American ghetto segregation was a post-Reconstruction urban development, not a plantation legacy

Evidence

Segregation emerged as the dominant and formalized modality of racism in the United States as freed slaves moved off the plantations after abolition and into cities, first southern and then up the Mississippi and the east coast, and ultimately also westward. White politicians in the southern Democratic Party machine secured their political power by shielding the white urban working class from competition by newly emancipated black citizens in the late nineteenth century just as the National Party came to power in South Africa in 1948 by securing the wellbeing of the white working and poor classes on the promise of apartheid’s racial restrictions on access. The ghettoized segregation widely associated with the height of American racism was a thoroughly urbanized post-Reconstruction development the full effects of which were realized in cities in the 1920s and 1930s, by which time it was being vigorously contested by black social movements and cross-racial coalitions. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 364

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the South African National Party apartheid parallel — comparable white working-class political bargains in two settler states. — connects to: Residential segregation was deliberately constructed, not natural or market-driven — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 340