University Place

Black Ghettos in New York and Chicago, 1880-1940

[Todd Goode, Associate Dean, College of Letters and Science, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point]

Good evening everyone, my name is Todd Goode and I’m the Associate Dean in the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and I’d like to welcome you tonight to the October installment of the 2016-2017 community lecture series sponsored by the College of Letters and Science.

Tonight’s presenter is Dr. David Chunyu, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Work at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and his discussion tonight will focus upon emergent ghettos, black neighborhoods in New York and Chicago, 1880-1940.

Dr. Chunyu is originally from Tianjin China, a city in Northeast China with a population of just under 4 million people, and surprisingly a climate very similar to that in Wisconsin, and that was one of the reasons why David was attracted to the position here.

David joined us in 2012, after receiving his PhD from the state university of New York at Albany and has research interests in the study of migration and immigration patterns, race and ethnicity, and urban sociology and social demography.

Dr. Chunyu’s talk tonight will address the conventional idea that black-white segregation in northern cities was conventionally believed to start after the Great Migration, and he will present an alternative view of that based on the analyses of New York City and Chicago, 1880-1940, from census data and historical street maps.

Although the high segregation and isolation in the black ghettos had crystalized by 1940, the segregation patterns were firmly in place by 1980, or 1880, excuse me, and Dr. Chunyu will illustrate that tonight.

Without any further ado, I’d like to introduce Dr. David Chunyu.

[applause]

[Miao David Chunyu, Assistant Professor, Sociology and Social Work, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point]

Thank you so much, everyone, thank you for being here, and thank you for giving me this opportunity to share my work. As you can tell from this slide, I’m only one of the many co-authors of this work. This is actually a research project that got started when I was doing postdoc research work at Brown University. And it was finalized after I came to UW-Stevens Point.

Eventually this work became a paper that was published in the American Journal of Sociology, last year. So, today’s talk is mainly based on this paper. And as you can tell from the title of my talk, our focus is about emerging ghettos in the early time period. By ghetto, we refer to certain areas in the city that has a – that has a concentration of racial minorities. That is often associated with lower socio-economic status.

And, here, we examine the detailed residential patterns of Blacks in Northern cities. The time period we focus on was, as you can see, is between 1880 and 1940. And for those of you who are familiar with history, there is some kind of a connection between this time period and the Great Migration. Because, basically, the first half of this period was before the Great Migration, and the second half the period was after the Great Migration.

The Great Migration refers to the large-scale – large-scale population movement of Blacks from the rural South to the northern cities after the first World War, due to the labor shortage in the northern cities as a result of industrialization.

Now, related to the Great Migration, one common view among the urban scholars is racial segregation that resulted in the formation of ghettos was mainly a thing after the Great Migration. Basically, they are arguing that before the Great Migration there was a small number of Blacks in northern cities, and they typically lived in integrated neighborhoods with Blacks. And, in other words, there was no segregation before the Great Migration. But our research suggests some finding that supports the Alternative View.

The Alternative view is, even before the Great Migration, there was already some distinctive – distinctive features that define the – the formation of the ghetto. And we based our conclusion on two pieces of information, or two key findings, which are really two major research questions of our research.

The first major research question was, what was the level of segregation in the early time period, before the 1880. And we’re especially interested in the level of segregation and final – final spatial scale, and how did it change over time. And in our research be found that the level of segregation was actually very high, even before 1880. Several decades earlier than 1880. And, it was especially high when we look at the more final spatial scale.

And the second research question we had was the process. The underlying process, the underlying mechanism that resulted in the formation of the black ghetto later on. And basically, we’re asking, what was the factor that determined the locational choice of Black individuals and families. And basically, we’re asking was this the result of social class or was that the result of race?

And – so, what we found is, even for the blacks with higher social class status, they were still not able to move out of the black neighborhoods. So, this is basically saying that in the early period of time, the segregation process was already in place. Regardless of their social class standing, pretty much Blacks was always restricted in their small and well-defined neighborhoods.

So, those were the key findings from our study, and the rest of my presentation will present will show you some very detailed information about data, numbers and maps.

