Studies of the Emergence of Racial Residential Segregation

W. E. Burghardt DuBois, 1899. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Series in Political Economy and Law 14.

This is the classic work in the history of the study of urban African Americans and describes blacks in Philadelphia at a time when DuBois perceived racial discrimination in the housing market but no large black ghetto had emerged. Indeed, Philadelphia in the last decade of the 19th century was quite integrated by the standard of the early 21st century.

Chicago Commission on Race Relations, 1922. The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and A Race Riot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Eighty years after its publication, this remains the best scholarly study of the causes of a major urban riot. This is an important study of the birth of racial residential segregation in northern cities.

Charles S. Johnson, 1943. Patterns of Negro Segregation. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Prior to publication of the Taeubers' landmark volume in 1965, there was little understanding of the extent and persistence of black-white residential segregation in American cities. And there were few, if any, census data available to document levels of trends over time. This book was Commissioned by Gunnar Myrdal and his collaborators. Johnson included an excellent chapter about residential segregation and housing issues and thus it is a pioneering work.

St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, 1945. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. New York: Harper & Row.

Stanley Lieberson, 1963. Ethnic Patterns in American Cities. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press.

In the 1960s, some social observers contended that blacks in US cities would undergo a process of assimilation similar to that of other European ethnic groups. Lieberson addressed that issues by examining ward data for a limited number of cities for the 1890 to 1930 period. He found that at the start of the period, blacks were not always more residentially segregated from native born whites than were white immigrants. But, over time, the segregation of foreign born whites from native born whites decreased while the segregation of blacks from whites generally
increased.

Gilbert Osofsky, 1963. Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York: 1890-1930. New York: Harper & Row.

When the subway and elevated lines first facilitated the populating of Manhattan north of 125th Street, the original residents included many Jewish immigrants who move up from lower Manhattan. Between World War I and the Depression, the racial composition of Harlem changed, thanks in large part to the entrepreneurial activity of a black real estate broker, A. Philip Payton. Gilbert Osoksky provides an excellent history of the development of Harlem as a black ghetto.

Seth M. Scheiner, 1963. Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865-1920. New York: New York University Press.

This is an excellent history of the post-Civil War growth of African American population in New York with considerable attention given to the development of black neighborhoods.

Allan H. Spear, 1967. Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto:1890-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

This is a marvelously detailed and informative book about the emergence of the black ghetto in Chicago.

Kenneth T. Jackson, 1967. The Ku Klux Klan in the City: 1915-1930. New York: Oxford University Press.

In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan became a powerful political force in many cities, partly because of whites' reaction to the large scale in-migration of blacks to these cities. In Detroit, the KKK apparently elected a mayor but his election was overturned. Maintaining neighborhood segregation was an issue for the Klan. Jackson provides extensive information about the urban political power of the Klan in the post World War I era.

Joe T. Darden, 1973. Afro-Americans in Pittsburgh: The Residential Segregation of a People. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath.

Kenneth L. Kusmer, 1976. A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland: 1870-1930. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

This is an extraordinarily valuable book since it documents the shift of blacks being quite racially integrated in post Civil War Cleveland to their concentration in the East Side ghetto which continues into the 21st century.

John Kellogg, 1977. "Negro Urban Clusters in the Postbellum South." Geographical Review 67, (July): 310-321.

Howard Lawrence Preston, 1977. Automobile Age Atlanta: The Making of a Southern Metropolis. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press.

Housing issues and racial residential segregation receive some attention from this author.

Howard N. Rabinowitz, 1977. Race Relations in the Urban South: 1865 - 1890. New York: Oxford University Press.

In the decades immediately following the Civil War, blacks and whites were not always highly segregated from each other in southern cities. This book describes that period and hints at the emergence of policies and beliefs that helped to create a foundation for the segregation that developed later.

Stanley Lieberson, 1977. A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants Since 1880. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

This book includes a very informative chapter describing the residential segregation of European immigrants and blacks in US cities from 1890 to 1930.

Olivier Zunz, 1982. The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development and Immigrants in Detroit: 1880-1920.

This excellent urban history focuses upon residential location and convincingly argues that blacks lived urban history in reverse. That is, as European immigrants came to Detroit they settled in ethnic neighborhoods but, over time, they and their children became residentially integrated with native-born whites and the descendents of other immigrant streams. Blacks, on the other hand, were not highly residentially concentrated at the start of the period Zunz studies but, over time, their segregation for all whites rose sharply.

Arnold R. Hirsch, 1982. Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago: 1940-1960. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Books by Spear and the Chicago Commission on the Riot provide detailed information about the strategies used to produce the first or World War I ghetto in Chicago. After World War II, different strategies were used to prevent racial residential integration. Hirsch does a marvelous job of describing the various federal, state and local policies that made certain that blacks and whites would seldom live together in metropolitan Chicago.

Joe William Trotter, Jr., 1985. Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat: 1915-45. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Housing segregation receives some attention in this book about the early black residents of Milwaukee.

Earl Lewis, 1991. In their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Housing issues and residential segregation receive some attention in this book.

Thomas J. Sugrue, 1996. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

This is the best description of racial conflict in a major American cities during the post World War II era. Black-white conflict - violent and non-violent - over which race would be allowed to live in which Detroit neighborhoods played a central role in the racial strife that fostered the 1967 Detroit riot - and a truce based on the American Apartheid system - whites in the suburban ring, blacks in the city.