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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 29. Patterns of Social Segregation and Discrimination - 4. Sanctions for Residential Segregation
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Chapter 29. Social Segregation and Discrimination 623
out of their intensely overcrowded ghettos and their willingness to bear a
great deal of physical and mental punishment to satisfy that need.
The clash of interests is particularly dramatic in the big cities of the
North to which Negro immigrants from the South have been streaming
since the First World War. When white residents of a neighborhood see
that they cannot remove the few Negro intruders and also see more Negro
families moving in, they conjure up certain stereotypes of how bad Negro
neighbors are and move out of the neighborhood with almost panic speed.
For this reason Negroes are dangerous for property values,® as well as for
neighborhood business, and all whites are aware of this fact. In describing
the succession of Negroes down the South Side in Chicago, an informant
said, “This was not an incoming of the Negroes, so much as an outgoing
of the whites. If one colored person moved into the neighborhood, the
rest of the white people immediately moved out.”^^
Such a situation creates a vicious circle, in which race prejudice, economic
interests, and residential segregation mutually reinforce one another. When
a few Negro families do come into a white neighborhood, some more white
families move away. Other Negroes hasten to take their places, because the
existing Negro neighborhoods are overcrowded due to segregation. This
constant movement of Negroes into white neighborhoods makes the bulk
of the white residents feel that their neighborhood is doomed to be pre*
dominantly Negro, and they move out^—with their attitudes against the
Negro reinforced. Yet if there were no segregation, this wholesale invasion
would not have occurred. But because it does occur, segregational attitudes
are increased, and the vigilant pressure to stall the Negroes at the border-
line is kept up.’*
Various organized techniques have been used to reinforce the spontaneous
segregational attitudes and practices of whites in keeping Negro residences
restricted to certain areas in a city. These include local zoning ordinances,
restrictive covenants and terrorism.
The earliest important legal step to enforce segregation was taken in 1910
when an ordinance was passed in Baltimore, Maryland, after a Negro family
* If white property owners in a neighborhood rush to sell their property all at once,
property values naturally are hurt. After the transition to Negro occupancy is made,
however, property values rise again at least to the level justified by the aging and lack
of improvement of the buildings. No statistical study has been made which shows unequivo-
cally that Negroes pay higher rents for equivalent apartments but this seems to be the
opinion of all those—including white real estate agents—who have looked into the matter.
Certain conditions, such as the lowering of rents to white tenants when there is a threat
of Negro succession and the conversion into smaller apartments to meet the needs of Negro
tenants, make it extremely difficult to measure the changes in rent that accompany a shift
from white to Negro occupancy. (See Chapter i6, Section 6.)
**
Negroes also get into neighborhoods which have deteriorated because industry, crime,
or vice are moving in.
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