Work

Creating the Black Ghetto

Year: 2015

Type: article

Abstract: Were black ghettos a product of white reaction to the Great Migration in the 1920s and 1930s, or did the ghettoization process have earlier roots? This presentation takes advantage of recently available data on black and white residential patterns in several major Northern cities in the period 1880-1940. Using geographic areas smaller than contemporary census tracts, it traces the growth of black populations in each city and trends in the level of isolation and segregation. In addition it analyzes the determinants of location: which blacks lived in neighborhoods with higher black concentrations, and what does this tell us about the ghettoization process? We find that the development of ghettos in an embryonic form was well underway in 1880, that segregation became intense prior to the Great Migration, and that in this whole period blacks were segregated based on race rather than class or Southern origin.

Source: The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

DOI: 10.1177/0002716215572993

Authors: John R. Logan, Weiwei Zhang, Richard Turner, Allison Shertzer

Institutions: Brown University, Mississippi State University, University of Pittsburgh

Language: English

Topic: Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

Subfield: Sociology and Political Science

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Reduced inequalities, Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Science Foundation, Brown University, National Institutes of Health, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development