![]() ![]() 1 But we will argue that they were ghettos, nonetheless, by the criteria that we examine. To avoid debate over terminology, we refer to the black neighborhoods that we find at an earlier time as ghettos in formation, or emergent ghettos. If the ghetto by definition is a large section of a city that is almost exclusively populated by people of one race, then there were no Northern city ghettos before World War I. Such places of course could not have existed prior to the Great Migration, when Northern cities were so overwhelmingly white. We show that having higher class standing was no more associated with living outside of identifiable black neighborhoods in 1880 than in 1940, but that class differentiation within black neighborhoods had appeared already in 1880.ĭiscussion of the black ghetto is heavily influenced by the great size and racial isolation of places like Harlem or South Side of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s. Specifically how did variation in social class standing among blacks affect their residential outcome? We examine how race combined with other background factors, especially social class, to place blacks in particular locations within cities. The second is the locational process resulting in segregated patterns. ![]() To what degree and at what spatial scale were blacks segregated from whites? We show that black-white segregation in major northern cities was substantial even in 1880 when we take into account its actual spatial scale at that time. The first is the sheer level of segregation across residential areas of cities. We base our evaluation on two key criteria. Some historians, notably Philpott (1978), argue that distinctive features of the black ghetto were present even before the Great Migration, and this study offers new support for that view. But following World War I, provoked by the first wave of the Great Migration, whites panicked: “They erected residential boundaries, through violence and law … thereby penning the migrants into black-only districts that proved to be embryonic ghettos” (2006, p. 456), who find that “1890 to 1940 saw the birth of the ghetto … Where only one city had a ghetto by our definition in 1890 (Norfolk, Va.), 55 cities had a ghetto by 1940.” Flamming’s (2006) study of black Los Angeles describes the trend from a historian’s perspective: The “quieter” migration of the better educated and more ambitious African Americans during 1890–1915 “filtered into small, loosely knit communities that were, in large part, middle class …There was some racial segregation, but there were no black ghettos to speak of” (2006, p. In the north, a small native black population was scattered widely throughout white neighborhoods … In this lost urban world, blacks were more likely to share a neighborhood with whites than with other blacks… No matter what other disadvantages urban blacks suffered in the aftermath of the Civil War, they were not residentially segregated from whites.” A similar interpretation is offered by Cutler, Glaeser, and Vigdor (1999, p. This perspective is stated most directly by Massey and Denton (1993, p.17): “There was a time, before 1900, when blacks and whites lived side by side in American cities. ![]() In this view a new neighborhood form was constructed after the First World War, as a result of the initial influx of black migration, re-emergent white racism, restrictive covenants and redlining spearheaded by government agencies. One common view is that before the Great Migration blacks in the urban North did not experience the segregating processes that later became common. Studies of black-white segregation in the early 20 th Century are mostly concerned with the phenomenon of creation of black ghettos in Northern cities. ![]()
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