Urbanism Theories and the Early Twentieth-Century Black Metropolis

ABSTRACT

This study integrates three theories of urbanism into a single framework suggesting that urban population size has a nonlinear relationship with social-world intensity. Hypotheses derived from this framework are tested in regression analyses of 1930 census data on Black Metropolis communities created in major cities by blacks’ early twentieth-century urbanization. The findings show that the slope of the relationship between black population size and Black Metropolis social-world intensity varies by the type of social world under investigation. Consistent with subcultural theory, urbanism markedly intensifies blacks’ cultural-expression social worlds and modestly intensifies blacks’ political-action social worlds. Consistent with determinist theory, urbanism degrades blacks’ religious-participation social worlds, and consistent with compositional theory, urbanism is unrelated to blacks’ goods-distribution-and-consumption social worlds. These results imply that researchers should explore nonlinear relationships of urban population size and social-world intensity that are predicted by the integrated framework of urbanism theories.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Robert L. Boyd

Robert L. Boyd received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is professor of sociology at Mississippi State University. His research examines entrepreneurship and the migrations of blacks and European ethnic groups to cities in the early twentieth-century United States. His recent publications appear in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of African American Studies, Journal of International Migration and Integration, and Sociological Inquiry.