| "By Eminent Domain" places the history of Jim Crow segregation at the cultural and economic foundations of the massive public works projects of post-World War II America through a discussion of race and real estate in mid-twentieth century South Florida. The building of interstate highways, public housing, and other urban renewal programs were only possible through federal, state, and local governments' legal power to take privately held real estate for a proven "public good." Yet rather than cast eminent domain as a top-down imposition coming from an emboldened New Deal or postwar American state, this dissertation argues that eminent domain's uses were the consequence of bitter, decades-old struggles at the political grassroots over the racial contours of capitalism and the "appropriate" place and uses of black-occupied real estate.;Dating back to the establishment of local racial segregation mandates during the 1910s, tourist entrepreneurs and real estate speculators first separated the so-called "races" as part of an economic strategy to distribute and manipulate real estate in the most profitable way possible. By manipulating immigration patterns, white working-class anxiety, and federal housing subsidies, investors and enterprising businessmen of all colors segmented housing into "white" and "colored" markets. They created the densely packed Central Negro District and controlled the expansion of surrounding black enclaves, using either one's confinement to or distance from "colored" neighborhoods to force the average South Florida real estate consumer to pay more for less.;The fantastic profits these capitalists amassed in a segregated economy congealed into powerful lobbying groups and a spate of new industries, all linked to the same foundation of tourism, international trade, and slum construction. However, the continued substandardness of slums, the violence required to maintain Jim Crow's cultural viability, and the racial confusions presented by Caribbean and Latin America migrants constantly landing at Miami caused deep political fault lines to erupt between the local chambers of commerce, city and county officials, landlords, and a host of community groups. Eminent domain emerged from these conflicts as the most assured means for peacefully modernizing South Florida's economy, even if it did so at blacks' ultimate expense. |
