African American neighborhood

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, who dub their specific communtiy as "the hood" of "the projects," deprived from housing projects. Some of the earliest African American neighborhoods were in New York City. [cite book |title= |first=Edwin G. |last=Burrows |authorlink=Edwin G. Burrows |coauthors=Wallace, Mike |year=1998 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=0-19-514049-4] There were also early communities in Virginia. In 1830, there were 14,000 "free Negroes" living in New York City. [cite book |title=Black Manhattan |first=James Weldon |last=Johnson |authorlink=James Weldon Johnson |year=1991 |isbn=030680431X] 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.Fact|date=November 2007

History

The Great Migration

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, Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Minneapolis, Detroit, Boston, 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. [cite web |first=S. |last=Mintz |year=2007 |publisher=Digital History |url=http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=443 |title=The Great Migration, Period: 1920s |accessdate=2007-11-29] The National Housing Act of 1934 contributed to limiting the availability of loans to urban areas, particularly those areas inhabited by African Americans. ['cite journal |url=http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0731-1214(200022)43%3A2%3C291%3ARATSTH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G |title=Racialization and the State: The Housing Act of 1934 and the Creation of the Federal Housing Administration |first=Kevin Fox |last=Gotham |journal=Sociological Perspectives |volume=43 |issue=2 |date=Summer, 2000 |pages=291–317 |accessdate=2007-11-29 |month=Oct |year=2000]

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.

The Second Great Migration

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.Fact|date=November 2007

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, [cite web |url=http://www.core.ucl.ac.be/services/psfiles/dp99/dp9913.pdf |title=Racial Discrimination and Redlining in Cities |accessdate=2007-11-29 |format=PDF |author=Zenou, Yves; Boccard, Nicolas |date=February 25, 1999 |publisher=Universite catholique de Louvain] access to health care, [See:Race and health] or even supermarkets [cite journal |url=http://www.springerlink.com/content/ptc5hvexthe7wrye/ |title=In poor health: Supermarket redlining and urban nutrition |first=Elizabeth |last=Eisenhauer |journal=GeoJournal |volume=53 |issue=2 |month=February |year=2001 |accessdate=2007-11-29 |doi=10.1023/A:1015772503007 |pages=125] to residents in certain, often racially determined,cite book |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=TWo8OFJpFtAC |title=How East New York Became a Ghetto |first=Walter |last=Thabit |isbn=0814782671 |pages=42 |accessdate=2007-11-29 |year=2003 |publisher=NYU Press] 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.cite journal |title=The Rise and Decline of the American Ghetto |first=David M. |last=Cutler |coauthors=Glaeser, Edward L.; Vigdor, Jacob L. |journal=The Journal of Political Economy |volume=107 |issue=3 |month=June |year=1999 |pages=455–506 |doi=10.1086/250069] 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. [cite book |title=Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States |first=Kenneth T. |last=Jackson |isbn=0195049837]

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. [" [http://www.villagevoice.com/news/9911,lobbia,4486,5.html Bowery Bummer: Downtown Plan Will Make and Break History] ", J. A. Lobbia March 17, 1999] Urban renewel had a disproportionate and largely negative impact on African-American neighborhoods. In the 1960s James Baldwin famously dubbed Urban Renewal "Negro Removal". [ [http://www.post-gazette.com/businessnews/20000521eastliberty1.asp 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] [ [http://www.worldfreeinternet.net/news/urban.htm Urban Renewal: How Corruption Operates locally] ] [ [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9678167/ Harsh urban renewal in New Orleans: Poor, black residents cannot afford to return, worry city will exclude them] ]

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. ["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)]

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.

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...] 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. ["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]

At the same time, however, middle-class and upper-class blacks have also paid more to live in the suburbs and have left the inner cities of former industrial powerhouses behind. In the New Great Migration, black college graduates are returning to the South for jobs, where they generally settle in suburban areas, certainly in middle-class areas, wherever they are in Texas, Georgia and Maryland (three of the biggest gaining states of college graduates.)

