African American neighborhood

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African American neighborhoods or black neighborhoods are types of ethnic enclaves found in many cities in the United States. Generally, an African American neighborhood is one where the majority of the people who live there are African American. Some of the earliest African American neighborhoods were in New York City.[1] There were also early communities in Virginia.[citation needed] In 1830 there were 14,000 "free Negroes" living in New York City.[2] They had their own schools and churches. The formation of black neighborhoods is closely linked to the history of segregation in the United States, either through formal laws, or as a product of social norms. Despite this, black neighborhoods have played an important role in the development of nearly all aspects of both African-American culture and American culture.[citation needed]

Contents

[edit] History

[edit] The Great Migration

Main article: Great Migration (African American)

The Great Migration was the movement of more than one million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States from 1914 to 1940. Most African Americans who participated in the migration moved to large industrial cities, such as New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Minneapolis, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Oakland, and Los Angeles, as well as to many smaller industrial cities. Hence the Migration played an important role in the formation and expansion of African American neighborhoods in these cities.

While the Great Migration helped educated African Americans obtain jobs, enabling a measure of class mobility, the migrants encountered significant forms of discrimination in the North. Because so many people had migrated in so short a period of time, the African American migrants were often resented by working classes in the north, who feared that their ability to negotiate rates of pay, or even to secure employment at all, was threatened by the influx of new labor competition.

Populations increased so rapidly with the addition of African American migrants and new European immigrants both that there were widespread housing shortages in many cities. Newer groups competed even for the oldest, most rundown housing, as it was what they could afford. African Americans competed for work and housing with first or second generation immigrants in many major cities. Ethnic groups created territories which they defended against change. More established populations with more capital moved away from the pressure of new groups of residents to newer housing being developed on the outskirts.

The migrants also discovered that the open discrimination of the South was only more subtly manifested in the North. In 1917, the Supreme Court declared municipal resident segregation ordinances unconstitutional. In response, whites resorted to the restrictive covenant, a formal deed restriction binding white property owners in a given neighborhood not to sell to blacks. Whites who broke these agreements could be sued by "damaged" neighbors. Not until 1948 did the Supreme Court strike down restrictive covenants.[3] The National Housing Act of 1934 contributed to limiting the availability of loans to urban areas, particularly those areas inhabited by African Americans.[4]

In cities such as Chicago the influx of African American migrants and other immigrants resulted in racial violence, which flared in several cities during 1919.

[edit] The Second Great Migration

See also: Second Great Migration (African American)

From 1940-1970, another five million people left the South for Northern and Western cities and industrial jobs. Violence marked some of the pressure of this migration, too, such as in the Detroit Race Riot of 1943.[citation needed]

In response to the influx of black people from the South, banks, insurance companies, and businesses began redlining--denying or increasing the cost of services, such as banking, insurance, access to jobs,[5] access to health care,[6] or even supermarkets[7] to residents in certain, often racially determined,[8] areas. The most common use of the term, refers to mortgage discrimination. Data on house prices and attitudes toward integration suggest that in the mid-twentieth century, segregation was a product of collective actions taken by whites to exclude blacks from their neighborhoods.[9] This meant that ethnic minorities could secure mortgage loans only in certain areas, and it resulted in a large increase in the residential racial segregation and urban decay in the United States.[10]

Urban Renewal, including white flight, has also been a factor in the growth patterns of African-American neighborhoods. The process began an intense phase in the late 1940s and continues in some places to the present day. It has had a major impact on the urban landscape. Urban renewal was extremely controversial because it involved the destruction of businesses, the relocation of people, and the use of eminent domain to reclaim private property for city-initiated development projects. The justifications often used for Urban Renewal include the "renewal" of residential slums, blighted commercial and industrial areas. In the second half of the 20th century, renewal often resulted in the creation of urban sprawl and vast areas of cities being demolished and replaced by freeways and expressways, housing projects, and vacant lots, some of which still remain vacant at the beginning of the 21st century.[11]Urban renewel had a disproportionate and largely negative impact on African-American neighborhoods. In the 1960s James Baldwin famously dubbed Urban Renewal "Negro Removal".[12][13][14]

The creation of highways in some cases divided and isolated black neighborhoods from goods and services, many times within industrial corridors. For example, Birmingham’s interstate highway system attempted to maintain racial boundaries established by the city’s 1926 racially based zoning law. The construction of interstate highways through black neighborhoods in the city led to significant population loss in those neighborhoods. It was also associated with an increase in neighborhood racial segregation.[15]

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act removed racial deed restrictions on housing. This enabled middle class African Americans' moving to better housing, in some cases in the suburbs and in others, desegregation of residential neighborhoods where they had not formerly lived. In some areas, however, real estate agents continued to steer African Americans to particular areas.

