Black residence shifted from southern rural areas to hyper-segregated northern cities

Evidence

Until the late 1800s nearly 90 percent of black Americans lived in southern rural counties while almost that proportion of whites lived in northern cities. By 1930 black urban residents tended to live in wards 40 percent black. From 1890 to 1930 black residence in New York surged nearly tenfold from 36,000 to 328,000, in Chicago over twentyfold from 14,000 to 234,000. Chicago neighborhoods just 10 percent black in 1900 were swept by the cold wind of segregation into neighborhoods 70 percent black just 30 years later. By 1950 a majority of African Americans had become city folk, and by 1960 a greater percentage of blacks than whites lived in cities. Between 1920 and 1980 blacks living on the land and working in agriculture declined 96 percent, and by 1981 this figure had almost disappeared to 1 percent. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 367

Categorization

• SHARE: The ‘96 percent decline in black agricultural residence over 1920-1980’ is a striking statistic for anyone doing urban or labor history.
• XREF: connects to: Housing discrimination, not just law, produced northern school segregation — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1182; Black northern migration met epidemic white urban violence through 1919 — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 865; Atlanta’s larger black population drove faster residential racial change than in northern cities — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 38