Cultural change and the ghetto

Abstract

Ghetto literature, the product of intense feeling and dramatic experience, has always been the most readable material of American urban history, indeed the only books which could command a wide audience.1 Today inter-racial conflict and the segregated pattern of Negro housing in our cities encourage urbanists to seek analogies between the urbanization of European peasants in American cities and the urbanization of the formerly rural American Negro.2 Both literary tradition and current interest create a severe historical distortion. The first tells of the integration of American society through the diffusion of immigrants and their descendants from a first settlement in tight urban clusters to a later suburban inter-mixture. Although such a process of cultural change did take place on a massive scale in many cities, assimilation by way of a ghetto has always been a limited case in American urban history, limited both in time span and in membership. Most foreign immigrants to American cities never lived in ghettos, and most immigrant ghettos that did exist were the product of the largest cities and the eastern and southern European immigrants of