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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 29. Patterns of Social Segregation and Discrimination - 3. Housing Segregation
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Chapter 29. Social Segregation and Discrimination 619
potent in the South than in the North, where race prejudice is less solidified
and where Negroes have the vote. It is in Southern cities that Negroes
receive few neighborhood facilities, such as paved streets, adequate sewage
disposal, street lights, and so on. Rapid increases in the Negro population
are much more prevalent in Northern cities, and residential segregation
—
by its curtailment of housing supply available for Negroes—^prevents a
proportional rise in housing facilities. In some neighborhoods of Northern
cities housing conditions for Negroes are actually as bad as, or worse than.
Southern ones.“
The available statistics refer directly to the actual concentration of
Negroes in certain areas of a city and not to segregation in the sense of
forced concentration. A sample study of 64 cities^® in 1930 showed that
84.8 per cent of the blocks were occupied exclusively by whites. On the
other hand, only 4.9 per cent of the blocks were completely occupied by
nonwhite persons, some of whom were not Negroes. The percentage of
blocks containing both whites and nonwhites was 10.3—over twice as large
as the percentage of blocks having no whites. A large part of this lack of
complete concentration is due to the fact that the data refer to entire
blocks and not to individual houses. In many mixed blocks Negroes are
concentrated In the backyards. Even so, we should not take it for granted
that the concentration of Negroes is complete.^® Most of the mixed areas,
however, are cases of whites living in ^‘Negro areas” and not of Negroes
living in ^Vhite areas.”
Residential concentration tends to be determined by three main factors:
poverty preventing individuals from paying for anything more than the
cheapest housing accommodation j
ethnic attachment j
segregation enforced
by white people. Even in the absence of enforced segregation Negroes
would not be evenly distributed in every city because as a group they are
much poorer than urban whites. This applies with particular strength to the
masses of Northern Negroes who are newly arrived from the South.
Negroes would also be likely to cluster together for convenience and mutual
protection. In the North this is again particularly true of Southern-born
Negroes who have been brought up in a strict ethnic isolation enforced by
the Jim Crow laws and the racial etiquette.in the South. The three causal
factors are closely interrelated. Even if initially the tendency on the part
of whites to enforce segregation on Negroes was but slight, the actual con-
centration of a growing population consisting of poor uneducated Negroes
* See Chapter 1
6
,
Section 6. The discussion in this section will refer to cities. The residence
of Negro tenants, sharecroppers, and farm laborers is controlled by the farm owners, who
usually keep their Negroes separate from their whites when they have them both on the same
land. Segregation operates on Negro farm owners in much the same way as it operates on
city Negroes—^they are seldom allowed to boy the more desirable land or land surrounded
by white-owned property. (See Chapter ii, Section 6.)
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