Creative extraction: Black towns in white space

Black places across multiple scales, from the neighborhood to the city, are in persistent negotiation for their survival with the white economic and political structures in which they are embedded. We argue that they are linked by a number of existential threats, manifested in the form of land grabs, environmental risks, political exclusion, denial of basic services, and other tactics aimed at both stifling Black-centered development and redirecting resources to bolster white development (Pulido, 2017; Wilson et al., 2008). Despite their shared fates, Black places are frequently analyzed through ostensibly race-neutral axes of comparison, such as physical dimensions, region, legal jurisdiction, and other geographic characteristics, which treat their experiences as separable phenomena, and lead to missed connections between them. Moreover, these Black place problems are usually treated as unconnected to white places. We adopt the Chocolate Cities frame in which the Blackness of places, whatever their size or legal structure, is the point of departure for how they are treated by law and through the political process, especially those of other white localities, and ultimately how they develop (Hunter and Robinson, 2018; Mills, 1997).

Recognizing these commonalities across Black places of all origins and at all scales, we focus specifically on Black-founded towns like Tamina, which are frequently left out of Black place analyses altogether. Black towns are intentional communities, typically established by Black people, for the purpose of creating the sociopolitical conditions for Black freedom and autonomy (Roberts, 2017; Rose, 1965; Slocum, 2019). From the fugitive antebellum communities of the Great Dismal Swamp (Sayers, 2014) to 20th century incorporated municipalities, such as Langston and Boley in Oklahoma (Slocum, 2019), they are critical sites not only for understanding the nuances of Black spatial imaginaries and governance (Lipsitz, 2011), but also to understand how whiteness is inherent to the structure and function of the town. Indeed, our observations of Black towns across the U.S., from Institute, West Virginia to White Hall, Alabama (Purifoy, 2018, 2013; Seamster and Purifoy, 2020) clarify that the U.S. town as a legal–spatial form is predicated on whiteness (Seamster, 2015).

White-founded localities are mostly chartered by state governments as incorporated municipalities or special districts and comprise the overwhelming majority of local places in the U.S. Though their whiteness is frequently unnamed, their various physical characteristics, cultural, and political traditions are central to the U.S. definition of a local place. By contrast, Black towns have small populations (typically < 10,000) and are sometimes state-recognized municipalities with formal local governments. But many, if not most, are unincorporated communities with local institutions that serve governance functions without state recognition or legal boundaries (Rose, 1965; Slocum, 2019). The unincorporated status of many Black towns obscures the number that exist across the country: unincorporated towns are often omitted from official maps. Black towns often encounter structural barriers to incorporation, and sometimes even avoid incorporation to shield against conspicuousness or state intervention.

We focus in this paper on Black-founded towns, rather than demographically Black places—white-founded places where the majority of the population is now Black—because though the dynamics of creative extraction apply in those places, Black towns are paragons of Black governance and Black-centered development, helping us identify the specific mechanisms that reproduce their development outcomes. These outcomes of their attempts to utilize the same political and legal institutions of place development used by white communities, for the purpose of building Black power, are indicators of the functional “neutrality” of those institutions.

Despite similarities to demographically Black places like Atlanta, Georgia, Black-founded towns share characteristics of size, economy, and infrastructure that are distinct from those places. These distinctions arise from the comparative lack of historic white economic and political investment in Black towns. For example, demographically Black places are more likely to have comprehensive water and sewer infrastructure than Black towns because those infrastructures are typically built out of white investments for white populations residing in those places. Black communities living in those places “inherit” the benefits of those infrastructures, even after white populations leave. By contrast, Black towns often struggle to secure public financing and political consensus from white officials at the county and state levels to build their own infrastructures, because the town is not a white-led project perceived to benefit white populations (Purifoy, 2018). The difference in infrastructure access has direct bearing on the comparative growth and development of these Black places.

Because the common characteristics of Black towns exist regardless of their legal status as incorporated municipalities or unincorporated communities, we use the terms Black towns, places, and communities interchangeably in this article to illuminate the connected experiences of Black-founded towns. We do not suggest there are no meaningful distinctions between an incorporated Black town and an unincorporated Black community; rather, we view the similarities among these Black-founded places as worthy of common analysis.

