hoping to dwell.
To Dwell in the City: Build Community
To move from the fictional version of white settlement to the reality, we can turn to the sociologists at the University of Chicago, who were watching the arrival of waves of immigrants from other countries, as well as from rural America. They observed that people arrayed themselves on an urban grid in a particular pattern. Poorer, industrial neighborhoods occupied the center, while wealthier, more residential neighborhoods were located at the edges. As the years passed, the sociologists decoded movements among the neighborhoods, such that white people, when they first arrived, would live in the poor neighborhoods in the center of the city, which we may call “newcomer neighborhoods.” When they got a little money, they moved on to more peripheral neighborhoods.
The newcomer neighborhoods were centrally located, close to mills and factories. They were eccentric places, built at hazard, bisected by alleys and overhung by industrial pollution. Although they were areas of filth, crime, and poverty, those funky neighborhoods provided the doorway into the American dream.
For blacks, the newcomer neighborhoods were the beginning and the end of their options for housing. As the neighborhoods became “black,” segregation created a boundary that was rigidly, and even violently, enforced. The newcomer neighborhoods were transformed into Negro ghettos. A 1946 map, created by the Chicago Council Against Racial and Religious Discrimination, showed vigilante attacks that had occurred on the periphery of the South Side ghetto. This terrorism was directed against the homes of blacks who had dared to move to white neighborhoods.6
Fig. 2.1. Terrorist Attacks Against Negro Homes in Chicago, May 1944–August 1946. Adapted from chart of the same title issued by the Chicago Council Against Racial and Religious Discrimination. ROBERT WEAVER, THE GHETTO, 1948.
The words “ghetto” and “slum” mean quite different things. A ghetto is an area of enforced residence due to membership in a particular ethnic or religious group. The word is usually associated with the ghettos established by the Catholic Church in Italy in the 1500s in order to separate Jews from Catholics.7 Geographer Harold M. Rose offered the following definition in 1971: “To date, the housing allocation mechanism operates under conditions which lead to black residential concentration and spatial segregation. Until blacks have free access to residential locations within their economic means, the ghettoization process can be said to be operative. Then and only then will the ghetto designation have lost its validity.”8
A slum, by contrast, is an area marked by poverty and worn-out housing. A ghetto might be poor, or it might not be: the crucial distinction is that living outside the ghetto is not a choice that members of the oppressed group can make. Even those who have managed to escape the restraints of poverty are confined to the ghetto by virtue of their membership in the subjugated group.
Thousands of ghettos sprang to life as a result of the Great Migration. The attention given a small number of these communities—Harlem and the South Side of Chicago, for example—distracts us from recognizing how very many urban ghettos were growing in the interwar period.
Furthermore, there has been little systematic attention to the ways in which the new geography functioned. African American migrants were leaving the rural, slave-holding areas of the South, known as the Black Belt, to which Harold Rose gave the lovely name “the Hearth of Black Culture.” This was—in 1910, the peak year of black residence in the South before the Great Migration—an area “. . . some two hundred miles wide which spanned the plainsland South from the Black Prairies of Texas to Virginia, and then tapered to a narrow tip in Megalopolis. This belt widened perceptibly where it crossed the Mississippi River bottomlands, sent a finger curling into northern Florida, and had outliers in the middle Tennessee River Valley–Nashville Basin–Pennyroyal Plain area and in the Kentucky Bluegrass.”9
One and a half million black people left the South between 1910 and 1930, settling in major cities in the Northeast and Midwest, while others moved from rural areas in the South to the southern cities. The years 1940–70 marked another great wave of migration, during which millions more moved to the nation’s cities. Though African Americans were 90 percent rural at the beginning of the twentieth century, they were 90 percent urban one hundred years later.
In the usual manner of migration, such a diaspora would have been the beginning of the decline of the culture of the old country, in this case, the culture of the Black Belt. Immigrants themselves hold on to their culture, but their children and especially their children’s children stop speaking the old language and switch to the customs of the American mainstream. However, the virulent racial segregation that was instituted all over America—and which remains at the time of this writing a potent force influencing residential life—has impeded the African American people’s transition from the culture of the Black Belt to the dominant American culture.
Instead, the geography created by dispersal-in-segregation created a group of islands of black life. “Archipelago” is the official geographic term for a group of islands. Black America is an archipelago state, a many-island nation within the American nation. The creation of the archipelago nation had two consequences for African Americans. The first is that the ghettos became centers of black life; the second is that the walls of the ghetto, like other symbols of segregation, became objects of hatred. In this ambivalent, love/hate relationship, it was impossible to choose to dwell. Yet people did choose to make life as vibrant and happy as they possibly could.
Black people worked hard to help one another. They worked especially hard to help the gifted child realize his potential. Paul Robeson, who spent his early childhood in the ghetto in Princeton, New Jersey, described the nurturing that accompanied the community’s conviction that he was a gifted child who would express their culture. “Hard-working people, and poor, most of them, in worldly goods—but how rich in compassion! How filled with the goodness of humanity and the spiritual steel forged by centuries of oppression! . . . Here in this little hemmed-in world where home must be theatre and concert hall and social center, there was a warmth of song. Songs of love and longing, songs of trials and triumphs, deep-flowing rivers and rollicking brooks, hymn-song and ragtime ballad, gospels and blues, and the healing comfort to be found in the illimitable sorrow of the spirituals . . .
“There was something else, too, that I remember from Princeton. Something strange, perhaps, and not easy to describe. I early became conscious—I don’t quite know how—of a special feeling of the Negro community for me. I was no different from the other kids of the neighborhood—playing our games of Follow the Leader and Run Sheep Run, saying ‘yes ma’am’ and never sassing our elders, fearing to cross the nearby cemetery because of the ‘ghosts,’ coming reluctant and new-scrubbed to Sunday School. And yet, like my father, the people claimed to see something special about me. Whatever it was, and no one really said, they felt I was fated for great things to come. Somehow they were sure of it, and because of that belief they added an extra measure to the affection they lavished on their preacher’s motherless child.”10
Ralph Ellison experienced the same investment in the “special” child while growing up in Oklahoma City. “During summer vacation I blew sustained tones out of the window for hours, usually starting—especially on Sunday mornings—before breakfast. I sputtered whole days through M. Arban’s (he’s the great authority on the instrument) double- and triple-tonguing exercises, with an effect like that of a jackass hiccupping off a big meal of briars . . . Despite those who complained and cried to heaven for Gabriel to blow a chorus so heavenly sweet and so hellishly hot that I’d forever put down my horn, there were more tolerant ones who were willing to pay in present pain for future pleasure. For who knew what skinny kid with his chops wrapped around a trumpet mouthpiece and a faraway look in his eyes might become the next Armstrong? Yes, and send you, at some big dance a few years
