whites—a distinction they retained: in 2000, 86 percent of blacks and 78 percent of whites lived in metropolitan areas.13 Not only did blacks become more urban: over the course of the century, they concentrated more than whites in central cities. In 1900, 26 percent of white adults and 12 percent of black adults lived in central cities. This situation reversed between 1940 and 1950. By 2000, the African American fraction had climbed to 52 percent while the white share had dropped to 21 percent, a stunning reversal of metropolitan racial ecology.
In the decades after World War II, with whites leaving and blacks entering central cities, racial segregation increased, reaching historic highs by late in the twentieth century.14 As Chapter 1 observed, segregation in 2000 was much higher than it had been in 1860, 1910, or 1930, when, except for Chicago and Cleveland, in northern cities whites still dominated the neighborhoods in which the average African American lived. This situation reversed by 1970: between 1930 and 1970, the neighborhood in which the average African American lived went from 31.7 to 73.5 percent black. Affluent as well as poor African Americans lived in segregated neighborhoods. The segregation index went down after 1980, but still remained high. At the end of the twentieth century, the typical African American still lived in a neighborhood where two-thirds of the other residents were black.15
In the century’s last decade, black suburbanization increased modestly: the percentage of blacks living in suburbs rose from 34 percent to 39 percent. But most black suburbanization was movement to inner-ring suburbs, themselves segregated and developing the problems of inner cities. Between 1990 and 2000, there was no change in the segregation of blacks within suburbs; in both years, the average African American suburbanite lived in a neighborhood that was 46 percent black.16 Overall, postwar configurations of segregation and inequality remained mostly in place.
Racial segregation did not just happen as a result of individual preferences, the racism of homeowners, or the venality of realtors who practiced blockbusting—although all these influences were at work. It resulted just as much from government policy and action. All levels of government share the culpability. The underwriting practices of federal agencies that insured mortgages introduced “red lining,” which virtually destroyed central city housing markets, froze blacks out of mortgages, and encouraged white flight to suburbs. Governments also deployed interstate highway and other road construction to manipulate racial concentration by confining African Americans to inaccessible, segregated parts of cities. In the 1930s, when the federal government initiated public housing, its regulations forbade projects from disturbing the “neighborhood composition guideline”—the racial status quo. Thus, even before World War II, two-thirds of blacks in public housing lived in wholly segregated projects. In the years after the war, local governments found ways to use public housing to increase black isolation even further by locating developments only in segregated neighborhoods.17
The spatial redistribution of America’s black population in the twentieth century intersects African Americans’ history of economic inequality.18 Segregation, Massey and Denton show, is itself a force that initiates a vicious cycle that concentrates poverty and magnifies its impact.19 An overwhelming number of African Americans started the twentieth century clustered in America’s poorest spaces—rural southern farms; they also ended the century concentrated disproportionately in the nation’s least-promising locations—central cities, where only 21 percent of whites remained.
Participation
The geographic redistribution of African Americans focuses one lens on the reconfiguration of black inequality in the twentieth century; the altered relationship of black men to the labor market focuses another. For it is among black men, more than among black women, that these trends created a new form of disadvantage.20
Patterns of black women’s market work varied over the twentieth century. For much of American history, black women worked out of necessity.21 As slaves, they were forced to labor; after slavery, and in the North, they worked to supplement men’s meager wages or because they were more often widowed.22 In post–World War II cities, disincentives built into public assistance kept many of them from employment until after 1996, when new welfare legislation forced them into the labor force—for some a welcome opportunity, for others a chance to join the ranks of the working poor.23 At the same time, better education, the impact of the civil rights movement, and the expansion of jobs in government, health care, and the social services opened more attractive work opportunities to black women. By contrast, for many black men in the late twentieth century, just a job in the regular labor market itself often proved elusive, a situation highlighted by social scientists who lamented black men’s chronic detachment from the labor force.24 The eminent social scientist William Julius Wilson titled his 1996 book When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor.
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