The seeds of the black ghetto were sown in the 1880s, longbefore the Great Migration

More than a year after the tragic shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri by a white police officer, the influence and legacy of historic racial segregation still looms large in the US. In new research, John R. Logan, Weiwei Zhang, Richard Turner, and Allison Shertzer argue that the process of black ghettoization in Northern cities has roots in the 1880s – much farther back than has been previously thought. Making use of census data covering smaller areas than traditional census tracts, they find that ’embryonic ghettos’ were present in many cities more than 50 years before the Great Migration, helping to make possible the extreme form of the ghetto that existed in 1940 and beyond.