This research arose from a pattern of spatial relations we identified in existing case studies and research projects we pursued in seemingly disparate Black places—small rural and periurban Black towns like Princeville and Taylortown in North Carolina (Purifoy, 2021, 2018) and the larger, demographically Black cities of Flint and Benton Harbor in Michigan (Seamster, 2018). Working within our “community of inquiry” (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012: 179), we observed a pattern captured in literature about race and local development. That is, towns chartered and governed by white officials are frequently “shadowed” by Black towns lying outside their boundaries—whether unincorporated county communities or chartered municipalities (Aiken 1987; Kellogg, 1977). These “shadow towns,” regardless of region, possess remarkable similarities in their development and relationship to their neighboring white towns. They typically lacked adequate water and wastewater sanitation infrastructure, possessed few signs of thriving economic development, and most of their residents worked in the adjacent white town or somewhere outside of the community. They relied on neighboring white towns for many basic necessities—including banking and finance, groceries, and healthcare (Purifoy, 2018). The similarity of conditions across U.S. regions generated three main observations, which are the focus of this article. First, we understand place development processes as relational, rather than independent. The dominant urban studies framework centers around an individualized model of development, wherein localities build viable tax bases and compete through political processes for scarce resources (Jacobs, 2012). We argue that the more common model of local development is premised on systemic and legally sanctioned extraction of resources and value from one place to grow another. Second, the relationality of place development is both racialized and uneven. White places develop through routine extraction of resources and power, enabled through the devaluation of Black places via seemingly race neutral structures of political geography, property ownership, and public finance (Delaney, 2010; Taylor, 2019). Third, because of these race-relational development processes, Black governance is structurally hindered from generating and sustaining development in tandem with white governed places. Black places thus have unique environmental, economic, and political perils vis-à-vis white places.

We introduce “creative extraction,” the process of race-relational development, demonstrated here in the context of Black towns in white space. We argue that the legal and sociopolitical structure of the U.S. reproduces the nation as white space that maintains power through the seizure and control of resources and political power from communities of color, particularly Black communities (McKittrick, 2013; Mills, 1997). Black governance, formal or informal, violates what political philosopher Charles Mills calls the “racial contract”—a historically grounded challenge to social contract theory—which endows whiteness with the power to shape the future of any space.

Tamina’s development history of the past 30–40 years is emblematic of creative extraction. The town’s fight for basic services is replicated in Black places in all regions of the U.S, as well as in Indigenous communities and Latinx colonias (Curley, 2019; Jepson, 2012). As an exemplar of Black sovereignty and governance, Tamina arguably poses a greater threat to white spatial hegemony than Black populations in white-founded localities. Creative extraction “corrects” for that threat, utilizing white governance at multiple scales to reclaim control through three connected processes—theft of land and resources, erosion of environmental and economic conditions, and exclusion of Black people as entitled participants in the social contract.

Dispossession of physical resources, from land to water rights, is the primary feature of creative extraction observed in Tamina. Maps show the gradual reduction of Tamina’s physical footprint as white towns cropped up around it. The signs of overburdened or nonexistent infrastructure—aging water towers, the presence of raw sewage in places where septic tanks have failed or are nonexistent—are also often evidence of dispossession.

The white land grabs of Tamina’s territory in the 1970 and 1980s were part of white flight from Houston to avoid integration and city taxes (Gottdiener and Feagin, 1988) and the growth of white-collar jobs in Texas’ oil industry. Rather than being built on “empty” territory, white suburbs like The Woodlands and Shenandoah were formed over preexisting Black communities (Greason, 2014).

The elder Mr. Howard first got involved with the community in the 1980s to help residents resist land grabs and harassment from outsiders.

There were several people…outside of the Tamina community, that were pursuing land that the people of Tamina had owned for generations…there were so many back then that were calling me…And I would intercede on their behalf and do the best I could to stop them from getting the land for little or nothing or just taking it outright.

