Consuming Lines of Difference: The Politics of Wealth and Poverty along the Color Line

Commentators on African American life have often focused on poverty, evaded recognition of African American wealth, and ignored the ways genteel affluence and impoverishment were constructed along turn-of-the-century color lines. Documentary research and archaeology at the Madam C.J. Walker home in Indianapolis, Indiana, illuminates how the continuum of wealth and poverty was defined and negotiated by one of African America’s wealthiest early-20th-century entrepreneurs. The project provides an opportunity to compare the ways in which wealth was defined and experienced along the color line in the early 20th century, and how such notions of black affluence shaped racialized definitions of poverty and materiality.