Second Ghetto

The concept of the second ghetto emerged from an attempt to establish a chronology charting the development of urban African American communities in the United States. An initial wave of studies published in the 1960s and 1970s described the appearance of the first such segregated enclaves and inaugurated the study of African American urban history by emphasizing the “tragic sameness” of black urban life in an “enduring ghetto.”

The Great Migration of rural blacks from the South that began in the late 19th century and accelerated through World War I established a significant African American presence in the industrial North, most visibly in metropolitan giants like New York and Chicago. Private market forces and private choices triggered a clustered, racialized pattern of settlement that fused neighborhood and racial identities and provided both a foundation and a framework for future growth. By the end of the 1920s, major cities across the Northeast and Midwest had established relatively firm boundaries for increasingly segregated black settlements, within which African American communal institutions grew and matured. The Great Depression soon slowed the reinforcing influx of Southern migrants, bringing to a close the initial phase of “ghetto” formation (1890 to 1933).

In Arnold R. Hirsch's 1983 book, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960, the historiography moved beyond the 1930s and broke with the notion of an enduring ghetto. In substituting a dynamic model of growth and development for that earlier static conception, the very notion that there was a second ghetto raised new questions. Ultimately, second ghetto came to refer to not only a period (1933 to 1968), but a place and a process as well. It conveyed a sense of change and contingency despite the obvious continuity furnished by the persistence of racial discrimination.

The coming of World War II sparked a resumption of the Great Migration and produced an inundating second wave of migrants that dwarfed that of the prior generation. The absolute numbers were so extraordinary (Northern cites absorbed 4.5 million black Southern migrants between 1940 and 1970) that they could not be contained by the existing settlements. Not only were previously stable racial borders over-run, but, in some cases (as on Chicago's West Side), new major colonies came into being. In others, small enclaves grew together, and in still others, areas of substantial black concentration that continued to hold large numbers of whites became increasingly homogeneous as the latter moved out, leaving spaces for the newcomers to fill. In case after case, vast stretches of the nation's urban landscape became the province of the poor and the nonwhite—with an inner core population that found itself increasingly isolated by class as well as color.

The black occupation of white homes and neighborhoods, as well as African American “encroachment” on vacant areas bordering white suburbs or subdivisions, remained—in the formation of the second ghetto as it was in the first—a tension-filled process. White resistance included violence and intimidation, but it proved only occasionally effective in halting or redirecting black movements already under way. Such tactics, however, were indicative of an implacable white hostility that limited African American choices and freedom of movement and [Page 711]assured the persistence of exceedingly high rates of segregation to the end of the century.

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