Displacement also occurred for public buildings: Julia Leveston mentioned that Oak Ridge High School, constructed for the white suburb Oak Ridge, forced some Tamina residents “to relocate across the tracks, because they…were made to sell. Then some—they just took the land.”

One method of land theft in Tamina occurs through the targeting of heir property—land owned in common by all heirs to a deceased owner. Such land can be vulnerable to seizure by nonfamily members seeking clear property title: if even one family member sells her stake in the property, or if the heirs are not coordinated enough to track and pay property taxes, the entire property can be sold away from the family, through nominal purchase by a non-heir or through foreclosure (Dyer and Bailey, 2009). Heir property in Black families is not only a vulnerability stemming from lack of access to resources and trusted attorneys to develop viable wills, but also represents an important alternative to individualist models of property rights. However, the U.S. Agricultural Census found in the 1990s that Black landowners had their acreage decimated over the 20th century, often through seizure of heir property (Gilbert et al., 2002).

Shenandoah refers to Tamina not as a sovereign Black place with development rights, but a “blank space” on which to implement its own aspirations. Shenandoah’s 2010 “Comprehensive Plan” marked Tamina on their land use map as “vacant land having no apparent use” (2010: 23), commenting, “Large tracts of land…are becoming increasingly hard to find for the industrial business community” (2010: 3–2).

In 2005, Tamina discovered Shenandoah had filed for a water Certificate of Convenience and Necessity (CCN) significantly overlapping Tamina’s long-existing water CCN (Tresaugue, 2015), and pursued legal action to reclaim its rights. Richard Howard explained that the map held by the state was different from Tamina’s version, and matched Shenandoah’s desired boundaries:

Even though Tamina already had expectation as to what the map was supposed to be, and had submitted that, at one point TCEQ mails to Tamina…what's purported to be the final map, and then the group has to sign off on it…Supposedly no one from Tamina received that map and approved it. So it was approved by default. But it was only later that the Tamina Water Corporation realized that the map that had been approved was not the map that they thought.

Not only did Shenandoah place its CCN territory directly over Tamina’s, but it cut and moved Tamina’s water service line in the process. “They encroached our service area,” Julia Leveston explained, “dismantling our service line at David Memorial [Drive]” to serve new commercial customers. “So nobody asked us anything. They just cut our lines there.” This selective provision of water was especially malicious, as Tamina had been involved in litigation to obtain additional water from Shenandoah for residents Tamina did not have capacity to serve with its own system as early as 1999. Shenandoah also used its ill-gotten water CCN to preempt Tamina’s application for a sewer CCN, which was pending before Shenandoah applied, in the process endangering a federal loan Tamina obtained to create its own sewer system (That sewer CCN was not approved until March 2019).

The serial thefts of Tamina’s resources, occurring across multiple domains, by both private and public actors, reflect a shared logic of creative extraction. The erosion of Black towns’ resources can work in parallel to theft as an equally effective mechanism of extraction.

Even if a town is not threatened by immediate capture or erasure, Black places are often starved of essential development tools as a precursor for theft. White communities can erode Black towns by using them as dumping grounds or “sacrifice zones,” extracting their resources and property, or blocking their access to infrastructure (Anderson, 2008; Wilson et al., 2008). The harm to land itself constitutes a form of extraction, robbing Black places of the ability to thrive from the full use of space, while unburdening white places to pursue other forms of desirable development. Tamina has been a frequent target for such environmental erosion since the white towns began growing around it.

Contractors working on developments in Shenandoah and The Woodlands, for example, dumped their waste back in Tamina, such that two decades ago, Tamina was described as “sit[ting] inside a perimeter of muddy lanes and illegal dump sites holding debris from the explosion of construction going on around it” (Contreras, 1999). Rather than cleaning them up, industry paved over these illegal dump sites and built on top of them. Runoff from one of these illegal dumps put Tamina’s cemetery, Sweet Rest, underwater; burials have been impossible since 2007. Heir property is also vulnerable to degradation, as development of even basic infrastructure is frequently disallowed without permission of all (typically unknown) heirs to the property.

One common, but understudied, method by which white towns can degrade Black spaces is through the use of extraterritorial jurisdiction powers (ETJ) (Wilson et al., 2008). Towns are usually granted land use and limited taxation powers over unincorporated communities outside of their municipal boundaries for the purpose of future town expansion. But the ETJ can be abused as a dumping ground to avoid political liability for environmental hazards within municipal boundaries, particularly as ETJ residents cannot vote in municipal elections (Holt Civic Club v. Tuscaloosa, 1978). Much of Tamina is in Shenandoah’s ETJ, but two other towns hold a sliver too: as Ranson Grimes put it, “if they get a mile [radius of control from city limits], then Oak Ridge North gets their mile. Then Conroe got their mile, and then we just have a little–teacup.”

Shenandoah reinforces the environmental harm of Tamina by using its ETJ to influence land use. Although the town only has half the population needed to become a “home rule” city and involuntarily annex Tamina, Shenandoah has already marked Tamina for future expansion, and has zoned the community industrial, despite hundreds of families living there. Geosouthern Energy, headquartered in the Woodlands, has an oil field immediately north of Tamina (and adjacent to a gravel company). A 2011 engineering report observed that many Tamina homes “depend on water wells even though they are adjacent to an oil field” (PTI, 2011: 1). The industrial contamination of local aquifers is one potential reason many Tamina residents that were still on wells now need to be connected to a water system.

Rules ostensibly designed to protect the health and safety of residents can also work against Black places’ survival, and can be deployed by outsiders to break up Black communities. Shenandoah used its condemnation powers to take forty acres of Tamina property for extending a commercial road (Williams, 2007). Lawyers representing Tamina clients described receiving environmental complaints from state agencies just before outsiders appeared, offering to “help” residents get into compliance with regulations. “And these people come in and they will assist them in trying to cure their problem, and the next thing you know, they’re claiming ownership.” Similar rules can appear written to frustrate the residents’ own property ownership: Julia Leveston claimed that her attempts to divide up inherited property for family members were stymied when she was told Montgomery County had made a new rule mandating each building using a septic system have at least one acre of land.

These forms of erosion rationalize later erasure, dispossession, or extraction, as underdevelopment of Black spaces is misread as “backward” (Mills, 2001; Woods, 2017[1999]). The confluence of these phenomena, as well as the lack of basic services, produces low property values, which hinders both individual residents and towns relying on property tax revenue. Environmental externalities also diminish Black residents’ health and use value of property (Bullard, 2008). The property devaluation serves the use value of the white towns; however, as degrading Black land preserves the value of white land. Blighted properties, or brownfields, are subsequently easier for white towns to take and redevelop using public funds, particularly under the guise of environmental remediation and revitalization (Bryson, 2012).

Finally, Black towns face political exclusion as the third arm of creative extraction. This mechanism includes the erasure or deconstruction of Black political forms and structures, the direction of resources away from Black governance, and the blocking of Black town development, which is perhaps most visible through conflict over infrastructure. This mechanism can encompass theft and erosion within its scope, as observed, for example, with Shenandoah encroaching on Tamina’s CCN boundary.

Tamina’s independence threatens the growth aspirations and spatial interests of nearby white towns, which rely on degraded Black space to bolster and project their own legitimacy and value. In a 2014 letter to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), James Leveston wrote that Tamina residents felt nearby cities were trying to “dislodge” them: “One way is to block Tamina from providing sewer services to its community and to hamper our development.” In our interview, Julia Leveston made the same point: “I’d say the big problem with us getting sanitary service—[it] would stop a lot of annexation. That’s what they don’t want. So that’s the blockage. They want the land.”

Shenandoah actively desires to annex Tamina. Despite a Houston reporter’s claim about Tamina that “the impoverished community doesn’t have the healthy tax base that would make it an attractive target for annexation” (Snyder, 2017), Tamina lies in the only direction in which Shenandoah can expand. Shenandoah’s forays into merging the two communities are not political negotiations so much as public threats. For instance, in 2007 Shenandoah administrator Chip VanSteenberg announced at an Old Tamina Water Supply Corporation meeting that “Tamina and Shenandoah are going to be married…Tamina will one day be in Shenandoah” (Williams, 2007). Tamina resident Rita Wiltz responded to this announcement, “I’m not getting in bed with you…It seems to me like a form of enslavement. If you want to jump across the freeway and take us whether we like it or not, you are going to” (Williams, 2007).

