Desegregation, Integration, and the Negro Community
| Author | Hylan Lewis,Mozell Hill |
| Published date | 01 March 1956 |
| Date | 01 March 1956 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/000271625630400115 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
116
Desegregation,
Integration,
and
the
Negro
Community
I F
one were
to
review
the
serious
liter-
ature
devoted
to
the
Negro
in
the
United
States
during
the
last
twenty
years,
a
great
deal
of
it
would
be
found
to be
dated,
excessively
abstract,
and
a
poor
guide
to
the
range
in
types
of
communities
in
which
Negroes
now
live.
With
notable
exceptions,
serious
and
scholarly
accounts
are
just
a
cut
above
popular
stereotypes
and
generalizations:
too
frequently
they
have
become
fixed
in
social-science
and
administrative
ex-
change
despite
limited
validity
and
use-
fulness.
One
of
the
functions
of
mi-
nority
protest
and
pressure
is
to
force
an
updating
and
correcting
of
scholarly
conceptions
as
well
as
lay
images.
It
is
begging
the
factual
question
to
say
that
Negro
communities
in
the
United
States
are
specific
local
areas
in
which
persons
designated
as
Negroes
live
in
prepon-
derant
numbers;
and
further
that
such
units
derive
distinctive
character
from
the
fact
that
Negroes
who
live
in
such
areas-and
undoubtedly
a
large
propor-
tion of
the
Negroes
who
do
not-tend
to
act
toward
themselves
and
others
as
if
they
have
different
life
chances
and
participation
possibilities.
Such
elemen-
tary
conclusions
should be
just
the
start-
ing
point
for
any
attempt
to
describe
and
analyze
the
manner
in
which
Ne-
groes
and
institutions
in
different
com-
munities
respond
to
desegregation.
The
range
in
types
of
Negro
commu-
nities
and
neighborhoods
is
not
signifi-
cantly
different
from
that
of
American
communities
and
neighborhoods
in
gen-
eral ;
they
run
the
gamut
from
closed
to
open,
small
to
large,
cohesive
to
loose,
and
from
mid-city
slum
to
suburbia
and
&dquo;exurbia.&dquo;
In
Negro
communities
as
in
communities
anywhere
in
the
United
States
the
economy,
regional
cultural
features,
demography,
and
history
inter-
play
to
qualify
life
and
to
condition
the
relationships
of
institutions
and
persons
to
the
larger
community.
The
precise
ef-
fect
of
these
factors
taken
separately
or
in
the
many
possible
combinations
is
still
inadequately
understood
or
measured.
For
example,
the
most
common
of
these
linkages-that
which
suggests
an
inverse
relationship
between
numbers
or
the
ratio
of
Negroes
to
whites
and
the
qual-
ity
of
race
relations
(and
by
implica-
tion
the
possibility
of
integration-has
too
many
exceptions
to
be
reliable.
The
Negro-white
ratio
is
but
one
of
many
factors
whose
weights
vary
from
situa-
tion
to
situation
as
they
appear
in
dif-
ferent
combinations.
Numbers
as
such
are
not
crucial
but
rather
the
perception
of
numbers
in
so
far
as
reactions
to
Negroes
in
any
instance
may
be
con-
cerned ;
and
the
responses
of
any
Negro
community
to
desegregation
are
not
only
functions
of
the
number
of
Negroes
in
the
community
but
also
of
the
quality
of
organization,
leadership
resources,
heterogeneity
of
the
population,
and
so
forth.
It
is
not
the
province
of
this
paper
to
try
to
list
the
many
actual
and
possible
kinds
of
Negro
communities
and
presumably
by
token
of
these
the
many
actual
and
possible
kinds
of
re-
sponses
to
desegregation.
Our
limited
purposes
will
be
to
set
forth
proposi-
tions
about
the
nature
of
Negro
com-
munities
wherever
found
in
the
United
States
and,
given
these,
to
suggest
some-
thing
of
the
range
of
reactions,
the
logic,
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