Sociology 3901: Week Six

I. Exam One

II. American Apartheid, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, 1993: macro sociology, compared to next week's micro sociology. Why such a persistent disproportion of persistent poverty in the black community?

A. Massey and Denton review several theories about the "underclass," welfare, and inner city social disorganization and then note that none of these explanations takes any major account of what seems to be the most obvious fact about black Americans, the fact that their neighborhoods are characterized by a very high degree of segregation.

1. conceptual dfn: ghetto = "set of neighborhoods that are exclusively inhabited by members of one group, within which virtually all members of that group live"

2. operational definition (How do they measure segregation?)

Index of dissimilarity: % of a minority group in a given community which would have to move in order to achieve a proportional residential pattern..

3. Research hypothesis: Massey and Denton expect that the index of dissimilarity for black Americans will be much higher than for other minorities, both historically and in the present day, and that segregation will be a major independent variable in explaining other disadvantages.

4. Research: secondary analysis, historical-comparative

a. History

1) The Great Migration and the creation of black hypersegregation in the 20th century ("piling up").... city by city chart which is summarized here:

Index of dissimilarity, 1860-1940

  Free blacks vs. whites, 1860 Blacks vs. native whites, 1910 Blacks vs. whites, 1940
Northen Cities (N=11) 45.7 59.2 89.2
 Southern Cities (N=8) 29.0 38.3 81.0

2). 1942: 84% of white Americans polled answered yes to a question: "Do you think there should be separate sections in towns and cities for Negroes to live in?"

3) Comparison with European immigrant groups... Chicago research in the 1920s... in none of the immigrant ghettos did one nationality constitute even a majority (except for Poles at 54%)... in Chicago's black ghetto, by comparison, blacks comprised 82% (Notice, this is an alternative way to measure segregation)

b. Factors by which the black ghetto was constructed

1) Violence: race riots after both World War I and II when ex-servicemen and their families tried to move into white neighborhoods

2) Restrictive covenants and other real estate practices

3) Government and private mortgage programs

4) Government programs of low-income housing

c. More recent trends.

1) more tables comparing cities' scores on the index of dissimilarity and showing little progress in the 1960s and 1970s and a little bit more in the 1980s

2) Comparison with Latino minority... in 1990, the average Chicago black lived in an area that was 90% black; the average Mexican-American lived in an area that was 50% non-Hispanic white

d. So what? Likely consequences of hypersegregation

1) Economics: communication networks, geographic access to jobs... ties into the deindustrialization argument

2) Politics: absence of common neighborhood interests for building coalitions

3) Black culture: the uniqueness of urban black language and norms/values largely a result of sustained isolation and blocked opportunity, rather than a remnant of an older culture...

5. Follow-up: The Failure of public policy--"Isn't there a law against segregated housing?"

a. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 passed with no provisions for enforcement other than lawsuits by individuals: how would YOU investigate discrimination in housing?

b. HUD continued to promote highly segregated low-income housing until stopped by a series of expensive lawsuits (Chicago, Philadelphia, Minneapolis)

B. Chicago (mico sociology)

1. The making of Chicago's ghettos--south side and west side

Notice that there is little neighborhood change from 1930 to 1940 in terms of the black ghetto (represented in shades or red and pink), some change from 1940 to 1950, and rapid change after 1950.

Changes in the location of Chicago's black population, 1910-2000

2 . Nicholas Lehman--The Promised Land: the Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

Chicago black population: 1940, 278,000; 1950, 491,000; 1960, 813,000. At high point, 2200 blacks moving to Chicago every week.

3. An Abbreviated Time Line of Events Described in Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto

 

TIME

 

Events in Chicago

Other Events/comments

1919

Famous city wide race riot starts at a beach near Hyde Park

 Blacks around 4% of Chicago's population

1939-1945

 Piling up in Black Metropolis

WWII, Second Great Black Migration North.

1943

 

Race riots between Blacks and Whites in Detroit, and in Harlem

1945-1955

  Homes for sale in many Chicago neighborhoods, as many whites, including returning veterans, buy homes in the new suburbs

The Great Wave of Suburbanization in the U.S., fostered by a variety of federal programs (GI Bill, Freeway construction)

1946

Antiblack riot in Airport Homes(temporary veteran housing)

 Neither "temporary" nor "veterans made any difference;
No one killed... an instrumental riot

1947

Antiblack riot in Fernwood Park(temporary veteran housing)

 Only 30% of arrestees white ethnics; majority represented older stock Americans.

