Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
African-Americans lived in the South. There were more blacks in the North than in
the South. Only the western inlands and Alaska were mostly without any black
population. The great migration to Manufacturing Belt cities ended when the
Taylorist industry crisis broke out. After leaving the poverty of the rural South,
blacks found themselves in the dilapidated inner cities of northern industrial cities in
crisis. The rise of the Sunbelt then attracted new white populations to the South. The
arrival of “Yankees” and Latin-American immigrants explains how blacks made up
only one-fifth of the population of the South. Meanwhile, their population in the
Manufacturing Belt was closer to their average percentages on a national level.
Having finally obtained legal recognition of their rights, African-Americans
were more divided than ever between supporters of full integration and the more
radical proponents of “black pride” separatism, at least in cultural terms and
following the Nation of Islam movement, the most famous member of which was
the radical leader Malcolm X, who was assassinated in 1965. Violence from 1965 to
1968 discredited the most radical movements at the political level, but the economic,
cultural, and social gap between blacks and whites drastically aggravated residential
segregation. This segregation can only be understood on a very small scale.
The total population is divided into 225,000 basic “block groups”. A census
block group is the smallest territorial unit for statistics defined by the federal Census
Bureau for the distribution of results of the decennial census. Block groups (BGs)
generally contain between 600 and 3,000 people, with an optimal size of
1,500 people. Some BGs are uninhabited. These entities are equivalent to the
quartiers IRIS 2000
used for the distribution of census results in France.
These territorial units enable an understanding of residential segregation. They
use Duncan's index of dissimilarity (1955), as popularized by Massey and Denton
[MAS 88], for the analysis of segregation in American cities.
tx
m
X
¦
n
i
i
m
D
[4.1]
i
1
21
TX
X
The index of dissimilarity (D) [4.1] can be interpreted as the proportion of the
total group studied (m), whether ethnic, social or racial, which would need to change
its unit of residency in order to obtain a perfect mix of population in all of the area's
statistical units.
