Negro Urban Clusters in the Postbellum South

Abstract

rT HE history of development of Negro residential areas in the South is distinctly different from the history of their development in the North.' The differences in the character and morphology of northern and southern Negro areas are attributable to their social and economic environments at the time of their inception. These environmental conditions are a function of the period in which the Negro communities were formed. The formation of the large Negro ghettoes during World War I was a consequence of the large-scale migration of Negroes from the rural South to the urban North.2 These migrants settled in inner-city tenement districts, and the Negro ghettoes thus formed expanded sectorally, by the process of residential invasion and succession of adjacent white working-class areas.3 Negroes had resided in southern cities long before the beginning of their northward migration in the twentieth century. In I860 Negroes comprised 20 to 40 percent of the population of the typical southern city.4 Although small antebellum Negro enclaves were scattered throughout southern cities, few large Negro residential areas came into being before the Civil War.5 Not until after the Civil War did that form of the modern southern Negro residential area begin to take shape. References to southern ghetto formation have been cursory in the literature on Negro residential areas, and no single author has dealt with the subject in depth. Karl and Alma Taeuber cited the postbellum development of peripheral Negro areas in Memphis, Tennessee, and Augusta, Georgia; and the formation of similar Negro areas in Washington, D.C.; Birmingham, Alabama; and Savannah, Georgia, has received attention from others.6 Thomas J. Woofter and Gunnar Myrdal proposed