Academic literature on the topic 'African American children Segregation African American neighborhoods'

AbstractA number of studies of African American communities show a tendency to approximate the phonological patterns of the surrounding mainstream white community. An analysis of the vowel systems of 36 African American speakers in the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus compares their development over the 20th century with that of the mainstream community. For vowels involved in change in the white community, African Americans show very different patterns, often moving in opposite directions. The traditional split of short-a words into tense and lax categories is a more fine-grained measure of dialect relations. The degree of participation by African Americans is described by measures of bimodality, which are applied as well to the innovative nasal short-a system. The prototypical African American speakers show no bimodality in either measure, recombining the traditional tense and lax categories into a single short-a in lower mid, nonperipheral position. The lack of relation between the two short-a systems is related to the high degree of residential segregation, in that linguistic contact is largely diffusion among adults rather than the faithful transmission found among children.

The present study used nationally representative data from the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) merged with census-track data from the American Community Survey (ACS) to model race-ethnic disparities in overweight, obesity, and obesity-related disease among children and adolescents as a function of neighborhood race-ethnic segregation, socio-economic status, household size and structure, family history of obesity, and other important predictors. Results indicate that African American and Hispanic children and adolescents are more likely to suffer from obesity and obesity-related disease than their non-Hispanic White peers. We also found that race-ethnic segregation proxied by the Index of Dissimilarity has a strong and negative effect on the weight status and health outcomes mentioned above. Moreover, race-ethnic segregation appears to explain up to 20% of the difference between minority children and their non-Hispanic White peers in the prevalence rate of overweight, obesity, and obesity-related disease.

Introduction Sickle cell disease (SCD) affects over 100,000 people in the US, the majority of whom are African American. Socioeconomic challenges have a significant impact on both access and adherence to appropriate treatments which, given a history of racial segregation and discrimination, disproportionately burden under-represented minorities. The distribution of socioeconomic factors, like poverty, educational attainment, and housing quality, can now be assessed routinely at the population level, yet the distribution and impact of such contextual risks in the pediatric sickle cell population have not been sufficiently described. Here, we sought to characterize the burden of neighborhood-level socioeconomic challenges and barriers among children with SCD in one large, urban county. We also sought to determine whether these area-level indicators were associated with hospitalizations and markers of adherence to SCD medications. Methods We pursued a retrospective review of electronic health record data from 2011-2017 for children with HbSS disease in the active Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center's SCD registry which includes all children receiving care within the past two years in the Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center and is representative of nearly all children with SCD in Hamilton County, Ohio. The analysis was performed under an IRB-approved study investigating socioeconomic factors for children in Hamilton County. Children within the SCD registry were excluded from this analysis if they had a non-HbSS genotype or an address outside of Hamilton County. Addresses were geocoded and linked to a specific census tract which approximates local neighborhood boundaries. Once linked to a census tract, that address was connected to a pre-determined list of variables present within the 2013-2017 US Census' American Community Survey. Variables included the census tract poverty rate, educational attainment rate (percentage of adults with less than a high school education), and the percentage of vacant housing. A validated census tract-level deprivation index, assembled from 6 such census variables, was also included. Outcomes of interest included number of hospitalizations and ED visits during the study period and %HbF for the subset on hydroxyurea treatment. Descriptive statistics were used to illustrate ecological socioeconomic characteristics among included patients. Associations between area-based socioeconomic deprivation and outcomes of interest were tested using the Kruskal-Wallis Test. Results There were 141 patients with HbSS included in the analysis (53% Male, 82% publicly insured). Mean age at the end of the analysis period was 9.6±6.3 years. Consistent with the aggressive treatment strategy at our center, most (97%) were on disease modifying treatment with either hydroxyurea (81%) or chronic transfusion therapy (16%). Compared to the county as a whole, children in the registry mapped to areas with relatively high rates of poverty (median 26%; IQR 15%-42%), low rates of education attainment (median with high school degree 86%; IQR 78%-91%), and high rates of vacant housing (median 13%; IQR 8%-19%). The deprivation index is scaled between 0 and 1 with higher values indicative of more socioeconomic deprivation. In our population, the deprivation index median was 0.45 (IQR 0.36-0.61). When the sample was categorized into three deprivation groups (low < 25th percentile, medium between 25th and 75th, and high >75th percentile), we found trends toward associations with utilization and adherence measures (Table 1). Conclusion A majority of our SCD patients live in neighborhoods with stark socioeconomic challenges and barriers which have been shown to negatively affect health outcomes. There appears to be a significant trend towards increased utilization among those living in more deprived neighborhoods, although, the link with adherence was less clear. The latter finding, indicative of similar HbF levels across deprivation groupings, may be the result of efforts made by our multidisciplinary comprehensive care team to optimize care for all patients regardless of socioeconomic challenges. The data presented here are novel and likely representative of socioeconomic challenges of most SCD patients living in the US. Future, larger, multi-center studies should focus on identifying and addressing social determinants of health within this population. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Trust is a key component in the creation and maintenance of social capital, which has been linked to neighborhood capacity to respond to environmental challenges as well as physical and mental well–being of individuals. This article investigates the significance of this component of social capital for the health and well–being of African American residents of various types of neighborhoods. Using data collected from a sample of residents of neighborhoods characterized by differing levels of racial and economic segregation in a midsized southern city ( N= 310), a psychosocial resources model of distress is employed to explore the role of trust as a critical resource mediating the impact of stress in the form of racial and economic segregation on residents’ well–being. Results show that minority saturation is a more important predictor of well–being than economic segregation, and that, though no mediating influence is found, generalized trust is an important predictor of well–being.