So, the first research question was about the Level of Segregation. And we – we did a lot of numbers,calculations, and data. And we based on our study on these two key measures that are very frequently used among the tomographers. The two measures are the D-score, which is known as the Dissimilarity Index. The D-score basically measures the evenness of the distribution of white and Black population all over the city. And the range of this D-score is between zero and one. So, if you get a higher score, then you have a higher level of segregation between whites and Blacks.

Now, to give you a very concrete example, a segregation score or Dissimilarity Index of 0.6 indicates 60% of either Blacks or whites must move to a different area in the city in order to achieve perfectly even distribution. And, the second score is the P score which is also known as the Isolation Index. Isolation Index measures racial composition of a person’s neighborhood. So, here, for a Black – for an average Black person, the P-score basically measures the percentage of Blacks living in the neighborhood in which an average Black person lives.

And so, we created the measures and we calculated the scores for many, many spatial scales in the city. And these spatial scales include something that’s very large, like ward level which usually has about 50,000 people, and down to census tract. The census tract usually has about 3,000-5,000 people. And then, some – some final spatial scales include street segment groups, street segments down to building, down to household. So, we pretty much calculate the segregation score for many, many spatial scales in big cities.

And, the data we used are from New York City and Chicago. You probably know that New York City and Chicago are the two greatest destinations for the Great Migration. And, we – we use the two kinds of data. One kind of data is the aggregated data for the small areas in New York City and Chicago between 18- 1900 and 1940. Here, we used the aggregate data at the numeration district level. A numeration district refers to a sub-division in the city that was assigned to a census enumerator to collect the information. So, that’s pretty similar to census tract, but sometimes it’s smaller. So, usually a numeration district has about 2,000 residents. So, it works as some kind of a neighborhood and some kind of unit for social interaction and social networks.

So, we have the aggregate level data for New York City and Chicago between 1900 and 1940, and in addition we also have the micro data, very detailed, individual-level information for 1880. And that, we have 100% full count 1800 – 1880 census data. So, once we have the individual level information, that is exactly who has exactly what kind of characteristic, what kind of demographic, socioeconomic status, then we’re able to aggregate that information to pretty much any spatial scale we want to calculate.

So, we can aggregate your household level, to building level, street level, and to tract level, so on and so forth. And, in fact, to enable our analysis, not just for statistical analysis but also for mapping purposes, we – we have done a lot of – a lot of work.

Now let me show you what the 1880, the 100% full count census looks like. Well, this is the original information that was handwritten. The paper, that was done by the numerator. But, fortunately, all these data have already been transcribed into the digital file. Like this, by the Minnesota Population Center. So, in this table we can see, back in the 1880 census we have information about households address, so we can see the – the street name, the address number, and each member of the household. The race, their gender, their age, and relationships to the household head. Their level of education, occupation and their own birthplaces as well as their parents’ birthplaces. So, that is really a lot of the information. But our goal is really trying to, you know, to locate, and this is actually the process that’s called geo-coding, which is to map exactly where these individuals are in – back in 1880. So, it’s not just about a lump sum of people, but we can pinpoint the exact location of these – these individuals and households in the streets back in 1880.

But in order to do that, we have to first recreate the street map in digital form back in 1880, and that involved a lot of work. So, for the next few slides, I’m going to give you a very quick overview of how this process was done.

So, we used a lot of historical maps, and we did many cities. Today’s talk is mainly about New York City and Chicago, but I personally was involved in recreating the digital street map for San Francisco. So, this is San Francisco, and this is the historical paper map. This was dated about 1881, 1883 something like that. And, in order to recreate this map, first we have to have the paper map. But a more critical information is really the street, the city directory, which has the full information about each street and divided street segments.

So, ideally what we want to have is for each street, you know, each street long streets can be divided up into many segments, and they are divided by the intersections. And each street segment has two sides, one side with even number addresses numbers and the other side is the odd number addresses. And then within each segment you also have the address range. So, in order to, you know, get the exact location of each household, we must provide the specific information for each street segment, the address range, the side, the odd number, the even number, and this is, like, the product of the digitized street map for San Francisco back in 1880. And if I overlay this map on – on the paper map, then I can visualize the original environment and maybe the social environment, the institutions, that gives me a more intuitive idea about how the original street structure looks like.