With these designs on annexing Tamina, Shenandoah blocked Tamina’s ability to access water and sanitation services through a USDA loan (Leonard, 2015). Although Shenandoah had (again) agreed to provide sewer access to Tamina through the terms of a settlement over the CCN conflict, Shenandoah ultimately reneged because the agreement would prevent Shenandoah from annexing Tamina until the loan was repaid, as long as 40 years. “[That land] could end up being extremely valuable to the city,” Shenandoah City Attorney William Ferebee said. “I don’t think any responsible [city council] would agree. You’d [be] tying up the next 20 city councils” (Leonard, 2015). Despite Shenandoah’s marriage announcement, our respondents said Shenandoah had never proposed that Tamina file for voluntary annexation into Shenandoah.

Moreover, as Shenandoah’s threats imply, annexation of Black communities does not necessarily entail inclusion into the larger municipality, political representation, or even the same application of rules (Gilbert, 2013). Our respondents said Shenandoah told them that, even after a voluntary annexation, Tamina residents would only be able to renovate their homes for under 50% of their value, effectively blocking their ability to maintain their homes (also cf. Williams, 2007). Annexation, therefore, would not stop the parallel process of erosion of Tamina’s property values and ability to direct their own development.

Julia Leveston describes the antagonism toward Tamina’s independence and development as obvious attempts at erasure. “[W]e wanted to keep our identity as Tamina,” she explained,

because it was on the county map and they took it off the map…There was a big sign there on the railroad tracks when you come across Tamina. They’d done away with that. So they’re actually fading us out, and most of the time if something happens newsworthy, they’ll say [it happened in] Shenandoah…

But while annexation is not desirable for Tamina residents, incorporation to preserve Tamina’s independent identity also raises potential costs very different from those facing The Woodlands. The latter town is contemplating incorporation to escape Houston’s interest in annexation, weighed against having to pay for its own roads, police, and other services currently provided by the county. However, Houston’s annexation would not likely erase The Woodlands’ community identity and certainly would not threaten the property rights of its population. A white place like The Woodlands incorporates to avoid sharing resources with a much larger and more diverse population; a Black place like Tamina incorporates to preserve its own existence (Smith and Waldner, 2017). Even after incorporation, as evidenced in cases from North Carolina to California, Black towns still face an uphill battle to obtain new services, as they must compete with other local entities for public funding (Goel et al., 1988; Purifoy, 2021, 2018). Thus, the fight for political legitimacy would be similarly onerous for Tamina after incorporation, as it still must navigate a deeply interconnected white political bureaucracy, and antagonisms that seek to undermine their standing as a municipality.

Without formal incorporation, Black governance is enacted, and Black territory is demarcated, through alternative or ad hoc structures, like Tamina’s Water Supply Corporation and its CCN, guaranteeing its right to provide water service. But even these minimal protections or boundaries impede whites’ absolute authority over space, which has made them a target for local political conflict. The normative white town builds incrementally, using its political structure and institutional recognition to assemble services and enact development. In contrast, Tamina is expected to surrender its political standing as the “cost” of obtaining basic services, thereby undermining a primary benefit of the services. Each failed attempt to obtain infrastructure attacks Tamina’s political legitimacy, which makes a takeover of the community appear less as a land grab and more as a normative adoption of “underutilized” territory.

County government also plays a key role in bypassing Tamina for resources or enforcing local units’ demands. In our interview, James Leveston noted that the county had made Tamina its highest priority for Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funding, only to erase Tamina as a priority altogether. For instance, in 1999, Montgomery County announced it would devote $1.25 million in CDBG funds for a Tamina water plant, then blocked its own decision, because the community’s poor condition meant the cost of service hookup wasn’t “worth it” (Contreras, 1999).