Patterns of residential segregation in late-nineteenth-century southern cities had great influence on the type of African American business that developed. They also affected the relative stability of business enterprise. In neighborhoods with a higher degree of segregation, African American entrepreneurs were able to develop vital businesses that survived the worsening climate of race relations around the turn of the century.

Beginning in the late 1890s, battles erupted along Baltimore’s racial frontiers as African Americans moved into predominately white neighborhoods. This article analyzes the fight to impose residential segregation by focusing on events on the streets. This vantage point reveals a fuller picture of the movement to impose legalized segregation in Baltimore. Attempts to maintain racially exclusive neighborhoods in Baltimore began years before the passage of the West Segregation Ordinances in 1910. A street-level examination emphasizes the violence and racism—often elided in top-down analyses—that were central to the push for legalized segregation. It also demonstrates the significance of grassroots activists in this story. The movement to impose residential segregation was both promulgated and opposed at the grassroots.

While many scholars have demonstrated that entrenched racial residential segregation perpetuates racial inequality, the causes of persistent racial segregation continue to be debated. This paper investigates how geographically and socioeconomically mobile African Americans approach the home–buying process in the context of a segregated metropolitan region, by using qualitative interviews with working–class to middle–income African American aspiring homebuyers. Homebuyers use three principal search strategies to determine suitable neighborhoods: avoiding decline, searching for improvement, and searching for stability. The findings suggest that despite these strategies African American homebuyers end up in areas that may not retain characteristics they desire in terms of racial demographics and amenities, in large part because such neighborhoods remain rare.

Dallas has a long history of uneven development. It is the product of excess capital, white planning, and a desire to shape the land into something it is not. Communities in Dallas broke sharply along racial and class lines, and as a result black and white Dallas developed separately. Forces of structural and physical violence largely determined where African American neighborhoods were, and are, located in Dallas. African American, Mexican American, and other low-income communities suffered not only from low housing availability and high rent prices, but also bombings, arson, and other physical threats. When alliances formed between poor whites and their neighbors of color, the construction of a highway or railroad was apt to split a neighborhood and fracture the community. The effects of segregation and discrimination have followed the African American communities in Dallas since their inception. Space for African Americans, who made up almost twenty percent of the population, within the Dallas city limits continued to shrink. In 1940, African American neighborhoods were squeezed into 3.5 square miles within the City and in small communities along the perimeter. Meanwhile, the wealthy sequestered themselves into enclaves within the city, avoiding both minorities and municipal taxes while benefitting from city services. In this paper I explore how this historical discrimination and segregation shaped geographic inequality across Dallas today. Much of the wealth in Dallas is clustered in the north around the Park Cities enclave as illustrated by viewing the property tax values over the city. Low-income, majority African American neighborhoods like Joppa, located in southern Dallas, illustrate the impacts that the flows of capital have on livelihoods. South Dallas experienced a sharp decrease in population as residents moved to the suburbs in the 1960s and has since been underdeveloped. Joppa, a small, historically neglected, neighborhood has remained isolated until recently. Developers are interested in Joppa for its cheap, empty lots, and valuable proximity to booming downtown Dallas and the Trinity River Corridor. Gentrification is a concern for the neighborhood; residents have a desire to revitalize their neighborhood on their own terms, not developers’. This research will help to visualize and amplify the continued material effects of a history Dallas is trying to make invisible.

