Book Review

Robert C. Kenzer provides an extensively documented study on the post-Reconstruction business activities of blacks. The topic is generally neglected in studies of the era, even as recently as Leon Litwack's Trouble in Mind (1998). Rather, the focus is on the masses of landless blacks, who lived in virtual peonage. Only brief mention is given to the economic activities of "enterprising" blacks, with assessments that rely primarily on fragmentary databases. But Loren Schweninger's comprehensive Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915 (1990), which proceeds from a regional analysis of the South, expands our knowledge of black landholders. Kenzer, proceeding from an internal regional analysis of North Carolina, distinguishes black landholding patterns and business activities in that state.

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Each chapter considers the interplay of political and socioeconomic forces, including the internal dynamics of the black community. The first chapter, "Black Landownership," documents differences in landowning rates between light-skinned and dark-skinned blacks. Landowner rates in the five years between slavery and freedom remained virtually the same. Based on his analysis of 59,276 North Carolina households headed by African American men, Kenzer notes that by 1870, "mulatto men now were nearly four times more likely than black men to own real estate." Based on land value, he documents that the economic status of light-skinned blacks was well above that of dark-skinned blacks. He emphasizes that flexibility in urban real-estate markets, rather than an absence of racism, elevated black landownership in cities above that in rural areas.

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