Residential Segregation In America

1652 Words4 Pages

Causes of Segregation So what happened to this integrated living and why did segregation happen in the first place? There are a few different factors that can be attributed to the formation of segregated housing; industrialization, the large movement of blacks from rural settings to the cities, and the attitudes that this movement created. The industrialization American did not just affect African Americans; it affected all Americans, but especially the immigrants and blacks. This process was much more rapid in the north than in the south, due to the Jim Crow laws that provided segregation in daily interaction already. Though, in the north, industrialization was happing fast and was changing the lives of many. The transition from production taking place in private homes to large factories significantly raised the demand for laborers. Immigrants from Europe largely filled this demand at first, but when these workers went on strike, the owners of the factories became desperate to find laborers. Where did they find these workers? They found them in the south. Black laborers where the ideal workers, in the factory owners eyes, because of the fact that they had little to no knowledge about industrial conditions and no experience with workers unions (Massey and Denton, p. 28). The northern factory owners even arranged for all of these southern blacks to be transported directly to the factories in the north on special trains. Since these blacks were used as strikebreakers, it created a lot of animosity towards them from the white factory workers. This was not the only reason for their negative feelings though, along with their animosity about the labor, they also just didn’t like them simply because of the fact that they we... ... middle of paper ... ... family and they move out, and so on and so fourth, this is called the “tipping” of a neighborhood. Works Cited Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Print. "Newsroom." 2010 Census Shows Black Population Has Highest Concentration in the South. United States Census Bureau, n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2014. . "A Portrait of Black America on the Eve of the 2010 Census." The Root. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2014. . "Racial Residential Segregation." Racial Residential Segregation. University of Michigan Population Studies Center, n.d. Web. 19 Mar. 2014. .

Open Document