A World More Concrete

A World More Concrete argues that Americans, immigrants, and indigenous people of all colors made tremendous investments in racial apartheid in the twentieth century, in order to regulate city growth and to maximize the value of land. Focusing on South Florida, the book illustrates how entrepreneurs used land and debates over property rights to negotiate the workings of Jim Crow segregation. Over the course of several decades, property ownership became an important feature in the development of cities and suburbs, in the articulation of civil rights reform, and in the general failure of civil rights activism to end residential segregation and black poverty. As a result of the privileged legal and social position granted to property ownership, Jim Crow culture became American culture - politically, economically, and in the built environment.