The WECC recruited homeowners by swapping violent tactics for restrictive covenants and buyouts.

Evidence

Throughout 1947 Joe Wallace reached out to the working-class and lower-middle-class whites of the region with a series of recruitment rallies. Generally, these meetings took place in reputable locations essential to white citizens’ sense of their community—the local schoolhouse, a Baptist church, the American Legion post. With small groups of twenty or so, Wallace gave a simple pitch. “We don’t hate the nigger,” he would tell them. “We love him—in his place!” Unlike earlier groups which had resorted to violence, Wallace promised that the WECC would seek to use capitalism and conversation to solve the problem. If whites would purchase homes from blacks and help them “find homes in the Negro district,” he argued, they could effectively “remove all Negroes from the West End.” After that, the neighborhood could be permanently protected by a “Great White Wall” of racially restrictive covenants written into the deeds of neighborhood houses. But to create this “paradise,” the WECC needed money. It would cost 5 for each covenant and considerably more for repurchasing the homes. Residents of the West End—white residents, at least—could help by purchasing stock in the nonprofit organization. The maximum amount was set at 500 per person, just to keep things democratic. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 132

Categorization

• XREF: Racially restrictive covenants via deed are the private-market mechanism that paved the way toward the ‘color-blind’ suburbs the reader tracks — direct precursor of later white-flight suburbanization.
• QUESTION: The $500 cap ‘to keep things democratic’ suggests a deliberate small-donor structure meant to broaden the base — worth checking whether that contrasted with elite-heavy civic associations.