Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
outward was the preferred goal, indicated the struggles social groups
encountered as they atempted to move from inner to outer rings.
The substantial movement of African Americans to Chicago and
their living conditions in the city led to a spate of scholarly work on their
transition.
11
It was a simple thing to incorporate African Americans
into the Park and Burgess concentric model. W hen African Americans
began to migrate from the southern United States, they “invaded” the
area called the “zone in transition.” The original theoretical formula-
tion of the Chicago School, which saw the city as a series of natural
concentric rings, fit easily with the migration of African Americans to
Chicago and other cities. Burgess wrote: “he concentration and scater
of Negroes and like the Poles, Lithuanians and Italians seems in general
the same.”
12
The influence of the Chicago School, with its emphasis on ecology,
led researchers working with the Census Bureau to define seventy-five
community areas for Chicago in the late 1920s, which helped capture
the concentric model. The Census Bureau collected and released data
for these areas; each one roughly encompassed a large neighborhood.
The typical map produced during this time by those in the Chicago
School was a dot or chloropleth map showing the rate or incidence of
certain social characteristics throughout the city, and researchers used
these maps to identify gradients between areas that might indicate zone
boundaries.
13
These areas, however, were quite large in both population
and physical size and as such did not clearly depict the population and
racial shifts occurring in Chicago. It is interesting that even though data
existed at the census tract level for Chicago from 1910, the researchers
in Chicago did not explicitly define segregation until years later. They
did, of course, notice the concentration of African Americans in certain
areas, but they drew the analogy between African Americans and immi-
grant groups from eastern and central Europe. Nor did they incorporate
into their models the levels of discrimination that existed toward African
Americans.
Once the census tract system was firmly put into place with the
censuses of 1940 and 1950, researchers began to measure segregation
explicitly.
14
The classic work on this topic is Karl E. Taeuber and Alma
F. Taeuber's
Negroes in Cities: Residential Segregation and Neighborhood