The riots that swept cities across the country from 1965 to 1968 damaged or destroyed additional areas of major cities, for instance Detroit's 12th Street, and the U and H street corridors in Washington, DC.

[edit] Late 20th century

By 1990, the legal barriers enforcing segregation had been replaced by decentralized racism, where whites pay more than blacks to live in predominantly white areas.[9] Some social scientists suggest that the historical processes of suburbanization and decentralization are instances of white privilege that have contributed to contemporary patterns of environmental racism.[16]

[edit] Contemporary

Black-White segregation is decreasing fairly consistently for most metropolitan areas and cities[citation needed]. Despite these pervasive patterns, many changes for individual areas are small.[17] Thirty years after the civil rights era, the United States remains a residentially segregated society in which both blacks and whites inhabit different neighborhoods of vastly different quality.[18][17] Cities throughout history have contained distinct ethnic districts. But rarely have they been so isolated and impoverished as the African-American districts found in U.S. cities today.[9]

[edit] Ghettos

Main article: ghetto

Racial segregation in the United States is most pronounced in housing. Although people of different races may work together, they are still very unlikely to live in integrated neighborhoods. This pattern differs only by degree in different metropolitan areas.[19] Due to segregated conditions and widespread poverty, some black neighborhoods in the United States have been called "ghettos." The use of this term is controversial and, depending on the context, potentially offensive. Despite mainstream America’s use of the term "ghetto" to signify a poor black urban area, those living in the area often used it to signify something positive.

The black ghettos did not always contain dilapidated houses and deteriorating projects, nor were all of its residents poverty-stricken. For many African Americans, the ghetto was "home", a place representing authentic blackness and a feeling, passion, or emotion derived from the rising above the struggle and suffering of being black in America.[20] Langston Hughes relays in the "Negro Ghetto" (1931) and "The Heart of Harlem" (1945): "The buildings in Harlem are brick and stone/And the streets are long and wide,/But Harlem’s much more than these alone,/Harlem is what’s inside." Playwright August Wilson used the term "ghetto" in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) and Fences (1987), both of which draw upon the author’s experience growing up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, first a neighborhood of early European immigrants, then a black ghetto.[21]

[edit] Institutions

Although black neighborhoods may suffer from civic disinvestment,[22] with lower quality schools, less effective policing[23] and fire protection, there are institutions that help to improve the physical and social capital of black neighborhoods.

[edit] Churches

See also: Black church

In black neighborhoods the churches have been important sources of social cohesion and activism.[24]For some African Americans, the kind of spirituality learned through these churches works as a protective factor against the corrosive forces of racism.[25] Churches may also do work to improve the physical infrastructure of the neighborhood. Churches in Harlem have undertaken real estate ventures and renovated burnt-out and abandoned brownstones to create new housing for residents.[26] Churches have fought for the right to operate their own schools in place of the often inadequate public schools found in many black neighborhoods.[27]

[edit] Museums

DuSable Museum, Washington Park, Chicago
DuSable Museum, Washington Park, Chicago
See also: List of museums focused on African Americans

The African American Museum Movement emerged during the 1950s and 1960s to preserve the heritage of the Black experience and to ensure its proper interpretation in American history.[28] Museums devoted to African American history are found in many black neighborhoods. Institutions such as the African American Museum and Library at Oakland and The African American Museum in Cleveland were created by African Americans to teach and investigate cultural history that, until recent decades was primarily preserved through oral traditions.[29]

[edit] Theatre and arts

Major movements in literature, music and the arts have their roots in African American neighborhoods: Blues, Gospel, Jazz, Harlem renaissance, Soul, Hip Hop and others. Cities were the places where young artists could meet and study with other artists and receive recognition, as did Jacob Lawrence when his "Migration Series" was featured by the Museum of Modern Art in New York when he was still in his 20's.

