Ghettos

Sociological Study of the Ghetto

Two streams of work first brought attention to the issue of the ghetto in the United States. One was the work of social science researchers, largely black, concerned with analyzing the position of blacks in American society at the beginning of the twentieth century. In that work patterns of residential concentration of blacks were found in many major cities, and their locational pattern described in some detail. The term ghetto was rarely used in the early studies; for instance in W. E. B. DuBois's The Philadelphia Negro (1899), urban concentrations of blacks are spoken of in the context of the wider experience of blacks in the post-slavery United States in general, and the word ghetto does not appear. The subsequent work in this stream, however, includes specific concerns with the black ghetto that took off with Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma (1945) and runs through St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's Black Metropolis (1945), Robert Weaver's Negro Ghetto (1948), Charles Abrams's Forbidden Neighbors (1955), the Taeubers' Negroes in Cities (1965), Kenneth Clark's Dark Ghetto (1965), to William Goldsmith and Edward Blakely's Separate Societies (1992) and Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton's American Apartheid (1993).

Running parallel to this line of investigation, but largely unconnected to it, was the examination in what was to become mainstream sociology of the social nature of spatial patterns of distribution of population groups in large cities. The work of Louis Wirth, in particular, and the publication of his The Ghetto in 1928, a work that is not referenced in a single one of the works mentioned above, brought attention to the concept, in the context of the ecological theories of Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess and the Chicago School (the University of Chicago's influential program of urban sociology). Wirth's picture focused on the story of the Jewish ghetto, and in broad outlines traced its origins to the expulsion of Jews from Palestine, which forced them to cluster together voluntarily and for self-protection, and continued with the imposition of walls and legal separation on Jewish residents in the medieval ghetto. The book then followed Jewish immigrants to the United States where, free from discrimination, they clustered together shortly after arrival but then over time dispersed, to the disappointment of some seeking to preserve Jewish culture and tradition. To some degree there has also been a countertendency toward reclaiming the earlier history and, for instance, revitalizing the vestiges of the old settlement left behind in earlier migrations. This can be seen in the restoration of historic synagogues whose congregations have long since moved away, as on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. That movement, however, is still one of quite limited impact in the overall picture of Jewish settlement.

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