1947

Blighted Areas Redevelopment Act gives South Loop Businesses Eminent Domain powers and funding for 'urban renewal'

 The Pettibone- Mumford legislation puts the Chicago Land Clearance Commission in charge of the project

 Blacks on the northern end of the ghetto increasingly pushed south by development of large apartment building, hospitals, etc.

1948

 Didn't change practice right away but raised the fear level in segregated white communities

U.S. Supreme Court strikes down racially restrictive covenants (Shelly v. Kramer)

1949

 

Antiblack riot in Park Manor

Antiblack riot in Englewood Park
Illinois legislature passes legislation giving Chicago City Council veto power over location of CHA housing projects.

 Rioting primarily by working class white ethnics (Irish, Poles, Italians, Czechs, etc) as "older American" groups were engaged in massive trek to the suburbs by this time. Mostly young men arrested, but older men and neighborhood women heavily involved in support roles.

1951

Over the opposition of the CHA, the City Council approves Duffy- Lancaster proposal to build public housing only in already overpopulated black neighborhoods.  Leads eventually to the construction of the enormous Robert Taylor Homes, and Stateway Gardens Homes.

 

1951

Antiblack riot in Cicero

 

1954

Antiblack riot in Trumbull Park, where CHA targeted 20% of units for black residents

In Brown vs. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down explicit state sponsored school segregation.

1954

Elizabeth Wood, the white liberal chief executive of the CHA, is fired, along with black CHA chairman Robert Taylor

 

1955

Richard J. Daley (the first) becomes mayor of Chicago, appoints a new segregationist leader to lead the CHA.

 

1957

Antiblack riot in Calumet Park

 

1958

City Council approves Hyde Park urban renewal plan

 The University of Chicago deeply divided over the appropriate response to the ghetto's expansion south

A. More from Hirsch

1. After World War II, who was able to move to the suburbs? Government mortgages mostly not available to blacks wanting to move to the suburbs, whatever their income, because of the definition of "changing neighborhoods" as a bad financial risk ("red lining").

2. Role of speculators and huge profits to be made. "Black families have moved in down the street; if you sell now, I can still get you xxx." Whites end up selling cheap, and blacks, still faced with severe housing shortage, pay dearly.

3. Not only homes but apartment buildings and housing projects came into play in the struggle for turf.... slum landlords in many cases actually evicting white tenants, subdividing apartments, and renting to blacks at large profit....

4. Neigborhoods that went black often did deteriorate...Impact of high costs on tight budgets, high density and lots of kids, men and women both in the workforce at low-end jobs... landlords that had no incentive to maintain their homes, since they could recover their investment quickly and buy again elsewhere. Owners of single family homes could not get home improvement loans. Widespread fires, as a result of poor maintenance and as a result of arson...spread of vacant lots and boarded up buildings... businesses failing and banks, department stores, etc. moving out.

5. Anti-black riots

a. Little or no advance planning--relatively spontaneous

b. The first post-war riot involved many old-stock Chicagoans (suburbanization had not allowed them an outlet yet), but later riots dominated by white ethnics

c. Chicago Commission on Human Relations... worked against racial violence and to that end, developed a close relationship with city's news media... felt that press coverage in 1919 riot had spread hysteria and contributed to violence... commission therefore "encouraged the press to give factual, unsensational reports when trouble occurs so that crowds will not go to the area and enlarge the problem." (p. 51

d. Editors and staff members of the major papers informed interested observers that 'they remember 1919 and the Detroit riots and are willing to go along with the policy of suppression." Thus inter-racial violence in this period largely unpublicized.

e. Not the generalized anti-black hostility of the 1919 riot; aimed to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods and maintain segregated parks and other public spaces... not attacking in black neighborhoods, not killing

f. Natural history of a riot... see accounts on pp. 54-56, 75-76, 90-91

g. Arrests mostly of young white ethnic males, but whole white community involved.

h. The ironies not lost on obervers like Walter White, NAACP head, p. 79, or The Chicago Defender

6. White violence ultimately not able to prevent a great expansion of the ghetto to the south and west, although successfully "defending" some neighborhoods.... e.g. Mayor Daley's Irish Bridgeport neighborhood.

7. White violence and racist politics became the decisive factor limiting the huge public housing projects of the post-World War II period in Chicago to ghetto areas. Notice especially:

a. State legislature passing law to require Chicago city council approval of the location of CHA housing projects

b. Dismissal of integrationist CHA leaders Wood and Taylor

c. Location of all major housing projects in African American neighborhoods, particularly the long corridor along State Street on the South Side... Robert Taylor Homes (note the irony of the name)--28 buildings, 4,415 apartments, and a total initial occupancy of 27,000 tenants, all located in the heart of the historic southside ghetto

Video: "Two Societies"

 

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