The Formation of the "Black Ghetto"

By the early 1950s, the black, inner-city ghetto was already well formed. African Americans already lived in highly segregated, densely concentrated urban areas. These ghettos, however, differed significantly from their modern counterparts. Their levels of "social organization" were intact, that is to say, informal social networks kept neighbors in touch with one another, formal social networks (churches, fraternal organizations, and volunteer organizations) brought people together, and institutions such as businesses and schools made community viable. Most people worked. Single-parent families were a distinct minority (about 17%). Levels of violence were low. Education were "integrated vertically," meaning that affluent, middle-class, working-class, and poor people all lived in relatively close proximity. This is not to overlook the often severe poverty (with its related conditions) that existed, but the social organization still present made these ghettos vastly different from their modern counterparts. They were societies unto themselves that mirrored the larger society.

The seeds of the black ghetto's current problems had, however, already been planted. Most importantly, these areas were highly segregated. It had not always been so. Prior to the late 1800s, urban rich and poor, white and black lived in relatively close proximity, (whether they wanted to or not). The poor were often servants (or, previously, slaves) of the rich and so lived close by, and the still primitive modes of transportation made living close to the centers of business and commerce necessary for everyone.

With the coming of large manufacturing factories to northern cities during the industrialization of the late 1800s, however, workers were needed and wages were unprecedented, so immigrant workers flocked to the United States from Europe, Asia, and every other area of the world. At the same time, efficient modes of transportation were coming into use, so the affluent were able to avoid this onslaught of "undesirables" by moving from the central cities. It was, in some ways, the beginnings of American suburbanization. Most immigrants could not afford to move away from the places where they worked, so they lived close to the factories and tended to live together in the same neighborhoods, choosing to live in a culture familiar to them. These were the first American urban ghettos.

But foreigners were not only "immigrants." African-American agricultural workers from the South also poured into the northern industrialized cities. They were not only pulled into the North by the lure of decent wages but also pushed out of the South because of the joblessness due to the mechanization of southern agriculture. Like other immigrant groups, they settled in ghettos near their jobs. Unlike other immigrant groups, however, they stayed there. As workers from the white ethnic ghettos became more affluent over the course of one or two generations, they gradually moved out from their ghettos and dispersed into the general population. We don't speak of "Finnish ghettos" or "German ghettos" anymore. Segregation, of course, did not allow black people into white areas. Even those African Americans who became affluent were confined to black ghettos.

The second great migration of African Americans from the South into northern cities occurred in the 1940s or 50s. Once again, they were pushed out of the South by increasing agricultural mechanization (especially the introduction of the mechanical cotton picker), and they were pulled north by decently paying jobs in the manufacturing centers of the cities. Because of continuing segregation, however, the geographical area of the black ghetto could expand only slowly and these new immigrants had few options. Population density increased constantly. By the 1950s, black people in the least segregated cities of America were more segregated than any other ethnic or racial group had ever been in any city in the United States.