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Developing a Typology of African American Neighborhoods in the American South: The Case of Charlotte
- University of Georgia Press
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Gerald L. Ingalls and Isaac Heard Jr. Developing a Typology of African American Neighborhoods in the American South The Case of Charlotte frican American neighborhoods of southern cities grew at a slower pace, from more varied spatial foundations, and under different social, economic, and historic conditions than did black neighborhoods in northern cities. While, at first glance, the present-day pattern of African American neighborhoods of southern cities such as Charlotte resembles that of their northern counterparts , beneath the surface lies a rich historical diversity. In this chapter we contend that the longer history of African American residential experience in southern cities offers a fertile research opportunity to understand how such communities are affected by the efforts of cities to position themselves within the developing global economy. Cities such as Charlotte provide a rich laboratory for exploring diversity in the residential experiences of African Americans in urban America. Our investigation in Charlotte suggests that the African American residential experience is not as one-dimensional as is often depicted in the literature. In fact, Charlotte offers a range of residential types, and we have developed a typology of African American residential areas based primarily on the timing of their initial development. We propose a typology of five African American residential types: InTown Residential Concentrations, Rural Villages and Concentrations, Separate Villages (Rim Villages and Streetcar Suburbs), and more recent, Auto-Oriented Suburbs. All of these types saw their genesis during the period from immediately after the end of the Civil War until about 1920. In Charlotte black suburbs did not emerge until the late 1890s and early 1900s. However, all five neighborhood types underwent significant changes in spatial form and character as Charlotte and most of North Carolina experienced its own brand of economic (industrial) development around the turn A African American Neighborhoods 161 ofthecentury.AndinCharlotte’scurrentexplosiveurbangrowth,generated in large measure by Charlotte’s efforts to compete within a restructuring, internationalizing economy, these neighborhoods are seriously threatened. Beginning in the mid to late 1960s, most, but not all, of the African American neighborhoods in our typology witnessed significant changes induced by significant urban restructuring under way in Charlotte’s urban core, some of its older suburbs, and its new suburbs exploding outward into surrounding rural areas. We describe each of these five types of pre-urban, pre-1965 African American neighborhoods, offer examples of each type taken from the present-day landscape of Charlotte, and describe the changes currently under way. African American Residential Patterns in the Literature The separation of African Americans into distinctive and segregated residential communities has long been a dominant theme in urban America. African American residential patterns, particularly the ghettoes that characterized the nation’s largest metropolitan areas from the latter half of the nineteenth century until today, have attracted considerable attention from social scientists. The focus on the ghetto as the worst manifestation of black residential patterns, and on the northern cities that hosted them, was a natural consequence of both the “context and historical roots” and the quest for understanding on the road to potential amelioration strategies.1 The issue of how to frame policy to address the problems of the ghetto has, of course, been the focus of considerable debate. During the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, social scientists broadened the conceptual framework for the examination of the African American urban residential experience to include urban poverty, social isolation, concentration, and dislocation.2 However, during this period much of the debate swirled around conservative or liberal views of the problem of the concentration of the urban poor. Conservatives tended to blame the growth of urban poor on “persistence of a culture of poverty and/or the liberal social policies inaugurated by the civil rights movement and the Great Society programs .”3 Scholars such as Wilson framed the worsening plight of the urban poor on the structural transformation of the national economy. Under his definition, ghettoes became places of concentrated poverty and joblessness. In When Work Disappears, Wilson framed his argument in terms of changing technologies and growing internationalization that induced a demand for a different kind of worker, one unlikely to be found in the low-skilled, [3.88.185.100] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:28 GMT) 162 ingalls and heard under-schooled, high-poverty populations of the inner cities of metropolitan America.4 Increasing levels ofeconomicsegregationproducedever-moreisolated minority populations, which were concentrated into high-poverty, largely Hispanic and African American inner-city residential areas.5 Throughout the debate, the...