Slumlord: Urban Paternalism and Other Undersides of Postwar City-Building

 This paper explores the issue of urban paternalism in the immediate postwar years, captured through the problem of slumlords.  Twentieth-century Americanists generally assume that blacks left the problem of paternalism behind once they made their many rural-to-urban migrations between the 1910s and 1940s.  As late as the 1960s, though, mostly white urban slumlords dominated black politics and social life, in many ways mirroring the exploitative practices rural Southern landlords deployed in the decades following the American Civil War.  Indeed, real estate entrepreneurs often followed the flow of tenants, moving from rural to urban areas and confident in their ability to take advantage of a growing class of black urban renters.  This twin migration proved particularly acute in Southern states, as the culture and economics of Jim Crow-ism transferred quite easily between town and country from one decade to the next.  From establishment of segregated urban regimes during the Progressive era through the making of the seemingly color-blind Sunbelt South, urban landlords assured handsome real estate profits by corralling migrating black populations and mastering mechanisms of hard and soft power.  They elicited black loyalty at the grassroots by making calculated contributions to black cultural life and education.  They helped handpick so-called "black" candidates in local elections and used a combination of legal wrangling and political corruption to dominate state legislation on housing reform, with their state-guaranteed profits coming at the ultimate expense of the renting black poor.  In fact, the power of slumlords – and the authority of state eminent domain laws to check those powers – prompted many urban progressives to cast slum clearance and urban renewal as crucial pillars of a broader civil rights program.  Yet the ability of slumlords to migrate capital meant that the consequences of these programs would likewise come at the expense of the urban poor.