The Social Integration of American Cities of More Than 100,000 Population

Abstract

T HE RESEARCH here reported constitutes the second stage in a continuing program. The first stage consisted of an exploratory study of the social integration of 28 cities.' It was completed just before our entry into the war. That study demonstrated that the concept of social integration points to something real, and that this something can be roughly measured by a positive and a negative index. It also furnished many clues for further research into causal factors. The present study was undertaken to check the previous findings on a larger sample of cities and to follow down some of these clues. Since the data used came from the I940 Census and other sources of that period, the study has to do with the pre-war situation in the cities investigated. It hardly seems necessary to point out the importance of research on social integration at the present time. At the level of the community, the nation, and the world, we are faced with grave problems resulting from the lack of a firm moral order to which people are loyal and in terms of which conflicting parties may be reconciled. Research upon the integration of cities is therefore important not only in its own right, but also because an understanding of the phenomenon of integration at the local level may suggest hypotheses respecting the national and international levels. Granted that there are important emergent properties at those higher levels, it seems probable that the phenomenon of social integration has some elements in common wherever it occurs.