Karen Benjamin

Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison

Karen Benjamin is the Lester Brune and Joan Brune Endowed Chair of History at Elmhurst University. She graduated with a Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2007. Her wide-ranging courses include Colonial America, Revolutionary America, Industrial-Age America, Twentieth-Century U.S., Environmental History, U.S. West, U.S. South, U.S. Women’s History, and The Formation of the Chicago Ghetto. She received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2021.

Her forthcoming book, Good Parents, Better Homes, and Great Schools: Selling Segregation before the New Deal, will be available from the University of North Carolina Press in July 2025. The book examines how white residential developers, planning consultants, and their allies in government strategically replaced block-level segregation with segregation at the neighborhood level in New South cities such as Atlanta, Baltimore, Birmingham, Houston, Raleigh, and Winston-Salem. Going beyond the more well-known Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps of the 1930s, the book traces segregation tactics back to the late nineteenth century, when this public-private partnership laid the groundwork for the nationwide segregation strategies codified by the New Deal. It links the tactics of residential and school segregation to prevailing middle-class ideas about what constituted good parenting, ensuring the longevity of both practices. By shifting the focus to efforts that specifically targeted parents, this book not only adds a new dimension to the history of residential segregation but also helps explain why that legacy has been so difficult to undo.

This project developed from a case study of a 1920s school building program in Raleigh, North Carolina, which continues to influence residential patterns in that city. Benjamin’s article on this topic appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Urban History (Spring 2012) examining the broader connections between schooling and suburbanization in the United States. She received Spencer Foundation Small Research Grants in 2013 and 2017 and a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2010 to support the initial research for the book.