How post-Civil War segregation helped to shape the patterns of racial inequality that we see today

In the wake of recent tragic killings of blacks by whites in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston, the issue of black-white segregation has come to the fore once again. In new research Angelina Grigoryeva and Martin Ruef examine the history of segregation in the aftermath of the Civil War. They find that in the North, as today, segregation was largely in the form of racialized African-American districts, while in the South, segregation was more fine-grained with black families relegated to side streets and alleys in more mixed communities, reproducing the racial inequality found under slavery. They write that examining early forms of racial segregation and how they varied by region may be useful in explaining regional differences in racial unrest in the contemporary United States.