Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
denied full opportunity. One of the main areas where segregation con-
tinued, even without legal force behind it, was in housing. The extent to
which blacks in the North were segregated residentially, were relegated
to the black quarters of ghetos, and continue to be segregated has major
implications for the United States. Puting it simply, the extent to which
racial segregation and discrimination was replicated in the North meant
that even with some claim to formal equality, African Americans, former
slaves, and children of former slaves were still not completely free in the
United States.
This essay answers two groups of questions:
1. W hen did the system of segregation with respect to African
Americans develop in U.S. cities and urban areas? Did it develop
similarly in many cities? Were there differences in the South
from the Northeast and Midwest and later from the West?
2. How persistent is segregation in various urban areas? W hat
factors may have served to mitigate it to some extent?
Using other research, some comparisons are also made regarding
ethnic and immigrant groups (both the early European immigrants and
more recent immigrants from Latin America and Asia). However, the
core of this work is to follow change in paterns of segregation of Af-
rican Americans from whites over a long time period and for all avail-
able urban areas using data that have not heretofore been organized and
analyzed in this manner. Studies of the development of cities and ur-
ban agglomerations and the population distribution within them in the
United States usually rely upon data from one or a few locations or make
comparisons based upon impressionistic evidence. Many such studies in
U.S. sociology and demography have used decennial materials created
by the Bureau of the Census to compare and contrast urban paterns.
However, since comparable georeferenced information about different
cities or urban regions was difficult to compile for earlier periods, it had
not previously been possible to rigorously track change at the small-area
level in a number of cities and assess how comparable their paterns of
change were. With the advent of the National Historical Geographical
Information System (NHGIS), data and maps depicting relatively small
areas of a few thousand people for about fifty urban areas now exist for
