saw a mass of vacant land and a bunch of leftover scraggly buildings typical of a burned-out ghetto. We stopped in front of one of the buildings. “Come in. I want to show you,” he said.
We went up to his second-floor office. “When I was a kid I dreamed of having a business on Henry Street, but my life didn’t turn out that way. I became a school principal instead. But I felt that there was something missing, so in 1986, I left that job and opened my counseling business here on Henry Street.
“Come over to the window,” he beckoned.
We stood shoulder to shoulder and he pointed up the empty street. “Sometimes I just stand here and the tears come down, thinking about what used to be.”
What used to be: houses not buildings, neon not vacant lots, neighborhood not emptiness. I wanted to see what he saw, and to understand how it came into being. In every city, where I was studying the effects of urban renewal, I asked people, “What was it like before urban renewal?”
Before the City Lights . . .
Though black people have been a part of American cities since their importation from Africa began in 1619—the Haitian fur trader Jean Baptiste Point DuSable was the first permanent resident of Chicago, for example—for the vast majority, urbanization was a twentieth-century phenomenon. It followed a long detour from auction blocks in ports serving the slave plantations, where blacks sojourned under the slave regime’s reign of terror. The languages and cultures of many different groups slowly yielded to a common present of oppression and a shared dream of a better future in a faceless place of opportunity they sang of as “New Jerusalem.” It was in New Jerusalem that people torn from their homes and forced into servitude would be able to make a home again.
During Reconstruction—in the immediate aftermath of the emancipation of the slaves and the Civil War—it seemed that the freed people might be able to make this New Jerusalem throughout the South. Between 1865 and 1876, black people were able to own land, establish schools, and elect representatives to every level of government. The violence that followed the federal abandonment of Reconstruction in 1876 inaugurated a frightful new epoch of oppression that greatly resembled slavery in its methods and its intent. As the white power structure solidified its dominance, it was able to introduce a system of segregation popularly known as Jim Crow.1 Between 1890 and 1910, Jim Crow laws created an elaborately divided world, such that the domain of resources and power was inhabited by whites, and the domain of deprivation and powerlessness was inhabited by blacks. The weight of this system fell with greatest force on those in the rural areas, who were tied to the land by debt slavery and peonage.
So much power was concentrated among the white landowners that it must have seemed that the divided world would last forever. But the confluence of worldwide instability and worsening of conditions in the South acted—as did the Black Death in the Middle Ages2—to create an opportunity for those living in feudal conditions to flee to the city for their freedom.
In 1916 the black mass movement to the city began. By 1930, 1.5 million black people had left the privation and oppression of the rural South to make a new life there. In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then a young painter in Harlem, created sixty panels describing the Great Migration. The stark pictures painted in poster colors on butcher paper cut to the core of the transition between rural oppression and urban opportunity. To help us understand the tension, he adds a refrain about the importance of the train:
• “Families arrived at the station very early in order not to miss their train North . . .”3
• “[White people] made it difficult for migrants leaving the South. They often went to railroad stations and arrested the Negroes wholesale, which in turn made them miss their train.”4
To make the move, you had to get on the train. When you arrived at your destination, the work of building New Jerusalem began. Geographer David Seamon has called this kind of voyage the “Dwelling-Journey Spiral.”5
Seamon traced seven steps in a novel about Swedish immigrants. Forced to leave home because of famine, the Oskar family set out in the 1850s to make a new home in America. They found land, built a home, and created a farm, thus establishing a place. But they were terribly lonely. In time, a group of other Swedish families gathered near, and together with their new neighbors, the Oskars began to create community. It was in the presence of this new community that all of the families found, once again, the opportunity to be at home in the most profound sense of the word, to be dwelling.
A story about Swedish immigrants helps us to see the journey to a new home in its ideal form. African Americans, by contrast, struggled toward their goal against great obstacles. The African American story teaches us that being “at home” requires freedom. Because of racist oppression, the African American journey involved finding a place, building homes, making community, winning the battle for civil rights, and then 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,