Emergent Ghettos: Black Neighborhoods in New York and Chicago, 1880–1940

Abstract

This study studies in detail the settlement patterns of blacks in the urban North from before the Great Migration and through 1940, focusing on the cases of New York and Chicago. It relies on new and rarely used data sources, including census geocoded microdata from the 1880 census (allowing segregation patterns and processes to be studied at any geographic scale) and census data for 1900–1940 aggregated to enumeration districts (EDs). It is shown that blacks were unusually highly isolated in 1880 given their small share of the total population and that segregation reached high levels in both cities earlier than previously reported. Regarding sources of racial separation, neither higher class standing nor Northern birth had much effect on whether blacks lived within or outside black neighborhoods in 1880 or 1940, and it is concluded that the processes that created large black ghettos were already in place several decades before 1940.

Spatial scale and measuring segregation: illustrated by the formation of Chicago’s ghetto

“…Woods, 1976;Peach, 1996), reaching the same conclusion as that stated explicitly by Logan et al (2015aLogan et al ( , 1077: their purpose was 'not to demonstrate that segregation is higher at a finer spatial scale, which is already well known' (our emphasis). The analyses reported here challenge that statement and assumption.…”

“…A major programme aimed at filling that lacuna is the recent work of Logan and his colleagues (Logan et al 2015a(Logan et al , 2015b on the emergence of Black Ghettos in American cities, building on earlier studies there (Duncan and Duncan, 1957;Taeuber and Taeuber, 1972;Philpott, 1978: see also Kusmer, 1978, andShin, 2016). Their research asks 'When did northern Blacks become highly segregated …?'…”

“…Where the population under consideration is small, measurement of its spatial concentration into relatively large units could well under-estimate the degree of segregation. Chicago, for example, had only 29,583 Blacks in 1880 (out of a total population of 1,692,793), and its 18 wards averaged nearly 30,000 residents, whereas the EDs averaged fewer than 1,500; at that date the index of dissimilarity at the ward scale was 0.648; at the ED scale it was 0.694 (Logan et al, 2015a(Logan et al, , 1070. A further problem with a small population is that there will almost certainly be few of its members in many of the spatial units, in which random allocation processes may well lead to over-inflation of the degree of segregation -as clearly demonstrated by Carrington and Troske (1997).…”

The scale of segregation: ancestral groups in Sydney, 2011

“…Not only has this allowed a much finer-grained investigation but it has also facilitated a much more nuanced appreciation of variations in segregation levels. It is widely assumed, as Logan et al (2015aLogan et al ( , 1077 put it, 'that segregation is higher at a finer spatial scale, which is already known' (see also Logan et al, 2015b); the results presented here suggest that this is not always the case -in part, undoubtedly, because (as Tranmer andSteel, 2001, andDuncan et al 1961 brought to our attention some years ago) segregation measures at fine spatial scales necessarily incorporate those at (unobserved) coarser scales.…”

Historic Roots of Modern Residential Segregation in a Southwestern Metropolis: San Antonio, Texas in 1910 and 2010

“…This database allows for detailed analysis of residential settlement patterns that provide insight into the past to establish the foundation for answering research questions about the perpetuation of residential segregation over time. Only a few studies have examined residential segregation patterns in the early twentieth century [22,23] and comparing patterns over a century is unique to the literature. Furthermore, the growing importance of non-Black minorities in the urban landscape of the United States makes the historical analysis in San Antonio useful to future scholarship on the segregation of Hispanics, the largest and fastest growing minority group in America.…”