Race, Space, and the Urban South: Then and Now

Abstract

More than half a century after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and the Civil Rights Movement, the cities at the heart of America’s racial conflict with itself have changed socioeconomically, culturally, and politically. Although many of these changes resulted in quality–of-life improvements for racial minorities, some questions remain about lingering bastions of segregation in the South. Using a critical race theory (CRT) lens, in this article we investigate four cities that were important to the Civil Rights Movement—Greensboro, North Carolina, Little Rock, Arkansas, Memphis, Tennessee, and Montgomery, Alabama—to examine demographic, economic, and sociocultural trends and how they affect racial minority groups. We find that, despite considerable improvement in terms of poverty rate, unemployment, and income, blacks continue to remain substantially behind whites in these cities, indicating that desegregation and access to opportunity has done little to close the black-white opportunity gap.

KEYWORDS:

• opportunity
• race
• segregation
• socioeconomic outcomes

Notes

¹ Dissimilarity indexes analyze how segregated racial populations are from one another by assigning a 100 value for completely segregated areas. A 100 value means that 100% of the population would have to move to a different neighborhood in order to be more evenly racially or ethnically distributed. A neighborhood with a value of 0 has achieved 100% integration. A dissimilarity index of 60 or above is generally considered high segregation (Frey & Myers, 2005).

² Throughout this article we sometimes use the term black and African American interchangeably, but we acknowledge that these are not necessarily synonymous and a person who identifies as black may not in fact be African American. Given the population of these four cities, however, it is likely that most black residents also identify as African American.