Residential segregation in the mid-sixties

Special censuses conducted by the Bureau of the Census at the request and expense of local governments provide current statistics for many large cities which are compared with corresponding data from the1960 Census. An analysis was made of the changes in the racial composition of the cities, and of the areas within the cities (defined by census tracts) which had a high concentration of Negro population in 1960 for ten cities of 100,000 or more population at mid-decade.As in the 1950-60 period, Negroes continue to move into the central cities of metropolitan areas while white persons continue to move out to the suburbs at a faster rate, and this results in net declines in the populations of the cities. The proportion of nonwhite persons living in areas of high Negro concentration has remained about the same or increased slightly in a majority of the cities, while in a few (such as Cleveland, Rochester, and Raleigh) this proportion has declined; that is, relatively more Negroes in these cities now live outside the ghetto neighborhoods. When the racial composition of the ghettos is examined, however, a higher proportion of the residents are now Negro when compared to 1960 in each of the ten cities.Thus, the concentration of Negroes in ghetto areas has shown little change, but the trend of white persons moving away from the Negro neighborhoods, either to other parts of the cities or to the suburbs, has increased sharply, and this has tended to polarize the Negro and white populations within large cities.