The All-Negro Town: Its Evolution and Function

Abstract

PHENOMENON that appears to have eluded urban geographers, urban sociologists, and others concerned with community development is the in the United States.' The existence of such towns has seldom come to the attention of persons who are not living near them, and the few previous works on the subject have generally focused attention on a single place. One of the objectives of the present study is to identify the universe of towns on an operational basis; another is to detect the effects of socioeconomic development on their form and structure. The term all-Negro town as it is here used applies to all places with a population of 1000 or more of whom more than 95 percent are classified as nonwhite. This percentage was thought to be a rational cutoff level, for the presence of whites at 5 percent or less might be thought to represent a random occurrence. Within the limits of this definition nineteen places were identified as towns (Fig. 1). On closer investigation of the data it was found that seven of them were statistical illusions. They are not separate places physically or politically but are nonpolitical appendages of larger places. However, instead of being completely ignored, they are retained and identified as pseudo towns. The remaining twelve places, which are physically or politically separated from their nearest neighbors, constitute the primary focus of this study. In most of them the white population is less than 1 percent, and in none of them are whites in positions of dominance.2