A Quantitative Study of Differentiated School Knowledge Transmission in Buffalo, 1918-1931

Abstract

The 1920s were years of dramatic and kaleidoscopic events in an industrial city such as Buffalo, New York. This was a decade of mass migration of rural blacks from the South into the North; the continued immigration of southern and eastern Europeans, primarily from Italy and Poland; recession due to war-time industries winding down to peace-time production; and a rising xenophobia in the Red Scare, a fear of social revolution, and a general concern about eroding American values with increasing criminal activity among urban youth from foreign regions. Indeed, at the beginning of this decade, Poles in Buffalo numbered 31,406 or 25.8 percent of the city's foreign-born population. There were 16,511 Italians, comprising 13.5 percent of the foreign-born population. Athough blacks made up only 3.7 percent of the foreign-born population and only 0.89 percent of the city's total population, the 4,511 blacks in the city were in marked contrast to the 1,771 living there in 1910. As a result of this influx, the socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic composition of neighborhoods in the central city shifted from northern European nineteenth-century immigrant groups to later-arriving southern and eastern Europeans and southern blacks who were yet to assimilate into the normative patterns of that society. Teachers