While some offers of service were simply retracted, other deals would have required Tamina to surrender its autonomy as a condition. In 2003, Tamina was again promised CDBG money and state grants to receive water and sewer service from Oak Ridge North’s municipal utility district (MUD). Tamina agreed to a steep price to obtain this deal. Not only did it agree to settle litigation with Shenandoah in exchange for this new opportunity, but Tamina Water Supply Corporation dissolved to form a new entity, Tamina Water and Sewer Service Corporation (TWSSC), which gave South Montgomery County representative majority control (Reut-Overman, 2001). Moreover, Tamina agreed to pay for improvements Oak Ridge North was planning for customers outside of Tamina. Despite Tamina’s subsidizing other communities’ development, U.S. Congressional Representative Kevin Brady announced the money would go to “the neediest of the needy” and made Tamina’s successful acquisition of public funds sound like charity from outsiders: “It was because of Friends of Tamina, Oak Ridge North and Montgomery County that this was possible” (Aikin and Webre, 2001).

But the political cost went one step too far: Tamina would have to surrender its CCN granting the right to provide water service. Tamina wanted a written promise that Oak Ridge North would return the CCN after Tamina finished paying its 20-year loan. Tamina’s CCN, as the license for Tamina’s water company to operate, is the sole legal designation identifying Tamina’s boundaries and rights as an entity. James Leveston described the process by which Tamina decided on this requirement:

All Tamina has is a water company. They have to have the CCN to operate the water company, but they wanted us to turn the CCN over to Oak Ridge. We had a community meeting, and the community agreed that we would turn our CCN over to Oak Ridge if, once the loan had been paid off, all obligations had been met, that they would turn it back over to the Tamina community; because that’s all the identity that we have.

He continued, “They said, oh, yes. They agreed to it on that – no problem; the only thing we want to do is help you all out.” But when it came time to include the agreement in the contract, Oak Ridge North balked. “They said, no, they couldn’t put it in writing; we’d just have to act in good faith.” Looking back, James Leveston’s interpretation was that Oak Ridge North “wanted to maintain this little grip that they would have on Shenandoah if they decided to annex us or whatever.” In other words, Oak Ridge North wanted to hold water provision rights in Tamina to keep a competitive edge on Shenandoah.

While The Woodlands-based Friends of Tamina wanted Tamina to give up its CCN and trust Oak Ridge North’s verbal promise, Tamina refused. Warzell Booty later told county commissioners that he could not “find any other group that has been asked by the county to give something up to receive CDBG funds” (Speakman, 2005). Just before the deal fell apart, the local paper editorialized that the “short-sighted vision of handful of self-appointed leaders could kill water and sewer for underprivileged community of Tamina,” complaining about their “stubbornness” in the face of “good-hearted community members” who “have been toiling for six years now” (Courier Staff, 2004). They asked, “So what do Tamina residents really want—a ‘sense of identity’ from a water supply corporation that can’t fully serve its own community? Or, would they like to finally enter the 21st century, with both water and sewer service to their homes?” Another article pointed out that the new, outsider-led TWSSSC could have made this decision over Tamina’s objections, and was exercising restraint in allowing Tamina to back out. When Tamina refused to approve the deal, outsiders’ interest in helping Tamina get water evaporated (Hoofard, 2004). The “Friends of Tamina” dissolved within a year (Hutton, 2004). The county again reallocated its state and federal project funds away from Tamina.

After these setbacks, Tamina is again thinking about incorporation. In March 2019, after another long delay, the TCEQ reaffirmed Tamina’s water CCN, which has been in limbo since Shenandoah first crossed Tamina’s jurisdiction in 2005, and granted Tamina its sewer CCN, a necessary step for Shenandoah to provide service. At the same time, Shenandoah’s planning efforts show no indication of diverting its plans to remove Tamina permanently from the map. In a December 2018 planning commission meeting, a transportation consultant presented plans backed by the DOT to alter the roads at the major intersection where Shenandoah ends and Tamina begins. The mayor called for extensive landscaping and beautification along that road, referring to it as the “entrance to the city.”