Even as two-thirds of Americans now say that there are strong conflicts between rich and poor, another great American division is slowly healing.
During National African-American History Month, we should celebrate the decline of racial segregation for the fourth consecutive decade. While there are far too many children — of all races — who are raised in the midst of poverty and desperation, the lessening of segregation reminds us that our nation continues to have a great ability to fight even its worst problems.
From 1890 to 1960, as blacks fled Southern farms seeking a freer and more prosperous life in urban areas, our cities became increasingly segregated.
Whites often bitterly opposed the influx of blacks into their communities, sometimes violently, as with the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, which started with “the drowning of an African- American teenager who had crossed an invisible line at 29th Street separating customarily segregated ‘white’ and ‘black’ beaches.”
During the first half of the 20th century, segregation was also enforced with legal tools. Some cities, such as Baltimore and Louisville, Ky., passed explicit racial zoning ordinances, formally restricting the areas where blacks could live.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Cities couldn’t zone by race, but developers could still insert restrictive covenants into new subdivisions that prevented units from being sold to minorities.
In 1957, a New York coalition of blacks, Jewish groups and labor unions helped create the nation’s first fair housing ordinance, which made it illegal to refuse to sell or rent on the basis of “race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry.” A decade of civil-rights activism led to the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, which made racial discrimination in housing illegal nationwide.
My past work found that in 1960, blacks made up less than 1 percent of the population in 56 percent of city census tracts. Almost one in five tracts had no black Americans. By 1990, only about 7 percent of city tracts were 100 percent white.
As of 1970, almost 80 percent of either whites or blacks would have had to move neighborhoods in order to achieve an even distribution of whites and blacks within the average metropolitan area. By 1990, that dissimilarity measure had dropped to 66 percent; it is 54 percent today. We are very far from living in a perfectly integrated society, but our nation is far more integrated than it was 40 years ago.
The general decline in segregation has also been accompanied by a change in its nature. Before 1968, segregation is best understood as the result of hard, if often informal, barriers against black mobility. There were neighborhoods that were simply off-limits. The effect was that blacks paid more for housing, especially in more segregated cities.
A core economic idea is that people pay higher prices when their choices are limited, whether those limits come from tariff barriers or racial restrictions.
The decline in segregation hasn’t been uniform across the black population. Much of the decline reflects relatively well- educated black Americans moving into white districts. While that freedom is something to celebrate, the exodus of the more skilled left many urban neighborhoods behind, and the effect of growing up in a segregated community appears to have gotten worse.
During the 20th century, blacks moved from being an overwhelmingly rural community to having a large presence in cities. They moved for economic opportunity and for freedom from the Jim Crow laws of the South. Unfortunately, black migrants were too often prevented from enjoying the full benefits of freedom that city air can bring. Gradually, those barriers have fallen and American cities are more integrated than they have been since 1910. This is a triumph for blacks and whites alike.
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Edward Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard University, is a Bloomberg View columnist.