Ghetto

The term ghetto originally referred to areas in Venice where Jews were forced to reside. Since the time of the Roman Empire, Jews have often been forced to live in isolated communities. Gradually, the term began to refer to any area of a city where particular minorities made up the bulk of the population. The term brings to mind the horrible abuses during the Jewish Holocaust, when many lived in ghettos. In America, the term has come to describe a severely distressed part of a city where African Americans make up the vast majority of the population. Ghettos are usually characterized by poorly maintained structures, high poverty rates, high crime rates, high rates of imprisonment, dysfunctional family units, poor education, and high unemployment. There is often a stigma attached to those who live in ghettos. People often incorrectly view all people living in a ghetto as people who display many of the negative characteristics of the ghetto.

After the urbanization of the United States accelerated in the 19th century and immigrants were settling in the cities in great numbers, some ethnic enclaves were referred to as ghettos. Certainly the neighborhoods in American cities that were predominately Jewish were often referred to as ghettos. Often people who were ethnically similar would settle near each other. Racial barriers as to where blacks could live exacerbated the growth of ghettos. Many of the European immigrants were assimilated into varied neighborhoods. Prejudice was a barrier to this kind of assimilation of blacks.

For decades after the Civil War, blacks in the north made up a small percentage of the population of cities and were not highly segregated. In the south many blacks lived in rural areas, and even in the cities they were somewhat interspersed with the white population. At the end of the first decade of the 20th century a massive migration began. In the south, the mechanization of farms, the decline of the sharecropper economy, and harsh treatment by whites led many blacks to begin migrating to northern states to find jobs and a better way of life. In the north, new factories were being built and there was a large demand for unskilled labor. Millions of blacks made their way to northern cities. Prior to the beginning of this migration there were few, if any, ghettos found in the cities of the north. By 1930, in Chicago, the majority of blacks in the city lived in areas where the neighborhood was overwhelming black. This growth of ghettos was happening in cities throughout the country. Demand for additional housing caused these neighborhoods to expand into white neighborhoods. Many of the whites who had the resources moved away from these areas.

Racial attitudes deteriorated in both the north and the south, and specific efforts were made to keep blacks from moving to white areas. Racial zoning and restrictive covenants were used to prevent blacks from moving into white neighborhoods. This led to the growth of ghettos. Additional waves of blacks moved to the north in the era of World War II as more jobs opened up in the industrialized cities. It was in the 1960s that the term ghetto came to be used to refer primarily to distressed areas of concentrated black populations in cities.

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