Racial Zoning

Racial zoning—the official designation of residential areas by race—was an offshoot of the rise of urban planning and Progressivism in the early 20th century. [Page 639]Progressive planners argued that state action was essential to remedy the effects of industrialization, immigration, and growth. Municipal zoning—the legally mandated division of the city into different areas based on a variety of characteristics—was one of the tools adopted. Nationally known planners such as Robert Whitten, Harland Bartholomew, and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. called for civic officials to determine the physical, economic, and social characteristics of their neighborhoods, drawing on their growing knowledge of the dynamics of “efficient” cities. Shaped by the era's prevailing theories of racial hierarchy and white superiority, they included the race of occupants among the features to be regulated.

Their expansive vision was not initially accepted by officials in the North, a region relatively indifferent to racial issues before the Great Migration. Although interested in influencing the social fabric of the city, city officials were content to rely on the physical and economic requirements of their zoning ordinances to achieve this. Northerners were also sensitive to the political and legal challenges that would result from regulating the location of races, given the region's greater degree of political freedom. In the one instance of racial zoning in the 19th century, a circuit court ruled (In re Lee Sing 43 F. 359) that San Francisco's 1890 Bingham ordinance, banishing residents of Chinese descent to a designated area of the city, was unconstitutional. The resulting diplomatic crisis, and the Chinese community's outrage, was a portent of the likely reaction in other Northern municipalities.

In the South, the idea of racial zoning found a more receptive audience. Since the late 19th century, the region's traditional spatial and social arrangements had been attacked by destabilizing forces: African American migration to and within cities, growing black assertiveness and independence, and the modernizing trends of the New South. Like other Jim Crow laws, racial zoning promised to formalize Southern race relations at a time when existing controls such as custom, harassment, and violence had weakened.

Baltimore was the first Southern city to adopt the practice. Its ordinance designated each city block by race, using the existing racial composition at the time of enactment as the basis for its designations. “White” blocks were those occupied by a majority of whites, and “Negro” blocks were those occupied by a majority of African Americans. Henceforth, only members of the designated group could occupy residential property on the block, allowing for a gradual separation of the races. The ordinance regulated occupancy only; members of any racial group could acquire the property. It also excluded servants, whose race was deemed incidental.

Richmond, Virginia adopted an ordinance in 1911, and in the next five years, cities in Alabama (Birmingham); Georgia (Atlanta); Kentucky (Louisville and Madisonville); Louisiana (New Orleans); Missouri (St. Louis); North Carolina (Asheville, Charlotte, Moorsville, and Winston-Salem); Oklahoma (Oklahoma City); and Virginia (Norfolk, Ashland, Roanoke, and Portsmouth) adopted residential segregation ordinances. The laws differed in the mechanisms through which segregation was achieved. Some designated areas by the race of the majority of owners at the time of enactment; others banned members of one race from moving to blocks in which all of the residents were of the other race; a third group established a map of districts by race.

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