And of course, the goal is really to geocode the terminology, geocode is really to pinpoint the individuals and the households to their exact locations on this map. So, once I finish my geocoding,the households become the dots on this map. And if I zoom in on that black, no I think that’s actually the blue dot, if I zoom in on this area, and then you can see some more detailed information about, you know, the blocks, the streets, so basically for each individual household I can tell on which side of the street is this household, and who is sharing the same building with this household, and who is living in this block, and who is living on the next block. That really enabled us to do a lot of analysis. So, that is the kind of the data we work with. Now let me show you some findings of our research.

Oh, by the way, this is the product of the – the geocoding for Chicago. So, after we finish the geo-coding for the – for the households in Chicago, we can identify who are the

[loses place in slide presentation]

Alright, so anyway, you just saw the distribution of many white households in Chicago and many Black buildings in Chicago.

So now, I would like to give you the information about the segregation measures. I just want to remind you about the two segregation measures I just introduced to you. One is the Dissimilarity Index, the other is the Isolation Index. But first I want to show you about the share of the Black population in the city, which is, you can see on the horizontal – on the horizontal line, this is a time period between 1880 and 1940. Basically, you can regard 1920 as the starting point of the Great Migration. So, before the starting of the Great Migration the share of the Black population in the Chicago city was really small. It was under 2% in 1880, and it was still under 5% in 1920. That is how small the black population is.

But, consider the Isolation Index, which is indicated by this curve at the enumeration district level. So, in 1880, the Isolation Level, which indicates an average Black person lives in a neighborhood that is more than – about 15% Black. But remember, the total share of the Black population is only about 1.3% of the total population. So, an average Black person lives in a neighborhood that is disproportionately Black.

And now as we move ten years forward, and now it becomes 1900, in 1910 we can see the Blacks are increasingly living in disproportionately Black neighborhood and that is really, really a high level of isolation. On the other hand, let’s look at the Dissimilarity Index, and let me remind you that the Dissimilarity Index indicates the level of segregation of Blacks from whites. And even in a period as early as 1880, the Blacks are segregated from whites with a score of almost 0.7. That means about 70% of total whites or total whites they must move to another area in order to achieve even distribution. So, that indicates, that was about thirty or forty years ago before the Great Migration and the level of segregation was already very high at the level of enumeration district.

And the next slide shows the level of segregation in New York City. So, the situation as quite similar to that in – in – in Chicago.

Another way to look at the level of segregation is to plot this curve, it’s called the Lorenz curve, now some-something similar to the Lorenz curve will be used to describe the incoming inequality, the Gini Index.

Now in order to understand this curve I’m going to have to ask you to imagine, imagine a reference line, which is the straight diagonal line, you have to imagine this line here. Now in a perfectly even distribution of Blacks and whites in the city, then the Lorenz curve should be a straight diagonal. But, unfortunately, back in 1880, in Chicago and New York City, the actual – the actual curves were way further away from this imaginary straight diagonal – diagonal curve, that means the level of segregation is really high. And, relatively speaking, New York City was somewhat less segregated compared to the level of segregation in Chicago, and that was the situation in 1880. So, that was already very segregated.

Now, if we move forward to 1940, and we can see, this is almost like complete segregation, and it is very, very close to theoretical maximum, just remember, the straight diagonal line represents perfect even distribution, but now this is really at the farthest possible extent, further away from the – the referenced straight line. So, it’s almost reaching the theoretical maximum.So – so, as we have heard earlier by the introduction from Todd by 1940, the formation of the Black ghetto was really fully established, by the time period 1940.

And, let me show you some thematic maps about the transition of black neighborhoods over time.

So, this is a series of maps visualizing how the Black neighborhoods kind of changed over time, but you can see something very consistent. So, this is in 1880, this was how the neighborhood was like in 1900, but this is really about the percentage of Blacks in the neighborhoods. And this was in the 1920

[changes slide]

1930

[changes slide]

1940.

