Book Review

Marshaling an impressive array of sources, rigorously analyzed, Thomas W. Hanchett tells a familiar story about a less familiar place. Charlotte, North Carolina, became increasingly segregated by race, class, and land usage over the century following Reconstruction. In a powerful thesis that well structures this chronological account, Hanchett argues that Charlotte evolved from a preindustrial "salt-and-pepper" city of intermingling peoples and purposes, to a "patchwork" of irregularly alternating black and white neighborhoods, to a partitioned metropolis of large homogenous "sectors" or quadrants.

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These transformations are vividly depicted in text and illustrations. Residences with "homey gable roof" and commercial establishments with "boxy, flat-topped form," once photographed side by side, came to occupy separate, ever more distant spaces, as railroads helped create a regional center of textile manufacturing, distribution, and banking. Removed from the core, neighborhoods were not predestined as enclaves, however. Charlotte's first streetcar suburb "bent or broke" all the rules; its designer envisioned a mixed-race, self-sufficient community of factories, stores, and houses. Yet after the failed Populist-Republican "Fusion" alliance, disfranchisement was encoded in law. Red-shirts paraded, and white preachers advocated race- and class-segregated communities, schools, and churches.

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