Residential Segregation

• Author: John O. Calmore
• Pages: 2219-2222

Page 2219

Residential segregation refers to the physical or spatial separation of groups. While residential segregation along racial and ethnic lines affects various groups, its most persistent and pervasive manifestations primarily disadvantage African Americans. SEGREGATION is both a condition of life and a process of group differentiation and distinction. As condition and process, it is closely related to INVIDIOUS DISCRIMINATION. The condition of segregation is primarily that of social and territorial isolation and containment. Now, as in the past, the basis of segregation is the actual or perceived incompatibility of groups due to conflicts in values, interests, behavior, and associational preferences. As a legacy of SLAVERY, black-white racial segregation has served in significant part as a substitute for caste. Segregation continues today as a part of the ideology of the color line, implicitly defining the African American's place, role, and status.

Racial segregation in American cities and metropolitan areas is marked both by the large extent of racial separation of blacks from whites within and between given neighborhoods and by the pattern of blacks concentrated in central cities and whites dispersed throughout the suburbs. African Americans are now an urban people, with eighty percent of them residing in cities. The high degree of segregation tends to isolate African Americans?and, to a lesser degree, Hispanics and Asians?from amenities, opportunities, and resources that benefit social and economic well-being.

During the first half of this century, the "Great Migration" of the southern black population primarily to the urban North and Midwest was a significant factor in creating a national presence and elevating the so-called Negro problem into one of national dimensions. This change inspired blacks to press their unfulfilled claims not only on the nation's moral sense but also on its lawmaking institutions, including the courts. National principles, supported by constitutional law, became a principal means of attacking inequality of fact and opportunity.

Although the Supreme Court decision in BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION (1954) is more celebrated, challenges to residential segregation preceded attacks on segregation in public schools. These residential segregation cases focused on two segregation props, racially zoned municipal areas and RESTRICTIVE COVENANTS related to transferring property. In BUCHANAN V. WARLEY (1917), fifty years after the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT was ratified, the Supreme Court relied on the amendment's due process clause to invalidate a municipal ordinance that prohibited blacks from purchasing or occupying a dwelling located on any block where a majority of the dwellings were white-occupied. The Supreme Court struck down similar acts of de jure segregation in Harmon v. Taylor (1927) and in City of Richmond v. Deans (1930).

One white reaction to the Buchanan decision was the restrictive covenant, a contractual devise by which purchasers of real property assume an obligation not to dispose of the property to certain designated classes (i.e., blacks particularly and non-Caucasians generally). In 1948, as part of the black campaign against residential segregation, the Supreme Court held in SHELLEY V. KRAEMER (1948) that state court enforcement of the restrictive covenants was unconstitutional STATE ACTION that violated the Fourteenth Amendment's EQUAL PROTECTION clause.

During the 1950s the federal government began to take steps toward weakening the de jure basis of racial segregation. Simultaneously, however, across the land racial homogeneity was being established by white surburbanization. This movement solidified the de facto basis of racial segregation in housing and therefore in schools as well. As historian Richard Polenberg has observed, "Suburbanization encouraged the growth of a racially segmented society, offering a classic example of how demographic trends would work at cross purposes with constitutional, political, and social...