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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 - 4. Sanctions for Residential Segregation
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622 An American Dilemma
Each city has a pattern of its own determined by the percentage of Negroes in
the total [population], the distribution of Negro employment, the distribution of
the areas where property is within the means of colored families, the attitude of the
people toward segregation, and the rate of expansion of business and manufacturing
sections.*^
The geography of a city also helps determine the pattern of segregation.
In a flat city like Chicago, which expanded in practically all directions from
a single center, Negroes are concentrated in the slums around the central
business district and their better class neighborhood stretches out like a
spoke from this slum base.^° In a hilly city like Cincinnati, Negroes are
concentrated in the lowlands. In a long, narrow city like New York,
Negroes tend to live in a section of the strip, and the transportation lines
go right through the Negro section. This latter variation should not lead
us to believe that there is no segregation in such a narrow city as Man-
hattan, although some Negroes would like to believe that there is none.
Claude McKay is in error when he says:
Segregation is a very unfortunate word. It has done much harm to the colored
group by paralyzing constructive thinking and action. Not by the greatest flight of
the imagination could Negro Harlem be considered as a segregated area. Besides the
large percentage of whites who do business there, quite a number of them also
reside there in the midst of the colored people. Harlem is more like a depressed
area. In my last book I compared it to the servant quarters of a great estate. The
servants live on a lower level. But they are not segregated.^®
To depict more clearly the character of residential segregation in Ameri-
can cities, Appendix 7 describes the pattern of Negro residences in
selected cities.
4.. Sanctions for Residential Segregation
Probably the chief force maintaining residential segregation of Negroes
has been informal social pressure from the whites. Few white property
owners in white neighborhoods would ever consider selling or renting to
Negroes j
and even if a few Negro families did succeed in getting a foot-
hold,® they would be made to feel the spontaneous hatred of the whites
both socially and physically. The main reason why informal social pressure
has not always been effective in preventing Negroes from moving into a
white neighborhood has been the tremendous need of Negroes to move
“The first foothold of Negroes in a white neighborhood is often achieved by accident:
a piece of property is deeded to an absentee landlord who has no interest in the neighbor-
hood) a white real estate agent wishes to make the large profit involved in selling to
harassed Negroes j
one of the local white residents may not be morally integrated into the
neighborhood (the strategic 3500 block on fashionable Grand Boulevard in Chicago was
supposed to have been first opened to Negroes by a white prostitute who wished to retaliate
on her neighbors for exposing her to the police).
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