Urban Space, Restrictive Covenants and the Origins of Racial Residential Segregation in a US City, 1900–50*

The origins of racial residential segregation in US cities have been a central concern to scholars examining the relationship between race, racism and urban development. Conventional accounts focus on the advent of industrialization, the ‘Great Migration’ of southern blacks to northern cities after the first world war, and white prejudice and racial discrimination in creating racially segregated neighborhoods in the early decades of the twentieth century (Hershberg et al., 1979; Taylor, 1993). A position put forth by scholars such as Feagin and Vera (1995), Bullard et al. (1994), and buttressed by Massey and Denton’s (1993) research on ‘American apartheid’ holds that ‘white racism’ is a permanent and ineradicable feature of American society. Central to this ‘permanent racism’ thesis is the argument that while the conditions of white racism and anti-black prejudice have changed over the century, racial discrimination remains the ‘structural linchpin’ (Pettigrew, 1979) of urban poverty, residential segregation and metropolitan development. However, a number of scholars have recently argued that the relationship between race, racism and residential segregation is far more complicated, especially considering the socially constructed nature of ‘race’ and historically changing manifestations of racism (Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Omi and Winant, 1994; Winant, 1994). While much research has focused on the role of racism and racial discrimination in the creation of racial residential segregation in US cities, few researchers have situated early twentieth-century meanings of race and racism within broader processes of urban development and the emergence of the modern real estate industry. Recently, a much spirited debate has ensued in the IJURR over the origin of the black ghetto and its identification with a host of pejorative labels such as ‘deviancy’, ‘disorder’ and ‘pathology’, among others. A number of scholars, including Wacquant (1997), Katz (1997), Abu-Lughod (1997), Gans (1997), Auyero (1997), Kusmer (1997) and Jargowsky (1998) have contributed to this debate by commenting on the ‘pernicious premises’ that define current urban research on the black ghetto, the use and misuse of the ‘underclass’ label in contemporary analyses of poverty and inequality, and the excessive reliance upon the Chicago model of ghetto development. Specifically, Wacquant (1997: 341–2) argues that contemporary urban research continues to embrace a century-old view of the black ghetto as a ‘morally defective’ and ‘nefarious place that disrupts and corrupts social life’.