Urban Underclass

Within the cores of American cities, and to a lesser extent in other industrialized countries (although most have better national safety nets than does the United States), lives a sizable group of impoverished people often known as the urban underclass. The term has been the object of much debate because some argue that it dehumanizes those to which it refers; however, the concept is widely acknowledged to have considerable validity. In the American context, the urban underclass refers to the poor, overwhelmingly African American population whose members populate the ghettos and low-income neighborhoods in the centers of most metropolitan areas. The story of how the urban underclass came to be formed reveals much about the race-specific dynamics of urban growth in the United States.

Some observers explain the origins of the under-class in terms of the three centuries of slavery and violent suppression practiced against African Americans, the only immigrant group whose members did not come voluntarily to the New World. White racism and institutionalized discrimination were largely responsible for the low rates of intergenerational mobility found among this population. Although the traditional core region of black Americans was in the South, by the early 20th century large numbers had begun to migrate north toward the ample jobs found in the then booming Manufacturing Belt. By the 1920s, large African American working-class communities had emerged in cities such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee, where many found employment in a wide range of semiskilled or unskilled occupations in industries such as the railroads, meatpacking, coal mining, shipyards, warehousing, steel, machine tools, and automobile production. Labor shortages accentuated by congressional quotas limiting immigration and the demand for labor during World War II contributed to these opportunities. Many African Americans developed vibrant healthy communities with low rates of crime, stable families, relatively high rates of home-ownership, and incremental improvements in their standards of living. Harlem, in northern Manhattan, New York, emerged as the center of black intellectual and cultural life.

However, following World War II, and particularly toward the end of the postwar boom during the 1960s, [Page 529]structural changes in the American economy and society began to erode the foundations of these communities. Steady sustained suburbanization saw the evacuation of much of the white middle class to the urban periphery, taking with it much of the tax base necessary to sustain public services in the inner city, particularly schools. Because suburbanization was an escape that was not generally open to most African Americans, who lacked the incomes to buy suburban houses and often were the targets of discriminatory zoning ordinances, the proportions of African American populations in inner cities rose steadily even as their economic prospects began to dwindle.

Deindustrialization, brought on by mounting international competition and technological displacement of workers, saw numerous factories close in the Northeast and Midwest. Many factories shut down in the national core, only to open up in the burgeoning Sunbelt or overseas. As manufacturing opportunities declined, African Americans—generally the least skilled and educated and with the fewest alternatives—bore the brunt of the costs in terms of declining employment and incomes. In short, deindustrialization affected blacks considerably more than it did whites, who generally made the transition into services more smoothly. As a result, black unemployment, particularly among males, rose steadily during the 1960s and 1970s, and black poverty rates—already higher than those for whites—reached new highs. Today, African American family incomes are generally around 70% of those of white families, although there has been some increase in the size of the black middle class.

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