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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 621
among his own kind then becomes largely an academic one, as we have no
means of ascertaining what he would want if he were free to choose. In
this sense practically all the statistically observed Negro housing concen-
tration is, in essence, forced segregation, independent of the factors which
have brought it about.
Southern whites do not want Negroes to be completely isolated from
them: they derive many advantages from their proximity. Negroes, on their
side, are usually dependent on whites for their economic livelihood, directly
or indirectly. For these reasons, there are few all-Negro towns or villages
in the South, and whites have never seriously endorsed the back-to-Africa
and Kansas movements.^^ In some Southern cities, especially in the older
ones, Negroes usually live in side streets or along alleys back of the
residences of whites and sometimes in rear rooms of the whites^ homes
themselves—a practice surviving from slavery, when the slaves lived in
shacks in the rear of the master^s house. In such cases there is also segrega-
tion, but the segregation is based on what we may term ^^ceremonial” dis-
tance rather than spatial distance. G^remonial distance occurs in Northern
cities, too, when Negro servants live in or near the white employer’s home."
In Northern cities, when Negroes were a small element in the population
in numbers and in proportion and when they were practically all servants
in the homes of wealthy whites (as they still are in many Northern cities
outside of the largest ones), they also lived scattered throughout the city
near the residences of their employers.
If, however, a Southern city received most of its Negro population
after the Civil War, and if a Northern city has a large number of Negroes,
such a city will tend to have large areas in which Negroes live separated
in space from the whites. In other words, there are roughly two patterns
of housing segregation in cities: one is found in Northern cities where there
are few Negroes and in old Southern cities where the successors of local
slaves make up the bulk of the Negro population j
there Negroes live in
practically all parts of the city but only along certain poorer streets or
alleys. The other is found in Northern cities with a fairly large Negro
population and in Southern cities where the proportionate bulk of the
Negroes has come in since the Civil War5
there Negroes live in a limited
number of distinct Black Belts. This is a rather gross classification of types
of residential segregation in cities: both patterns are to be found in the same
city—and there are many variations.^^ In fact, as Woofter says:
* Ceremonial distance is regularly called into existence to preserve spatial segregation on
the borderline between white and Negro neighborhoods. It becomes especially apparent when
the accidents of city growth have brought wealthy white neighborhoods in close physical
proximity to poor Negro neighborhoods. For example. New York’s Harlem is adjacent to
the Columbia University area and Chicago’s small Near North Side Negro community
is within a block or two of the Gold Coast.
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