Negro Ghetto Research Articles

The Negro Ghettos and Federal Housing Policy

The summer racial disturbances which have recently become epidemic have focussed attention upon the United States' most important and perplexing domestic problem-rampant racial ghettoization of its major cities. The Negro ghettos are to a considerable degree a product of American housing policies of the post-World War II era. Ironically, they now stand as one of the greatest obstacles to achievement of the nation's goal of decent housing for all its citizens. These racial concentrations-which are also concentrations of the most deprived of all Americans in virtually every sense of the term-are of impressive size. Today the Negro populations of at least five major cities are estimated to exceed half a million. Negroes constitute close to two-thirds of all residents of Washington, D.C.; more than one-third of the citizens of Baltimore and New Orleans; over one-fourth of those residing in Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis.' In all cases they are compressed into limited areas, while large sections of the same cities remain almost exclusively white. In some places like New York and Los Angeles, where the Negro proportions are somewhat smaller, other severely disadvantaged groups like Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans are similarly ghettoized in large numbers. The recent rate of growth of the urban ghettos can best be described as explosive. During the I950s alone the Negro population of New York increased by forty-six per cent; of Detroit by sixty per cent; of Los Angeles by ninety-six per cent; of Milwaukee by a staggering 187 per cent.2 Such rapid increase in a problem-ridden population, together with its compression into areas of the central cities which are most deficient in housing and other facilities and services, helps explain why every one of these cities has recently suffered destructive racial violence. Today, violence is only the most extreme and obvious symptom of the problems which the slum ghettos are causing the major cities and this nation. Washington, D.C., where ghettoization has proceeded farthest of any, affords some illustrative statistics3 In the twelve years between i954 and I966, Washington's total population

Social Sciences: Where Do They Fit in the Politics of Science?

Social scientists and a growing num ber of people in Congress and the Ad ministration are beginning to give hard thought to the place of the social sci ences in the scheme of social science government relations. Thus far there seems to be no consensus as to what new institutional arrangements should be created, but the feeling is strong that something should be done. The catalog of problems which intrude upon rela tions between the social scientists and government is still being compiled. Problems which must appear obvious to many social scientists, however, are those having to do with money, pro fessional independence, and influence and visibility. The mounting interest of members of Congress in the social sciences is undoubtedly a reflection of the in creasing seriousness of such problems as the upheavals in the Negro ghettos, the overwhelming demands on big-city school systems, and the near-chaos in public transportation. The rapid growth of federal support for the social sci ences, and of the involvement of social scientists in the work of government, is evident from NSF figures showing that the total federal contribution to research in these fields increased from $35 million in fiscal 1960 to $188 mil lion in fiscal 1966.** Nothing has done more to alert social scientists and government to the problems inherent in their deepening involvement with one another than the Camelot incident. Project Camelot, the long-since canceled U.S. Army sponsored study of political instability

The Negro Ghetto: Problems and Alternatives

G HETTOS, as we must realistically term the segregated areas occupied by Negroes and other minority groups, are common features of American urban life. The vast majority of Negroes, Japanese, Puerto Ricans, and Mexican-Americans are forced by a variety of pressures to reside in restricted areas, in which they themselves are dominant. So general is this phenomenon that not one of the hundred largest urban areas can be said to be without ghettos.' Inferiority in almost every conceivable material respect is the mark of the ghetto. But also, to the minority person, the ghetto implies a rejection, a stamp of inferiority, which stifles ambition and initiative. The very fact of residential segregation reinforces other forms of discrimination by preventing the normal contacts through which prejudice may be gradually overcome. Yet because the home and the neighborhood are so personal and intimate, housing will be the last and most difficult step in the struggle for equal rights. The purpose here is to trace the origin of the ghetto and the forces that perpetuate it and to evaluate proposals for controlling it. The Negro community of Seattle, Washington, is used in illustration of a simple model of ghetto expansion as a diffusion process into the surrounding white area. From the beginning of the nineteenth century the newest immigrants were accustomed to spend some time in slum ghettos of New York, Philadelphia, or Boston.2 But as their incomes grew and their English improved they moved out into the American mainstream, making way for the next group. During the nineteenth century the American Negro population, in this country from the beginning but accustomed to servitude, remained predominantly southern and rural. Relatively few moved to the North, and those who did move lived in small clusters about the cities. The Negro ghetto did not exist.3 Even in southern cities the Negroes, largely in the

Social Class and the Desegregation Movement: A Study of Parents' Decisions in a Negro Ghetto

Social Class and the Desegregation Movement: A Study of Parents' Decisions in a Negro Ghetto

Social Class and the Desegregation Movement: A Study of Parents' Decisions in a Negro Ghetto

Social Class and the Desegregation Movement: A Study of Parents' Decisions in a Negro Ghetto

Literature of the Negro Ghetto

Literature of the Negro Ghetto