African American neighborhoods have also generated African American theater and numerous dance companies in a variety of styles. After his career as a classical ballet dancer with the New York City Ballet, Arthur Mitchell founded a school and dance company in Harlem. Alvin Ailey created dances out of the African American experience with his Alvin Ailey Dance Company.

Chicago stepping is a name given to a dance that has evolved over the years from various other dances. Originally created in Chicago's predominately African American neighborhoods, the dance has morphed from its beginnings with the Jitterbug in the 30s and 40s, to the Offtime in the 50s, to the Walk and the Chicago Bop in the 60s and 70s.

Hip hop is both a cultural movement and a music genre developed in New York City starting in the 1970s predominantly by African Americans.[30] Since first emerging in the South Bronx and Bedford-Stuyvesant, the lifestyle of hip hop culture has spread around the world.

[edit] Newspapers

The historic office of the Omaha Star, an African American newspaper
The historic office of the Omaha Star, an African American newspaper
Main article: African American newspapers

Many African American neighborhoods produce their own newspapers, including the South Fulton Neighbor in Atlanta, the Capitol Update in Tallahassee, and the Star in Omaha.

 Please help improve this section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion.


[edit] Education

Lincoln Academy was the first school for African Americans in Tallahassee, Florida
Lincoln Academy was the first school for African Americans in Tallahassee, Florida
See also: Historically Black colleges and universities

Segregation in schools and universities led to the creation of many Black schools.

 Please help improve this section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion.


[edit] Built environment

Many African American neighborhoods are located in inner cities, These are the mostly residential neighborhoods located closest to the central business district. The built environment is often 19th and early 20th c. row houses or brownstones, mixed with older single family homes that may be converted to multi family homes. In some areas there are larger apartment buildings.

Shotgun houses are an important part of the built environment of some southern African American neighborhoods. The houses consist of three to five rooms in a row with no hallways. This African American house design is found in both rural and urban southern areas, mainly in African-American communities and neighborhoods.[31] The term "shotgun house," is often said to come from the saying that one could fire a shotgun through the front door and the pellets would fly cleanly through the house and out the back door. However, the name's origin may actually reflect an African architectural heritage, perhaps being a corruption of a term such as to-gun, which means "place of assembly" in the Southern Dohomey Fon area.[32]

During the periods of population decline and urban decay in the 1970s and 1980s many African American neighborhoods, like other urban minority neighborhoods, repurposed abandoned lots as community gardens. Community gardens serve social and economic functions,[33][34] providing safe, open spaces in areas with few parks. Organizations such as Philadelphia Green, organized by the Philadelphia Horticultural Society, have helped communities organize gardens to build community feeling and improve neighborhoods.[35] They can be places for socialization,[33] fresh vegetables in neighborhoods poorly served by supermarkets, and sources of traditional African American produce.[36]

[edit] Historic Neighborhoods

Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstones
Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstones
The Apollo Theater on 125th Street; the Hotel Theresa is visible in the background.
The Apollo Theater on 125th Street; the Hotel Theresa is visible in the background.

There are hundreds of African American neighborhoods. Some of the oldest and most influential include the following:

