For the last decade, I have been working with a wide range of scholars, elected officials, community members, and other stakeholders to document and interpret the history of Black communities in High Point, North Carolina. The city was a factory town that produced furniture and hosiery for most of the twentieth century, and when manufacturing moved elsewhere it experienced the decline typical of many industrial centers. Yet the topic of deindustrialization has been largely absent from this work, so when I saw the news about the working group I was eager to join and learn. From my newcomer’s perspective, two issues that our study contributes to the group are the relationship between deindustrialization and race and the challenge of studying deindustrialization as a public historian when the scholarship and politics of the subject become intertwined.
Our project differs from many in this group in that it does not yet have a home space, though an effort is underway to develop an African American culture and history center on Washington Street, the commercial hub for Black High Point during the Jim Crow period. We are also raising money to produce a podcast on the city’s Black leadership over the past century. Without a physical plant, though, our issues revolve around the fundamental question of how best to deliver information and narratives to a local and potentially a wider audience.
We have attempted a variety of methods of achieving this goal over the past decade. My work began in 2014 when students and I launched the William Penn Project to develop an oral history collection of interviews with alumni from the city’s segregated Black high school. Over the next decade, we also produced a mobile exhibit on the history of one of the city’s oldest and most prominent traditionally Black churches, and a short documentary film on the integration of High Point College (now High Point University). In 2021, the High Point NAACP asked the City Council to consider reparations and the Council asked me to research the history of racial disparities in the city’s education system as part of the One High Point Commission Reconciliation and Reparations Report. In doing so, I read through the School Committee’s records from its formation in 1919 until its merger with a countywide system in 1992.
Through these endeavors, we have studied the relationships among race, religion, and education. Other parts of the One High Point Report have studied the connections between race, health, and urban renewal. Yet so far no one has examined the effects of deindustrialization on these disparities, or even the historical process of deindustrialization within the city. These investigations seem vital for a city trying to chart a course forward out of the damages generated by the decline and removal of its local industries.
While I search for studies of the deindustrialization process within High Point, I have started to examine the questions and interpretations generated by other scholars of race and deindustrialization in the United States. For example, Thomas Sugrue’s study of Detroit finds that “through persistent racial discrimination deindustrialization magnified the effects of deindustrialization on blacks” in that city and that the process also reconstituted the special and social relations of the city along lines of race and class.[1] A more recent study of Chicago highlights the disproportionate representation of Black workers in public sector jobs of that city and urges a broader reassessment of privatization alongside deindustrialization in “racialized accounts of urban economic restructuring.”[2] Hopefully testing these hypotheses in our local context can help us to better understand the causes of the recent One High Point Commission Study’s finding that residents in the city’s most affluent zip code have a life expectancy seventeen years longer than those in its poorest zip code.
Another intriguing vein of scholarship to consider for our work are the studies of collective memory within the context of deindustrialization. Bill Bamberger and Cathy Davidson’s Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory focuses on the last six months of operation at a factory in nearby Mebane, North Carolina[3]. While we don’t have the opportunity to replicate such a study, the relatively recent deindustrialization of High Point from the 1970s through the 1990s means that we have community members who lived through these experiences and empty factories that some of my colleagues in the Art department at High Point University have already begun to photograph. Conducting oral histories to consider how the closing of these factories altered the identities of both workers and management and whether and how those experiences differed along racial lines in our community provides another opportunity to enrich our understanding of how the recent past may have altered or reinforced the more longstanding racial divisions within our city.
The final challenge that I currently perceive for our efforts to incorporate deindustrialization into the larger project is a political one on which I have not yet found any scholarship. The recent work of the One High Point Commission has divided the city along party lines; as work proceeds, I remain concerned about developing strategies—perhaps even beyond standard best practices—to protect our work from partisanship and misinformation. I suspect this issue is common for practitioners on this subject, so I hope we can address this subject within the group’s conversations.
[1] Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 144. Other seminal projects that document the heightened economic disparities generated by deindustrialization include William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: 1997); and Loic Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge, 2008).
[2] Virginia Parks, “Revisiting Shibboleths of Race and Urban Economy: Black Employment in Manufacturing and the Public Sector Compared, Chicago 1950-2000,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (January 2011), 110-129.
