African-Americans enlist to preserve the all-black town

Patrik Jonsson:

Perry Barrett, for one, is asking himself this provocative question: Is there a place today in America for the all-black town?

While many African-Americans, including Mr. Barrett, grew up in small rural towns with nary a white person, those communities today have almost faded from the scene - a consequence of interventions such as the Voting Rights Act, desegregation laws, and the civil rights movement, not to mention changing attitudes.

But a few such towns persist - and some residents and former residents are determined to save them. Far from seeing places such as Taylortown, N.C., as anachronisms carried over from the days of Jim Crow, they view the black town as a beacon of self-sufficiency and pride - something to be savored, safeguarded, even invested in.

Barrett is one who's putting his money where his heart is.

As a kid in the 1930s, he careened across Taylortown, picking up trash and listening to Negro quartets play open-air concerts. In those days, he couldn't hope to live in nearby Pinehurst, a white and wealthy golf town whose black hired hands lived in segregated but proud enclaves like Taylortown, Midway, and Jackson Hamlet.

After living on New York's Long Island for most of his adult life, Barrett is investing his hard-earned savings in three buildings in his hometown, rather than in the real estate bonanza around Pinehurst's greens - even though he admits he has little hope of recouping the investment.

"I'd be smarter to put my money somewhere else," he says, peering at the leaning shacks and dirt tracks that block in his property. "But this is more important, it always has been to me."

The task for people like Barrett, though, is a daunting one. Many younger African-Americans are ambivalent, at best, about preserving this way of life, and the forces arrayed against the all-black town - development, politics, history - seem unstoppable.

"They're mostly towns that have a real small population, often an older population, and they're really beginning to think seriously about, how do we survive?" says Oklahoma lawyer Hannibal Johnson, author of "Acres of Aspiration" about the promise of all-black towns. "The reason they want to remain viable is the history of human spirit triumphing and self-determination."

Apparently, it is only racist when white people want to live amongst their own kind.