Rise of the black ghetto. How to create an American version of apartheid.

Abstract

The article compares the segregation of African Americans in the United States to African apartheid. Before World War I, blacks were relatively few in the North, which together with people's need to be near their factories and offices, helped to reduce any tendency toward housing segregation. The modern ghetto, with its sharply defined racial lines, generally did not begin to form until blacks in substantial numbers migrated north beginning in 1916. Violence and the threat of violence, together with agreements among white homeowners not to sell to blacks, increasingly left African-Americans in separate neighborhoods. To measure segregation, economists David M. Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser of Harvard University and Jacob L. Vigdor of Duke University calculated dissimilarity scores, which are defined as the proportion of blacks who would need to move across census-tract lines to achieve the same proportion of blacks in every tract of a metropolitan area. The average index for all metropolitan areas rose steadily to reach a peak of 0.74 in 1960 and then declined to 0.5 by 2000.