Contemporary

Black-White segregation is decreasing fairly consistently for most metropolitan areas and citiesFact|date=February 2008. Despite these pervasive patterns, many changes for individual areas are small."Inequality and Segregation"R Sethi, R Somanathan - Journal of Political Economy, 2004] 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. ["Segregation and Stratification: A Biosocial Perspective" Douglas S. Massey Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race (2004), 1: 7-25 Cambridge University Press] "Inequality and Segregation" Rajiv Sethi and Rohini Somanathan "Journal of Political Economy", volume 112 (2004), pages 1296–1321 ] 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."The Rise and Decline of the American Ghetto," David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser, Jacob L. Vigdor. "The Journal of Political Economy", Vol. 107, No. 3 (Jun., 1999), pp. 455-506]

Ghettos

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." [http://books.google.com/books?id=O0bnHQAACAAJ The Suburban Racial Dilemma: Housing and Neighborhoods] " By William Dennis Keating. Temple University Press. 1994. ISBN 1566391474] Due to segregated conditions and widespread poverty, some black neighborhoods in the United States have been called "the ghetto" or "the projects." 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 urban area (predominately African-Americans), 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. [Smitherman, Geneva. Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.] 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. [http://kpearson.faculty.tcnj.edu/Dictionary/ghetto.htm GHETTO] Kim Pearson]

Institutions

Although black neighborhoods may suffer from civic disinvestment, [" [http://www.springerlink.com/content/1r10889302275643/ Root shock: The consequences of African American dispossession] " Journal of Urban Health. Springer New York. Volume 78, Number 1 / March, 2001] with lower quality schools, less effective policing ["The Neighborhood Context of Police Behavior" Douglas A. Smith Crime and Justice, Vol. 8, Communities and Crime (1986), pp. 313-341] and fire protection, there are institutions that help to improve the physical and social capital of black neighborhoods.

Churches

In black neighborhoods the churches have been important sources of social cohesion and activism. [Church Culture as a Strategy of Action in the Black CommunityMary Pattillo-McCoy American Sociological Review, Vol. 63, No. 6 (Dec., 1998), pp. 767-784] For some African Americans, the kind of spirituality learned through these churches works as a protective factor against the corrosive forces of racism. ["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] 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. [ [http://www.adcorp.org/ Abyssinian Baptist Church Development Corp.] ] Churches have fought for the right to operate their own schools in place of the often inadequate public schools found in many black neighborhoods. [" [http://www.observer.com/2007/charter-lawsuit A Harlem Church Sues to Operate Charter School] " by Azi Paybarah Published: October 25, 2007]

Museums

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. [" [http://www.blackmuseums.org/about/history.htm African American Museums Association: History] "] 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. ["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]

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. [ [http://www.thenext.org.nz/the_resource/history_of_hiphop.php The Resource - THE NEXT ] ] Since first emerging in the South Bronx and Bedford-Stuyvesant, the lifestyle of hip hop culture has spread around the world.

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.

Education

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

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. [" [http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/1679/Black_architecture_still_standing_the_Shotgun_House Black architecture still standing, the Shotgun House!] " The Great Buildings Collection on CD-ROM Kevin Matthews] 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. [cite journal| name=Vlach, John|journal=Pioneer America|title=The Shotgun House: An African Architectural Legacy|year=1976|volume=8|pages=47–56]

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,"Urban Community Gardens as Contested Space" Karen Schmelzkopf Geographical Review, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Jul., 1995), pp. 364-381] [" [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VH5-41C2TK0-6&_user=10&_coverDate=12%2F01%2F2000&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=96793a3b0f6f3835bb8c2690d1104e25 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] 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. [" [http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article.cfm?issue=11-13-07&storyID=28458 Minority Communities Need More Parks, Report Says] " by Angela Rowen The Berkeley Daily Planet] They can be places for socialization,"Urban Community Gardens as Contested Space" Karen Schmelzkopf Geographical Review, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Jul., 1995), pp. 364-381] fresh vegetables in neighborhoods poorly served by supermarkets, and sources of traditional African American produce."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)]

ee also

* List of African American neighborhoods

References