Setting [Futile] Boundaries: Black Municipalities in the White Settler State

Keywords: Black geographies, municipal underbounding, legal geographies, settler colonialism
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Since Aiken’s identification of municipal underbounding in the post-Bellum U.S. South in the 1980s, several scholars of law, geography, and political science have taken up the social, political, and environmental impacts of this largely white municipal practice of geopolitical exclusion on Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Municipal underbounding and its related practices, namely, extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ), recall logics of settler colonialism in the ways they disrupt landscapes, hoard resources, and reproduce plantation power relations. But almost none of the scholarship on the subject has challenged the underlying premise of municipal boundaries, only their uneven application to retain white segregation. This paper uses the cases of two Black municipalities in North Carolina—Princeville and Taylortown, to demonstrate the futility of municipal boundaries as viable place logics, as Black municipalities disrupt the reproduction of the local settler colony. I trace the two towns from their origins—Princeville in 1885 and Taylortown in 1987—the strategies implemented to secure their local stability and growth, and their challenges in setting and enforcing boundaries that, according to centuries of municipal practice, should ensure viable futures for their residents.