So, you can see, it’s increasingly more and more Black. And eventually, by the time period 1940, you can see, this is like the south – this is really the south side of the Chicago. So, this became the core of the Black belt in Chicago. But you can see overtime, back in 1880, even though in the Black neighborhoods those were really majority whites. Just remember the share of the Black population was very small, but it, sort of, established the foundation for the formation of the Black ghetto in later years. So, this, you know, the formation of the Black ghetto was not really started after the Great Migration. It was – this mechanism, or the process, was well under way several decades earlier than 1940.

So based on that information, the distribution of the Black neighborhoods, and also based on some spatial analysis technique, we have identified or defined some Black neighborhoods over time. And this allowed us to conduct some statistical analysis.

So, here I show you how the Black neighborhoods evolved in a period of 60 – 60 years from 1880 to 1920 and to 1940. And you can see the – the South side, which is here, that’s in Chicago, this is the West side. These are two persistent neighborhoods that existed in all these years. And of course, in later years we have seen some new Black neighborhoods emerged, for example, the North side, and the Lilydale, and but, basically we can see some persistent, persistent Black neighborhoods, and this was – this was in Chicago. Now let me give you a closer look at very fine spatial scale about what is going on in this – in this residential pattern of urban Blacks. Now I’m going to select a very specific block in the South side of Chicago. So, this is where I’d like to – to zoom in. But, before I give you the detailed information – so some basic – the larger picture about this area is there are many red dots. The red dots that represent predominantly white buildings, and then you see some blue, black dots, those represent predominantly Black buildings. So, in this area, it was sort of the beginning of the formation of the – the- the Black ghetto in the South side. Now I’m going to zoom in on this – on this block. This is really the 1400 block of the South street. I’m going to zoom in and then I’m going to create a new picture for you, so this is what it looks like. Of course, the direction has been switched a little bit.

[difficulty with advancing slide]

Let me try this once again OK

So, here is the street segment, this is the block. And this block has a direction. This is the North, this is the South, and this is the 1400 block of the South street, and this is the odd number side of the street, and this is the even number side of the street. And we can see many squares, these squares basically represent buildings, so each building has a specific address number. Let me show you some specific buildings, and these buildings are marked by different colors. White color, or the – the light color represents predominantly white buildings and the dark color represents the predominantly Black building or mixed building.

For example, this square represents a predominantly Black building The address number should be 1425. And then, the next building has four white residents and one black resident. The upper numeral represents the number of white residents and the lower numeral represents the number of Black residents.

So, in the next building, that is address number 1429, that is an all-white building, 16-16 all Black building, all 16 Blacks. And the next one is 1431 and the next one is 1433 South Street. And then on the other side of the street, which is the even number of the street, this address number is 1418, it’s mixed, so 7 white residents and 6 Black residents. So, the point here is that even when we look at a block that is seemingly integrated, but when we look at it carefully, it’s actually the predominantly Black buildings that tended to – to be near to each other. So that suggests that even in micro-level as small as block level there could be some steering process that restrict the locational choice for – for Black households.

And it has been documented by other sociologists, that in the early period of time, Blacks tend to be placed in the oldest building, or the least comfortable building in the – in the block, although sometimes they have to pay the same level of rent as the white tenants.

So, this is showing that not just at the aggregate level – at the aggregate level but also in the micro-level, there is something about the segregation process that separate the Blacks from whites, restricting their housing options.

And this is a very, very quick summary of all the segregation scores we have calculated for New York City and for Chicago and many different levels of spatial – spatial scale. Well, I guess we aren’t really interested in the detailed numbers, but the pattern is very clear, and that is, as we move down along the spatial scale, the smaller the spatial scale, then the higher segregation we see. This is not something we see from existing studies, so this is something new from our own research.

And basically, this is the finding that addresses our first research question, that is, what was the level of segregation in the early period of time, and how about the level of segregation in final spatial scale ? And it was established. So, even several decades earlier than the Great Migration, there was already very high level of segregation, especially when we move down the spatial scale.

Now, the second research question was really about the process. We had the outcome, but how did we explain this outcome? What really caused the restriction of Black families into small, well-defined areas? And there could be some possibilities, one possibility, it may be social class. It may be just because of lower income or poverty. Poorer Blacks tend to be restricted in the least comfortable housing structure. But the other possibility is that maybe Blacks were constricted – were restricted to the least comfortable areas but because of their race, regardless of their social class standing.

