Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
a “heat map”) of the distribution of the African American population by
enumeration district. Even with only about 6,400 African Americans
in Chicago, it is plain that areas in the south near the lake already had
a larger proportion of African Americans than most of the rest of the
city. Indeed, the dissimilarity index for blacks with respect to whites in
Chicago in 1880 was 0.69, meaning that over two-thirds of blacks would
need to relocate to even out the distribution across the enumeration dis-
tricts.
20
Incidentally, compared to the other cities for which we have data
for 1880 and 1930, Chicago was the most segregated with respect to dis-
similarity in 1880. By contrast, African Americans were not particularly
isolated. Indeed, their isolation index was only 0.15, while the isolation
index for the white population was 0.99. However, these figures are not
surprising, since even though African Americans were concentrated in
certain parts of Chicago, there still were not many of them. However, the
cities south of the Mason-Dixon Line (Nashville, Baltimore, and Wash-
ington, D.C.) had higher levels of black isolation but lower levels of white
isolation. All of this is due, of course, to the much higher proportion of
African Americans in the southern cities.
Though there were few African Americans in Chicago in 1880, figure
2.3 makes it plain that the areas that had been identified to be African
American in 1880 became much more racially concentrated by 1920. At
the beginning of that decade, Chicago had grown by more than 400
percent to about 2.7 million, and the African American population had
grown 1,500 percent to about 109,000, or about 4 percent. Chicago also
expanded to include much more territory in 1920 than it had in 1880.
With all of this growth came increased segregation. The dissimilarity
index grew to 0.86, while black isolation jumped to 0.52.
The consolidation of African American segregation is made very
plain by figure 2.4, which is a map of Chicago in 1960. The identifiable
African American area had grown massively. Chicago grew by about
half a million, and almost 400,000 of those new residents were African
Americans, although they were still in the minority. The dissimilarity
index had reached 0.91, black isolation was 0.84, and white isolation was
0.97. In short, for Chicago there was a very substantial increase in segre-
gation between African Americans and whites over this period. In 1880 a
few African Americans were living in Chicago, and even then they were
