation as the natural order of things, and could not imagine a community in which Black and White people shared the same spaces, or their children played or went to school together, even 40 years in the future.  

Even as late as 1967 the Comprehensive Plan, titled A Plan for Land Use, referred to "white" and "non-white" housing stock. For example, "Over 15,400 housing units were added to the white stock..." and "1,400 units added to the non-white stock between 1950 and 1964..." (Lexington-Fayette County Planning Commission 1967, 109).  The implication is that there were two separate housing markets. And of course, unofficially and in some cases officially, that was true—as a result of restrictive covenants, redlining, and realtor steering. 

The timing is important because it was during the early decades of the twentieth century that long-standing urban reformist concerns about slums, and the various threats they presumptively posed, took on a racialized inflection as the presence of blacks in cities grew. The dual menace of slums and blacks came to be refracted through the prism of a newly-emergent racial ordering of urban space, and slum clearance provided the opportunity to demolish African American neighborhoods that were 'out of place' within that socio-spatial order. (Hanlon 2011, 735)

At pages 744–745, Hanlon goes on to say that the practices of displacement and removal, such as happened to Adamstown and its residents, "can be counted alongside those of confinement and separation as expressions of prescriptive judgments about where blacks should and should not live" (emphasis added).

We discuss the facts about Adamstown in more detail here.

This little article, which appeared in the Lexington Leader on April 29, 1931, seems trivial at first blush.  But what does this incident say about community attitudes concerning White and Black space?   

A 1941 Herald-Leader article described "remarkable" housing growth in Fayette County over a two-year period, including 816 homes in new subdivisions such as Lafayette, Chevy Case, other subdivisions out Nicholasville and Winchester Roads, and 63 new homes within the city limits. In addition, the article stated, "The largest suburban area for Negro residents, the Douglas park-Price road area off Georgetown street, has added 28 homes. . ." In addition, the article referred to two new housing projects built in the two-year period: Charlotte Courts ("to be occupied by Negro families") and Fowler's Gardens ("for white families") (Templin 1941).  As in the above article about curb painting, the newspaper saw no need to explain why there were separate subdivisions and housing projects for African American families: the writers, editors and publishers assumed their readers already knew.

In the autumn of 1930, when Rhada Crowe bought and moved with her family to a house at 209 East Sixth Street (red X on map), they became the only African American family on that block. A week after they moved in, dynamite exploded on the front porch as the family slept inside. Fortunately no one was injured, but the family began preparing to move out. The police launched an investigation (Lexington Leader October 3, 1930).

Within a few days, African Americans who lived on East Sixth Street between Ohio Street and Elm Tree Lane (teal line on map) received letters warning them to move or risk dynamiting of their own homes. Several residents took the letters to the police, who promised protection and said the residents did not have to move. 

The Lexington Leader pointed out a distinction between the two cases: In Rhada Crowe's case, "the colored family had recently moved into a block in which Negroes had never lived before. The ones who complained today to Chief Thompson have been living at their present locations for years, and many of them own their own homes" (Lexington Leader, October 14, 1930).

We did not find a follow-up story giving the results of the police investigation. There is no indication that this was a case of state-supported violence, and in fact the police appeared sympathetic to the residents. What interests us is that this happened at all, and that the newspaper thought it important to distinguish between the Black families who had and had not moved into White neighborhoods.

Nationally, did the FHA Promote White Entitlement?

The White assumption that all space belongs to White people began long in the past, as demonstrated by some of the examples above. But in the 1930s that notion got a boost from the Federal Housing Administration. In Freedom to Discriminate, Gene Slater explains how the FHA promoted a belief among White Americans that they were entitled to own homes—homes in all-White neighborhoods.  

The low-interest FHA-insured mortgages made it possible for millions of people to own homes for the first time. "The possibility of buying and owning a home more easily and affordably than ever before became a common expectation, a birthright, for white Americans" (Slater 2021, 131). Encouraged by FHA policies and realtors' arguments, new homeowners adopted the belief that along with their inherent right to own a home came the right to protect that home from decreasing in value. In its Underwriting Manual, the FHA insisted (without any supporting evidence) that racial homogeneity was essential to maintaining property values. "To millions of white homeowners, it was not only the developer, the market, and the economic laws of property values that sanctioned their living in an all-white community, but the government itself" (Slater 2021,131–132).

In addition to encouraging the notion that Whites were entitled to own homes in all-White neighborhoods, Slater says the FHA public relations strategy encouraged home buyers to see their home ownership as the result of their own "hard work, savings, and individual merit" rather than due to government assistance (Slater 2021, 131).

A comment made in 1950 by Lexington realtor W. Bruce Davis bears out Slater's assertion. Davis, with two other members of the local Real Estate Board, addressed the City Commission to oppose public spending on a proposed low-income housing project. After the realtors asserted that such spending was "unfair to taxpayers," Davis said that "private citizens who own their own home 'have a better feeling about living' than those who accept 'favors' from the government"  (Lexington Leader 1950). Davis apparently did not see FHA-insured low-interest loans as "favors." 

