Occupying Jim Crow

Chapter 2 details how black workers responded to the resistance of white tourists and the ambiguous state of segregation in the late 1880s and early 1890s. In their campaigns to desegregate public and commercial leisure space, black activists used violent and non-violent resistance to manipulate class divisions among whites and fight against discrimination by claiming full rights as citizens and free choice as consumers. By claiming that the right to consume was equal to the right to work, black workers helped refute free labor ideology as the basis of economic freedom.

Introduction

On July 23, 1893, an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer asked frustrated business owners and tourist promoters of Atlantic City “What are we going to do with our colored people?” Noting that “never before” had the resort community seemed “so overrun with the dark skinned race as this season,” Atlantic City and other popular northern resort destinations struggled throughout the Reconstruction era to contain the recreational activities and consumer demands of black pleasure seekers. As these struggles reveal, contests over segregation were not restricted to former plantation districts, northern legislatures, the workplace, or public transportation systems. In the late nineteenth century, the popularity of the New Jersey shore coincided with growing concerns over civil rights. On beaches and boardwalks, and inside amusement venues and hotel dining halls, African Americans’ claims for integrated leisure were imbedded in political debates over the meaning of race and the rights and health of consumers....

Conclusion

This chapter briefly details the post-1920 northern freedom struggle at the Jersey Shore. Despite continued efforts by grassroots black activists to press for integration, the black merchant class exploited the gradual decline of white entertainment spaces and the growing appeal of black consumer culture to lure in white customers and to downplay direct civil rights action. Rather than the typical “long march to freedom” promoted in many oft-told accounts, this chapter argues that the promise of consumption and the accompanying culture of growth spurred the region’s long retreat from earlier civil rights victories.

Cleaning Up Jim Crow

Chapter 5 examines how the moral and physical health of consumers and consumer districts became tied to economic rights, commercial expansion, and political stability. Intertwined in these debates were competing consumer and leisure discourses. Free consumer advocates advanced and protected the underground economy of leisure and advocates of consumer protection advanced a program of economic growth and environmental justice. Together, these campaigns helped contain campaigns for integrated leisure by solidifying the legal doctrine of “separate but equal.”

Marketing and Managing Jim Crow

Chapter 3 examines the political strategies white business owners and marketing agents employed in response to the black consumer activism of the late 1880s and early 1890s. Beginning in 1893, white authorities developed a Jim Crow strategy built around a defense of market values and public propriety, necessary regulations that they believed would prevent a wholesale disintegration of core capitalist principles and Victorian assumptions of respectability. In doing so, they attempted to make the segregation debate about political economy instead of race, castigating black consumer activism as a disruptive social act that threatened the popularity and financial growth of the region.

Boycotting Jim Crow

Chapter 4 explains how black entrepreneurs used the creation and promotion of black-owned leisure venues to boycott segregation and protect their right to consume. Recognizing the need for economic growth and social autonomy, black ministers and entrepreneurs argued that the right to consume should be greater than the right to integration. In building modestly profitable and popular businesses and recreational spaces, the region’s black merchant class succeeded in helping make separate more equal, even though they lost the larger fight over integrated leisure.

Reconstructing Jim Crow

Chapter 1 examines the early political struggles of business owners, white tourists, and black workers to define the boundaries of the public sphere during the Reconstruction era. For both whites and blacks alike, the promotional battles and intellectual disputes that ensued between 1865 and 1893 revealed the ways in which segregation was moving beyond discussions of free labor ideology and becoming increasingly tied to consumer opinion after the Civil War. Out of these disputes emerged an intermediate segregation policy that failed to ensure the peace or profitability of the region’s popular vacation destinations.