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The North was once alive with the aboli-tionist spirit and open to the possibilityof integration. Yet this passion yielded

to several forces that marginalized African-Americans in the 20th century.

Before World War I, blacks were relative-ly few in the North, which together with peo-ple’s need to be near their factories and offices,helped to reduce any tendency toward hous-ing segregation. In New York City, for exam-ple, largely black neighborhoods were usual-

ly only a few blocks long and interspersedwith the homes of working-class white fami-lies. The modern ghetto, with its sharply de-fined racial lines, generally did not begin toform until blacks in substantial numbers mi-grated north beginning in 1916. There theyfound themselves competing for jobs andhousing with immigrants from Europe. Thecompetition was often violent, as in the Chica-go riot of 1919, when 38 people were killed.Violence and the threat of violence, togetherwith agreements among white homeownersnot to sell to blacks, increasingly left African-Americans in separate neighborhoods.

Because blacks had fewer choices, land-lords could charge them more than whites.Crowding increased as tenants took in lodgers,

and many landlords allowed their propertiesto become run down. The Federal HousingAdministration and the Veterans Administra-tion condoned redlining, the practice of deny-ing mortgages to those in minority neighbor-hoods, until well into the 1960s.

Despite the problems, several communi-ties, notably Harlem, were vibrant, at leastuntil the manufacturing economy began todecline in the 1970s. Other factors in the de-terioration include the increasing availabili-ty of crack cocaine, the growth of unwedmotherhood, higher crime rates as the babyboomers came of age, and the disruptive ef-fects of urban renewal. Churches, social clubs,newspapers and unions in black communitieswithered, and banks closed their branches, tobe replaced by currency exchanges thatcharged up to $8 for cashing a check.

To measure segregation, economists DavidM. Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser of HarvardUniversity and Jacob L. Vigdor of Duke Uni-versity calculated dissimilarity scores, whichare defined as the proportion of blacks whowould need to move across census-tract linesto achieve the same proportion of blacks inevery tract of a metropolitan area. By con-vention, a dissimilarity index above 0.6 ishigh, whereas an index of less than 0.3 is low.A score of 0 represents perfect integration and1.0 complete segregation.

As the chart shows, the average index forall metropolitan areas rose steadily to reacha peak of 0.74 in 1960 and then declined to0.5 by 2000. But the largest metropolitan ar-eas, particularly in the North, are still on av-erage far above 0.6. Of 291 metropolitan sta-tistical areas, 72 had dissimilarity scores above0.6 in 2000 and 28 had scores below 0.3.Some of the fastest-growing cities, such as LasVegas and Phoenix, had low and decliningscores. Decreasing scores, however, reflect pri-marily the dispersion of more affluent blacksinto previously white neighborhoods. Thenorthern ghettos and their poverty remain, ar-guably, the number-one problem in the U.S.

Rodger Doyle can be reached atrdoyle2@adelphia.net

Rise of the Black GhettoHOW TO CREATE AN AMERICAN VERSION OF APARTHEID BY RODGER DOYLE

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A dissimilarity score is a measure of segregation: above 0.6

represents high segregation, andbelow 0.3, low. Data are for 2000.

MOST SEGREGATED ScoreDetroit, Mich. 0.84Gary, Ind. 0.81Milwaukee, Wis. 0.81Chicago, Ill. 0.78Cleveland, Ohio 0.77Flint, Mich. 0.77Buffalo, N.Y. 0.76Cincinnati, Ohio 0.74

LEAST SEGREGATEDBellingham, Wash. 0.21Santa Cruz, Calif. 0.22Boulder, Colo. 0.23Boise, Idaho 0.24Jacksonville, N.C. 0.24Redding, Calif. 0.25San Angelo, Tex. 0.25San Jose, Calif. 0.25

LIVINGAPART

Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto. Gilbert Osofsky.

Harper & Row, 1966.

Urban Injustice: How GhettosHappen. David Hilfiker.

Seven Stories Press, 2002.

How East New York Became a Ghetto. Walter Thabit.

New York University Press, 2003.

S O U R C E : “ T h e R i s e a n d D e c l i n e o ft h e A m e r i c a n G h e t t o , ” b y D a v i d M .

C u t l e r , E d w a r d L . G l a e s e r a n d J a c o bL . V i g d o r i n J o u r n a l o f P o l i t i c a lE c o n o m y , V o l . 1 0 7 , N o . 3 ; J u n e

1 9 9 9 . D a t a p r i o r t o 1 9 5 0 a r e b a s e do n c i t i e s r a t h e r t h a n m e t r o p o l i t a n

a r e a s . A d d i t i o n a l s e g r e g a t i o n d a t aa r e a t h t t p : / / t r i n i t y . a a s . d u k e . e d u /

~ j v i g d o r / s e g r e g a t i o n

FURTHERREADING

Chicago

Detroit

New York City

Washington, D.C.

Average of allmetro areas

Year1890 19601920 2000

Diss

imila

rity

Scor

e

1.0

0.9

0.8

0.7

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

SEGREGATION IN U.S. METROPOLITAN AREAS

COPYRIGHT 2004 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC.