The Retreats of Reconstruction ─ Race, Leisure, and the Politics of Segregation at the New Jersey Shore 1865-1920

This study examines the consumer origins of racial segregation in northern leisure spaces and the struggle for American Americans' civil rights after the Civil War. In contrast to scholars who emphasize the conservative triumph of free labor ideology in limiting civil rights and other popular treatments that credit black consumer activism with defeating segregation, this book argues that the various consumer ideologies that first surfaced in northern leisure spaces during the Reconstruction era contained early desegregation efforts and prolonged Jim Crow. Beginning in the 1880s, the economic realities and class dynamics of popular resort towns like Atlantic City and Asbury Park unsettled prevailing assumptions about political economy and threatened traditional segregationist practices. Exploiting early class divisions between white business owners and white tourists, black working-class activists staged a series of successful protests that helped make northern leisure spaces a critical battleground in a larger debate about racial equality. Yet while African Americans used the claim of consumer rights and public health to contest Jim Crow, defend black-owned leisure districts, and push for environmental protections, white northerners eventually blocked claims to integrated leisure by adopting a producer driven vision of mass consumption that separated the right to consume from the right to integration. By the 1920s, white authorities learned to disguise talk of race with a capitalist vocabulary of consumer choice, commercial development, and greater prosperity. Likewise, the African-American business class increasingly lost faith in the power of civil disobedience and adopted the position that protecting their right to consume in black-owned commercial spaces was more important than fighting for integrated leisure. Combining intellectual, social, and cultural history, this book examines how these decisions helped popularize the popular doctrine of "separate but equal" and explains why the politics of consumption is critical to understanding the the "long civil rights movement. "

David E. Goldberg teaches in the History Department at Drury University and is winner of the 2014 Alfred E. Driscoll award for Best Dissertation. He is a civil rights historian focused on race, consumerism, and the environment in the Jim Crow North.