A Haven and a Hell

The Ghetto in Black America

Lance Freeman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231545570
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The black ghetto is thought of as a place of urban decay and social disarray. Like the historical ghetto of Venice, it is perceived as a space of confinement, one imposed on black America by whites. It is the home of a marginalized underclass and a sign of the depth of American segregation. Yet while black urban neighborhoods have suffered from institutional racism and economic neglect, they have also been places of refuge and community.

In A Haven and a Hell, Lance Freeman examines how the ghetto shaped black America and black America shaped the ghetto. Freeman traces the evolving role of predominantly black neighborhoods in northern cities from the late nineteenth century through the present day. At times, the ghetto promised the freedom to build black social institutions and political power. At others, it suppressed and further stigmatized African Americans. Freeman reveals the forces that caused the ghetto's role as haven or hell to wax and wane, spanning the Great Migration, mid-century opportunities, the eruptions of the sixties, the challenges of the seventies and eighties, and present-day issues of mass incarceration, the subprime crisis, and gentrification. Offering timely planning and policy recommendations based in this history, A Haven and a Hell provides a powerful new understanding of urban black communities at a time when the future of many inner-city neighborhoods appears uncertain.

Chapter One

THE EMBRYONIC GHETTO

A young black man arriving in New York City at the age of nineteen, Joe Hamilton was enamored with the bright lights and hustle and bustle of the city. He admired the confident swagger and dapper clothes of the young men in his neighborhood. He admired their style and the way they strolled the streets seemingly always on their way to someplace exciting and important. His goal was to remake himself from a green country boy to a sophisticated city gent. Although job options were limited and the pay was too little to help support his mother and sister, it was enough for drink and an occasional night on the town. Soon he was able to adopt the style and swagger of those he previously admired, becoming a regular at the local watering hole, where the regulars included gamblers, pickpockets, murderers, and women of ill repute. Able to access only the most meager of jobs, he instead acquired status among those on the margins of the underworld. He soon succumbed to the bottle, barely able to keep a job or a roof over his head. His girlfriend tired of his drunkenness, putting him out and inspiring such a fit of rage in him that he murdered her. Before long, he was incarcerated, following the path of his father, whose imprisonment had left his family without a home and brought them to the city in the first place. Joe’s quick descent from a green awestruck newcomer to an alcoholic denizen of the underworld and eventually an inmate in prison was one that his contemporaries had seen many times before. Although they were sad about his fate, they did not dwell on his tragic life, for he was “only one more who had got into the whirlpool, enjoyed the sensation for a moment, and then swept dizzily down.”1

For those familiar with life in the American ghetto, this story seems all too common. A young man with limited options for achieving status or success via conventional means turns to the street to gain a modicum of respect as well as to mind-altering substances to numb the pain of a stunted existence. Before long, his life on the edge runs afoul of the law, and he becomes enmeshed in the carceral state, as his father was before him. The inner city is a dead end, a place of sorrow and stunted ambition.

This story, however, taken from Paul Dunbar’s novel The Sport of the Gods,2 takes place at the turn of the twentieth century, before the birth of the ghetto, as dated by contemporary social scientists, and the ensuing social problems that would become its hallmark. The social problems chronicled in The Sport of the Gods appear to be a case of art imitating life and not just the fanciful details of a story tailored to appeal to the masses’ prurient interests. Writing at the same time as the publication of Dunbar’s novel, W. E. B. Du Bois, a pioneer of urban sociology, described the neighborhoods of recent Negro migrants as hotbeds of “dirt and vice,” “New York’s most dangerous slum[s].” Indeed, Du Bois pinpointed crime as the “most sinister index of social degradation and struggle,” which he further laid at the doorstep of “bad homes, poor health, restricted opportunities for work and general social oppression.”3 Indeed, in cities across the North, blacks found themselves in the least-desirable environs. An Indianapolis newspaper editor complained that blacks were “compelled to live in alleys, or broken down barracks, while at the mercy of rental agents and have as next door neighbors frequently, the most vicious classes.”4

High rates of crime and social dislocation were common among blacks in the urban North. Social statistics first became available in the last decades of the nineteenth century and were used by policy makers and social reformers. Although these statistics were often put to the dubious use of justifying pseudoscientific race theories, they also documented the precarious position of late-nineteenth-century blacks in urban America.

Using his pioneering methods of social investigation, Du Bois found that Philadelphia blacks were incarcerated at anywhere from 20 percent to 138 percent the rate of whites from 1879 to 1895, which he felt was indicative of the crime problem among members of the race, even after accounting for the unreliability of arrest statistics and prejudice against Negroes. The pressures of stunted opportunity were also evident in family life among Philadelphia Negros in the late nineteenth century. Du Bois observed high rates of cohabitation among Negroes, which he attributed to “the difficulty of earning income enough to afford to marry.”5 Moreover, the death rate was some 20 percent higher among Philadelphia blacks in the 1890s.6

Novels such as The Sport of the Gods and the observations of early social scientists such as Du Bois tell a similar tale about life for late-nineteenth-century urban blacks in the North—for them, life was harsh. Indeed, these conditions were hellish. Did they, however bad, constitute a ghetto? Although few would argue otherwise about life for black Americans in the urban North before the Great Migration, which commenced in 1916, many instead date the rise of the ghetto to the first or second decade of the twentieth century and the Great Migration.

American ghettos, those large sections of many American cities that are home to tens of thousands of blacks and few others, are a twentieth-century result of the Great Migration and the forces that shaped blacks’ incorporation into modern American cities. But significant numbers of blacks lived in the urban North prior to the Great Migration, which commenced during World War I. As discussed later, blacks residing in the late-nineteenth-century urban North experienced the forces of ghettoization that would bedevil later generations of blacks, but at this point they did not form the critical mass that would allow these spaces to function as true havens for the race. We thus begin our chronicle of the ghetto by examining the experiences of urban blacks in late-nineteenth-century America.

WHAT IS THE GHETTO?

The term ghetto originated in sixteenth-century Venice to describe a section of that city where Jews were forced to live, a section that happened to house a copper foundry, or geto. Soon thereafter, Jewish sections of other European cities came to be referred to as getos. The term persisted for several centuries, reaching its most notorious use during the Holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s, when the Nazis imprisoned Jews in ghettos as part of their “final solution.” In the United States, the term ghetto became synonymous with the large agglomerations of blacks in American cities in the wake of World War II, as evidenced by the publication of The Negro Ghetto by Robert Weaver in 1948, the first book using the term in its title in reference to black America.

The moniker seemed to fit the black belts that were prevalent across much of urban America. Like Jews in Nazi Europe, blacks were stigmatized outcasts. Like Jews, who were forced to wear yellow stars of David, blacks could not hide their identity. Jewish ghettos were overcrowded, crammed with many more people than the spaces were built to house. Likewise, Harlem and the South Side of Chicago were packed with black families living doubled up and even tripled up. Jews did not choose to live in the ghetto; they were confined there by walls and the barrels of guns. Blacks, too, were confined to the black belts through the use of restrictive covenants, terror, and discrimination. Finally, using the term ghetto to describe black belts in America might have been a way to pric...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Embryonic Ghetto
• 2. The Age of the Black Enclave
• 3. The Federally Sanctioned Ghetto
• 4. World War II and the Aftermath: The Ghetto Diverges
• 5. The Ghetto Erupts: The 1960s
• 6. The Last Decades of the Twentieth Century
• 7. The Ghetto in the Twenty-First Century
• Conclusion: How to Have a Haven but No Hell in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• References
• Index