Atlanta

Baltimore
East Baltimore

South Baltimore

West Baltimore

Boston

Chicago

Cleveland

Dallas

Denver

Detroit

East St. Louis

Houston

Indianapolis

Kansas City

Los Angeles

Louisville

Memphis

Miami

Newark

New Orleans

New York City
Brooklyn

Manhattan

Queens

Oakland

Omaha

Philadelphia
North Philadelphia

Northwest Philadelphia

South Philadelphia

Southwest Philadelphia

West Philadelphia

Pittsburgh

Richmond

San Francisco

Saint Louis and County

Seattle

Tacoma

Tampa

Tulsa

Washington, D.C.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Burrows, Edwin G.; Wallace, Mike (1998). Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514049-4. 
  2. ^ Johnson, James Weldon (1991). Black Manhattan. ISBN 030680431X. 
  3. ^ Mintz, S. (2007). The Great Migration, Period: 1920s. Digital History. Retrieved on 2007-11-29.
  4. ^ 'Gotham, Kevin Fox (Summer, 2000). "Racialization and the State: The Housing Act of 1934 and the Creation of the Federal Housing Administration". Sociological Perspectives 43 (2): 291–317. 
  5. ^ Zenou, Yves; Boccard, Nicolas (February 25, 1999). Racial Discrimination and Redlining in Cities (PDF). Universite catholique de Louvain. Retrieved on 2007-11-29.
  6. ^ See:Race and health
  7. ^ Eisenhauer, Elizabeth (February 2001). "In poor health: Supermarket redlining and urban nutrition". GeoJournal 53 (2): 125. doi:10.1023/A:1015772503007. 
  8. ^ Thabit, Walter (2003). How East New York Became a Ghetto. NYU Press, 42. ISBN 0814782671. Retrieved on 2007-11-29. 
  9. ^ a b c Cutler, David M.; Glaeser, Edward L.; Vigdor, Jacob L. (June 1999). "The Rise and Decline of the American Ghetto". The Journal of Political Economy 107 (3): 455–506. doi:10.1086/250069. 
  10. ^ Jackson, Kenneth T.. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. ISBN 0195049837. 
  11. ^ Bowery Bummer: Downtown Plan Will Make and Break History, J. A. Lobbia March 17, 1999
  12. ^ The story of urban renewal: In East Liberty and elsewhere, Pittsburgh's dominant public policy tool didn't work out as planned Sunday, May 21, 2000, By Dan Fitzpatrick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
  13. ^ Urban Renewal: How Corruption Operates locally
  14. ^ Harsh urban renewal in New Orleans: Poor, black residents cannot afford to return, worry city will exclude them
  15. ^ From Racial Zoning to Community Empowerment: The Interstate Highway System and the African American Community in Birmingham, Alabama Charles E. Connerly Journal of Planning Education and Research, Vol. 22, No. 2, 99-114 (2002)
  16. ^ Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California Laura Pulido Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 90, No. 1 (Mar., 2000), pp. 12-40
  17. ^ a b Inequality and Segregation R Sethi, R Somanathan - Journal of Political Economy, 2004
  18. ^ Segregation and Stratification: A Biosocial Perspective Douglas S. Massey Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race (2004), 1: 7-25 Cambridge University Press
  19. ^ The Suburban Racial Dilemma: Housing and Neighborhoods By William Dennis Keating. Temple University Press. 1994. ISBN 1566391474
  20. ^ Smitherman, Geneva. Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.
  21. ^ GHETTO Kim Pearson
  22. ^ Root shock: The consequences of African American dispossession Journal of Urban Health. Springer New York. Volume 78, Number 1 / March, 2001
  23. ^ The Neighborhood Context of Police Behavior Douglas A. Smith Crime and Justice, Vol. 8, Communities and Crime (1986), pp. 313-341
  24. ^ Church Culture as a Strategy of Action in the Black Community Mary Pattillo-McCoy American Sociological Review, Vol. 63, No. 6 (Dec., 1998), pp. 767-784
  25. ^ "Gathering the Spirit" at First Baptist Church: Spirituality as a Protective Factor in the Lives of African American Children by Wendy L. Haight; Social Work, Vol. 43, 1998
  26. ^ Abyssinian Baptist Church Development Corp.
  27. ^ A Harlem Church Sues to Operate Charter School by Azi Paybarah Published: October 25, 2007
  28. ^ African American Museums Association: History
  29. ^ African-American Museums, History, and the American Ideal by John E. Fleming The Journal of American History, Vol. 81, No. 3, The Practice of American History: A Special Issue (Dec., 1994), pp. 1020-1026
  30. ^ The Resource - THE NEXT
  31. ^ Black architecture still standing, the Shotgun House! The Great Buildings Collection on CD-ROM Kevin Matthews
  32. ^ "The Shotgun House: An African Architectural Legacy" (1976). Pioneer America 8: 47–56. 
  33. ^ a b Urban Community Gardens as Contested Space Karen Schmelzkopf Geographical Review, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Jul., 1995), pp. 364-381
  34. ^ A survey of community gardens in upstate New York: Implications for health promotion and community development Health & Place Volume 6, Issue 4, 1 December 2000, Pages 319-327
  35. ^ Minority Communities Need More Parks, Report Says by By Angela Rowen The Berkeley Daily Planet
  36. ^ The Paradox of Parks by Brett Williams Identities: Global Studies in Power and Culture, Volume 13, Number 1, January-March 2006 , pp. 139-171(33)
  37. ^ WHMC-St. Louis, Oral History T-091, Interview with Cecilia Knea and Mary Oldani, February 11, 1972