So, our next step with the analysis is to – is to estimate statistical models. I guess we don’t really have enough time to go into detail, but let me give you some quick idea about this – about this analysis.

Basically, there was some disagreements among the urban scholars about the timing of the restriction of the middle class Blacks to the Black neighborhoods. So, some urban scholars tend to argue that the restriction of the middle class Black to Black neighborhoods was only a thing that took place after the Great Migration. But, others – some other scholars tended to argue that even from the very beginning the Black, the Blacks of middle class were already restricted in their locational choices.

So, we estimated a series of statistical models. The models logic is like this. This is – this is the second time I’m showing the – the distribution of the Black neighborhoods in Chicago for 1880, 1920 and 1940. The fact is, many Blacks, they were living inside the Black neighborhoods, but there were also some Blacks who were living outside the neighborhoods, outside the Black zone. So were trying to estimate what kind of Blacks are more likely to live inside the Black zone and what kind of individuals are more likely to live outside the Black neighborhood. And this is the – this is the fundamental logic. And we did the same thing for – for -for the pattern in New York City.

I guess we don’t have enough time to go over what happened in – in New York City, but we still identified some noticeable Black neighborhoods in New York City for those who are familiar with a map of New York, you probably know this is Manhattan, this is Brooklyn, and in the later years there was this establishment of the Black neighborhoods in Harlem, in the Bronx, and in – in Queens. So, we did the parallel analysis for both Chicago and New York City.

Some factors we considered include the following. The question is, still what kind of individuals are more likely to live outside the Black neighborhood versus living inside the neighborhood? And then, maybe, its regardless of the people’s social class, people are always restricted within their Black neighborhood. Or was there simply the differentiation within the Black zone, and we consider the following factors, if the following factors could have an impact on peoples locational choice.

So, the factors will look into does it make a difference if a Black individual is a migrant from the South, or is this Black individual is born from the local state, from New York City or from Chicago. Does it make a difference if this individual is of mixed race between white and Black? Does it make a difference if this individual happens to be a live-in servant, living in the white headed household? Because in the – in the year of 1818, many Black individuals actually worked as live-in servants together with their white employers. So, in that situation, many people could well live outside the Black neighborhoods simply because of their employment.

But our key question is really about the impact of social class. So, does it really make a difference if an individual, a Black individual, is in a higher social class, will that enable the Black individual household to live outside the Black zone? That was really our key research question.

So again, the data we used were really the micro data, that is, specifically on the individual level, what kind of characteristics does this individual have? What kind of characteristic does that individual have? And again we have the 1880 full count census data. In addition, we also have the assembly data from 1940, 1940 census, and we just focus on the Black adults and we use the random representative sample of Black adults and we conduct a series of statistical analysis.

Again, in the interest of time, I’m going to give you a summary of the results. Basically, the finding was Black’s social class standing was actually not associated with whether theyre living in the Black neighborhood or living outside the neighborhood. So, it is regardless of people’s social class, just because of race, basically Blacks were just restricted in their locational choices.

But we did find some evidence that within the Black neighborhood, there was limited mobility for the Black families or households with better socioeconomic status. So, some Blacks with better socioeconomic status, they might have some mobility within their own building, so that was – was very restricted, and the finding was quite similar for the situation in 1940. Again, we don’t see how social class was associated with the Black – Black mobility outside the – the Black neighborhood, but there was some limited mobility within the Black neighborhood that was associated with the social class. So perhaps with Blacks, for Blacks with somewhat better income, better education, they are able to have slightly better neighborhood, but still within the Black – within the Black zone.

So, in summary – this is really the conclusion of my research.

So, in summary, we confirm that the highest segregation and isolation that is found in the Black ghetto as we know it today had already crystallized by 1940. But we also find that the level of segregation and isolation were already as high – were already high as early as 1880, and especially very high at the final spatial scale. And lastly, in terms of the process, or the underlying mechanism that determines the Black settlement, we found that the segregation process was already firmly in place. It’s regardless of Black individual’s social class, and they had growing impacts and larger spatial scales as the Great Migration brought a large Black population to northern cities.

And that concludes my presentation. Thank you.

[applause]