As we noted in the Redlining section, the FHA's policy of redlining, and other forms of housing discrimination, became illegal in 1968. It is not so simple, however, to change the attitudes that had led to redlining, or the attitudes that redlining fostered. 

Two National Scholars View White and Black Space 

In White Space, Black Hood, Georgetown Law professor Sheryll Cashin invokes the idea of caste, which she refers to as a "system of sorting and exclusion." That system, Cashin says, "now exists at the intersection of race, economic status, and geography," and "thrives on certain cultural assumptions—that affluent space is earned and hood living is the deserved consequence of individual behavior" (Cashin 2021, 5–6).

Until the changes brought by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s–1970s, and the passage of the Fair Housing Act, nearly all African Americans lived in segregated Black neighborhoods. Gradually over the last 50 years, middle-class and affluent African Americans have been able to move away from those segregated neighborhoods, and many have done so. Cashin asserts, however, that the practices that initially assured segregation continue today. These practices now focus on segregating at the extreme ends of the race/economic spectrum: White affluence vs impoverished Black spaces.  Everyone in between is "ensnared by the inequality generated by this dynamic" (Tompkin 2021).

According to Cashin, the practices that continue segregation today include boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and surveillance.  

Boundary Maintenance. Calling boundary maintenance "a polite term for segregation," Cashin contends that the affluent maintain boundaries "through exclusionary or restrictive zoning or simply using their political power to oppose development that they don't want"  (Cashin 2021, 112).

In Lexington, there are many examples of the ways in which exclusionary zoning maintains boundaries by keeping smaller, less-expensive homes out of more affluent neighborhoods. Homeowner Association rules can serve a similar purpose. Other Lexington examples include gated communities, or roads and railroads that serve as boundaries. Richard Schein has provided one blatant example in a paper describing the gate separating prestigious Hampton Court from the adjoining low-income neighborhood; the gate was padlocked and welded shut in 1988. As Schein states, "the gate functions as a contemporary boundary between white and black, even rich and poor in Lexington . . ."  (Schein 2012, 946).  As of March 18, 2022, the gate was still welded shut. 

Opportunity Hoarding. Cashin defines opportunity hoarding as the process "whereby the most affluent neighborhoods enjoy the best public services, environmental quality, and private, public, and natural amenities, while all other communities are left with fewer, poor-quality resources" (Cashin 2021, 111). She says communities tend to use exclusionary zoning and neighborhood school assignment to hoard opportunities that enable residents to "rise on the benefits of exceptional schools and social networks" (Cashin 2021, 111).  Exclusionary zoning makes houses in areas containing the best schools attainable by only the upper and upper-middle class. Being in higher tax brackets, those homeowners will also "enjoy larger mortgage interest and property tax deductions, and therefore lower real costs, than their lower-income competitors” (Fennel 2002, 635). 

In Lexington we often see examples of opportunity hoarding during discussions about new developments or school redistricting.  It sometimes appears that residents believe they are entitled to low-traffic commutes, or that certain "good" schools belong to their neighborhoods—even when those schools are not within walking distance and all neighborhood children are bussed or driven to school. 

Stereotype-driven Surveillance. The notion of White space has become a matter of life and death for many African Americans, including Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery. In 2012, an armed, White Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager visiting in a predominantly White (but 30% Black) gated community. Ahmaud Arbery was 25 in February 2020 when he was chased and shot while jogging in a Georgia subdivision. The 2021 article, "When Black Men Meet White Communities" by Rashawn Ray, puts Arbery's shooting in historical context.

In Black in White Space, Yale sociology professor Elijah Anderson points out that our society is still "replete" with overwhelmingly White neighborhoods, business, stores, restaurants, churches, government offices, schools, and more, "from which Black people are typically absent, not expected, or marginalized when present at all." According to Anderson, Black people often refer to these settings as "the White space," and approach them "with care" (Anderson 2022, 14). Much of Anderson's observation is from larger cities such as Philadelphia; we wonder if the situation might actually be worse in smaller, whiter cities like Lexington, where only 14.6% of people are African American (US Census Bureau 2021).

We have barely scratched the surface of Cashin's and Anderson's books. For example, both authors discuss in depth the concept of what Anderson calls "the iconic ghetto" and Cashin calls "the Hood." These terms encompass not only physical spaces in which some low-income African American people are trapped, but also "a mental construct" that "hovers over phenotypic Black people as they make their way in civil society" (Anderson 2022, 27). That mental construct includes poverty, criminality, welfare cheating, poor parenting, and more, all too often explained in terms of individual pathology. Cashin and Anderson discuss these and many other concepts in much greater depth than we can even summarize here, and we recommend their books to those who would like to explore these ideas further.