[3] Bill Bamberger and Cathy Davidson, Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (Durham, NC, 1998).
An important consideration for public historians, which this case also illustrates, is the contest over authorship – whose stories are told and who curates those stories. Who decides which stories are memorialized? This is both a political contest (not only between established political parties) and an ideological one. The oral history project is a firm foundation on which to build. Such a project might further explore how hierarchies of class and caste are components of that process, as you suggest with the examples of Chicago and Detroit. Part of the attraction for for textile corporations to relocate to the Carolinas was certainly the ‘availability’ of a relatively impoverished population who could be recruited (cheaply) to operate the factory. That ‘availability’ was created by the structures of Jim Crow law and other legacies of slavery. While Jim Crow was employed throughout the USA, and fractured the working class, it took especially virulent form in the historic South.
Thanks Paul for this. There are so many important and interesting pathways you have started and are planning. Cheap labor – that’s one key element in these histories, especially in textiles. I imagine furniture is the same? There were efforts by labor leaders to create a national wage to avoid capital flight, but that, of course, did not succeed. I have some specific questions about the furniture business and its labor practices regarding race and gender, that we’ve seen in other industries (e.g. differing rates of pay, assigning jobs, housing, unionization, etc.). All of those things come into play, along with the issues you note about health. What I think will be interesting is to talk about deindustrialization in a Southern context – most histories are about the Great Lakes areas in the US, or Northeast and New England. We need more work on the South (and Global South, too), so I applaud what you are doing. As to politics, the shift of the Southern Democrats to the GOP in the wake of the Black freedom movement is key. I also think that in your case with North Carolina, addressing the ways in which leaders like Luther Hodges advertised the state as a “progressive” one to build the Research Triangle around Raleigh-Durham is part of the story. Works by scholars like Bruce Schulman (Cotton Belt to Sun Belt) might be instructive there.
I agree with Greg that you’ve raised many compelling questions. I hope at some point we can compare your findings in High Point with one of my own focuses, the Showers Brothers furniture company here in Bloomington, Indiana.
The link with memory and commemoration is likewise one of my key interests. I’m eager to know what you learn about racial differences in the memory of deindustrialization.
I see your final point, the political challenge, as one of the most important issues for this group to address. The economic understanding of deindustrialization (or the migration of capital, when we adopt the global frame of analysis) is inherently controversial in the current political environment, particularly when you foreground the differing racial experiences. The AASLH’s recent virtual summit on Doing Public History in Polarized Times was quite helpful.
Paul, thank you for sharing this! Have you read As Goes Bethlehem? It might be a neat one that starts to touch on the moral economy of deindustrialized steelworkers and does, I think, the best job in trying to historicize abstract ideas like bitterness. I am curious, too, about where might newer immigrant communities fit into these tales of deindustrialization. Admittedly, I normally only have a week about the South in my Intro to Latina/o History survey; however, after reading a new book, Marquez’s The Latino South, I realize that I am missing a lot of opportunities to engage with the perseverance of workers, the changing nature and scale of work, and the new dangers of types of work.
Overall, I find that last point fascinating! How can we talk about preservation and interpretation efforts in an era of increased hostility to these sorts of programming and funding?
I think it must be particularly challenging to develop interpretive materials and narrative strategies about a community’s deindustrialization history without a physical site as backdrop and touchpoint for engagement. At the same time I’m fascinated by your project’s multifaceted approach to High Point’s history without the presence of a physical space. Portability increases awareness and access, and particularly with the podcast, there is an invitation to further community contribution that could reach people beyond High Point.
Moving toward a comprehensive history of the deindustrialization process in High Point also seems like an excellent place to start. Creating oral histories taps in to the currents of collective memory and may generate major lines of inquiry if stories repeat or if there seem to be major absences or omissions.
I’d like to hear more about how the lack of a “home space” has impacted the way you approach your work in the community. It sounds like there are a number of ways that you are able to be in some ways more present than those of us who have physical space but struggle to get the community to come to them. Your case study is really valuable in that it makes us think about the best container so-to-speak for histories of deindustrialization. Does the absence of a space set the conditions for the narrative of deindustrialization to take center stage, rather than an addendum to the main story of industrial successes and innovation?