Race, Regional Origin, and Residence in Northern Cities at the Beginning of the Great Migration

2002 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart E. Tolnay ◽  
Robert M. Adelman ◽  
Kyle D. Crowder
Author(s):  
John R. Logan ◽  
Weiwei Zhang ◽  
Richard Turner ◽  
Allison Shertzer

Were black ghettos a product of white reaction to the Great Migration in the 1920s and 1930s, or did the ghettoization process have earlier roots? This article takes advantage of recently available data on black and white residential patterns in several major northern cities in the period 1880–1940. Using geographic areas smaller than contemporary census tracts, we trace the growth of black populations in each city and trends in the level of isolation and segregation. In addition we analyze the determinants of location: which blacks lived in neighborhoods with higher black concentrations, and what does this tell us about the ghettoization process? We find that the development of ghettos in an embryonic form was well underway in 1880, that segregation became intense prior to the Great Migration, and that in this whole period blacks were segregated based on race rather than class or southern origin.


Author(s):  
Jennifer Jensen Wallach

This chapter explores the class tensions inherent in the middle-class project of reforming black food habits, demonstrating that working-class African Americans frequently did not share the certainty that foodways could be used as an avenue for citizenship and doubted many of the assumptions embedded in the project of cultural elevation subscribed to by black food reformers. One of the issues at the heart of the culinary tensions among members of the black community was the emerging question about whether there was a distinctive African American way of eating that was separate from mainstream American food culture. In the context of the Great Migration, “southern” food often became labeled “black” food in the northern cities that served as the terminus for black migrants. This transformation took place much to the consternation of black food reformers who, on the whole, resisted the idea of essential black cultural practices.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soumyajit Mazumder

How does the appearance of a new immigrant group affect the integration of earlier generations of migrants? We study this question in the context of the first Great Migration (1915-1930), when 1.5 million African Americans moved from the US South to northern urban centers, where 30 million Europeans had arrived since 1850. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation induced by the interaction between 1900 settlements of southern-born blacks in northern cities and state-level outmigration from the US South after 1910. Black arrivals increased both the effort exerted by immigrants to assimilate and their eventual Americanization. These average effects mask substantial heterogeneity: while initially less integrated groups (i.e. Southern and Eastern Europeans) exerted more assimilation effort, assimilation success was larger for those culturally closer to native whites (i.e. Western and Northern Europeans). Labor market outcomes do not display similar heterogeneity, suggesting that these patterns cannot be entirely explained by economic forces. Our findings are instead more consistent with a framework in which changing perceptions of outgroup distance among native whites lowered the barriers to the assimilation of white immigrants.


2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart E. Tolnay ◽  
Katherine J. Curtis White ◽  
Kyle D. Crowder ◽  
Robert M. Adelman

Between 1910 and 1970, millions of southern-born Americans migrated to the northern and western regions of the country in search of better opportunities. Some traveled only short distances, leaving Appalachia for nearby destinations in the southern Midwest. Others made the much longer trek to the West Coast. In this article, we use data from the 1920, 1940, and 1970 Public Use Microdata Samples to investigate the distances traveled by male participants in the Great Migration, with a special focus on differences by race, as well as on changes over time. We find that the average distance traveled increased substantially during the Great Migration for blacks and whites alike. However, throughout this time period, white migrants moved significantly farther than black migrants. The greater propensity for white migrants to move west, rather than north, accounts for a good deal of this overall racial variation. Although the difference in distance traveled between blacks and whites narrowed significantly over time, it remained substantial as the Great Migration came to a close. We conclude by highlighting the impact of these differential migration patterns on the composition and social conditions in northern cities.


1997 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 857
Author(s):  
Gloria L. Main ◽  
Robert Charles Anderson

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