John R. Logan, Elisabeta Minca, Benjamin Bellman, and Amory Kisch. 2023. "From Side Street to Ghetto: Understanding the Rising Levels and Changing Spatial Pattern of Segregation, 1900–1940." City & Community.
Abstract
A standard interpretation of the intensification of segregation in the early twentieth century is that residents of Northern cities reacted against a growing African American presence, using segregation as a tool of social control that was less needed in the South. Evidence from newly available data for 134 cities in 1900–1940 puts this interpretation in question in several ways. We find that segregation was already high in 1900 at the neighborhood scale. Not only was it rising, but it was changing its spatial scale as clusters of Black settlement in side streets and alleys disappeared from White districts while expanding into large Black zones. Finally, multivariate analyses show that trends were similar in the North and South, and in neither region was Black population size (i.e., “Black threat”) a significant predictor of increasing segregation. The general trends of rising segregation and increasing spatial scale became a nationwide pattern.
Benjamin Bellman, Seth E. Spielman, and Rachel S. Franklin. 2016. "Local Population Change and Variations in Racial Integration in the United States, 2000–2010." International Regional Science Review.
Abstract
While population growth has been consistently tied to decreasing racial segregation at the metropolitan level in the United States, little work has been done to relate small-scale changes in population size to integration. We address this question through a novel technique that tracks population changes by race and ethnicity for comparable geographies in both 2000 and 2010. Using the Theil index, we analyze the fifty most populous metropolitan statistical areas in 2010 for changes in multigroup segregation. We classify local areas by their net population change between 2000 and 2010 using a unique unit of analysis based on aggregating census blocks. We find strong evidence that growing parts of rapidly growing metropolitan areas of the United States are crucial to understanding regional differences in segregation that have emerged in past decades. Multigroup segregation declined the most in growing parts of growing metropolitan areas. Comparatively, growing parts of shrinking or stagnant metropolitan areas were less diverse and had smaller declines in segregation. We also find that local areas with shrinking populations had disproportionately high minority representation in 2000 before population loss took place. We conclude that the regional context of population growth or decline has important consequences for the residential mixing of racial groups.
John R. Logan and Benjamin Bellman. 2016. "Before The Philadelphia Negro: Residential Segregation in a Nineteenth-Century Northern City." Social Science History.
Abstract
Although some scholars treat racial residential segregation in northern cities as a twentieth-century phenomenon, recent research on New York and Chicago has shown that black-white segregation was already high and rising by 1880. We draw on data from the Philadelphia Social History Project and other new sources to study trends in this city as far back as 1850 and extending to 1900, a time when DuBois had completed his epic study of The Philadelphia Negro. Segregation of “free negroes” in Philadelphia was high even before the Civil War but did not increase as the total and black populations grew through 1900. Geocoded information from the full-count data from the 1880 Census makes it possible to map the spatial configuration of black residents in fine detail. At the scale of the street segment, segregation in that year was extraordinarily high, reflecting a micropattern in which many blacks lived in alleys and short streets. Although there was considerable class variation in the black community, higher-status black households lived in areas that were little different in racial and class composition than lower-status households.