Overall this thesis analyzes a strain of the white supremacist vision in Denton, Texas via a case study of a former middle-class black neighborhood. This former community, Quakertown, was removed by white city officials and leaders in the early 1920s and was replaced with a public city park. Nearly a century later, the story of Quakertown is celebrated in Denton and is remembered through many sites of memory such as a museum, various texts, and several city, county, and state historical markers. Both the history and memory of Quakertown reveal levels of dominating white supremacy in Denton, ranging from harmless to violent. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 focus on the history of Quakertown. I begin chapter 2 by examining as many details as possible that reveal the middle-class nature of the black community and its residents. Several of these details show that Quakertown residents not only possessed plentiful material items, but they also had high levels of societal involvement both within their community as well as around Denton. Despite being a self-sufficient and successful community, Quakertown residents were not immune to the culture of racial fear that existed in Denton, which was common to countless towns and communities across the South during the Jim Crow era. I identify several factors that contributed to this culture of fear on the national level and explore how they were regularly consumed by Denton citizens in the 1910s and 1920s. After establishing Quakertown and the racist society in which it thrived, in chapter 3 I then examine the various sects of what I term the “white coalition,” such as local politicians, prominent citizens, and city clubs and organizations, who came together to construct a reason to remove the black community out of fear because of its proximity to the white women’s college, the College of Industrial Arts. I then look at the steps they took that secured the passage of the bond referendum that would allow them to legally remove the black neighborhood. Chapter 4 largely focuses on the ways in which the white coalition ensured the black community was transferred from Quakertown to its new community on the outskirts of town, Solomon Hill, from 1922-1923. These ways overwhelmingly included outright racial violence or the repeated threat of it. I then briefly describe the quality of Solomon Hill in the years after the relocation. I also summarize how and why the story of Quakertown was lost over time–among both white and black citizens–and conclude with the discovery of a Quakertown artifact in 1989, which initiated the renaissance period of Quakertown’s memory. In chapters 5 and 6 I switch gears and analyze the memory of Quakertown today via sites of memory. I begin by providing a brief historiography of New South memory studies in chapter 5. This review is important before delving into the specifics of the memory of Quakertown, because 1920s Denton was a microcosm of the New South, specifically in terms of race relations and dominating white supremacist ideals. I explore some of the different techniques utilized by memory historians to evaluate how and why the white supremacist vision dominated the southern region during the Jim Crow era; I, in turn, then use those same techniques to reveal how the white supremacist vision in Denton dominated at the same time. In chapter 6 I provide in-depth analysis of the most prominent sites of memory in Denton that, today, are dedicated to the memory of Quakertown. Collective analysis of these sites reveals levels of white exploitation, blatant omissions, and general misuse surrounding the story of the black removal and experience. I conclude my thesis by stressing that although the white vision today is shaped differently than it was during Jim Crow, it nonetheless still exists in Denton today, as evidenced in the treatment of the sites of Quakertown’s memory.

Dr. Patricia Carter Sluby (Fig. 5.1) is a primary patent examiner retired from the US Patent and Trademark Office and formerly a registered patent agent. She is also the author of three books about African American inventors and their patented inventions. Patricia’s father is William A. Carter Jr., and her mother is Thelma LaRoche Carter. Her father was the first black licensed master plumber in Richmond, VA, and his father also had the same distinction in Columbus, OH, years earlier. Her father was born in Philadelphia, PA, and attended college. Her grandfather went from Virginia to look for work in Canada and became a stonemason. Later he relocated back to the United States, where he soon married in Boston, MA, and several of his children were born there. Later, the family moved to Philadelphia where Patricia’s father was born. Her mother, who attended Hampton Institute, taught school and later managed the office for Patricia’s father’s business. Patricia’s mother was born and raised in Richmond, as were most of her maternal relatives. Patricia had three brothers. They were all born during segregation in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy. Patricia was born on February 15, in Richmond. She attended kindergarten through eighth grade in segregated schools that were within walking distance of home. In school, they studied from hand-me-down books, but her black teachers were well trained and well informed. They had bachelor’s degrees; some had master’s or even PhD degrees. To go to high school, Patricia took a city bus across to the east side of town, to the newly built school for black students, which incorporated eighth grade through twelfth grade. Her teachers were excellent instructors who lived in her neighborhood and knew her parents quite well. The teachers looked out for the neighborhood kids and acted as surrogate parents out­side the confines of the home. Teachers and principals were also great mentors, dedicated to their craft; they encouraged students to understand the world and function as responsible adults. Patricia excelled in science and math.

The United States has a dual residential system; the FTE sector lives in wealthy suburbs, and the low-wage sector lives in inner cities. Urban services are old and deteriorating. City schools are old, city planners concentrated poor people in tall buildings, and public transportation is neglected. Insufficiently maintained tall buildings destroy social capital, and poor public transportation keeps low-wage workers from good jobs. Residential segregation has increased, leading to segregated schools and neighborhoods; support for inner cities is presented as helping African Americans and Latinos. The FTE sector has little personal contact with inner city problems, and does not support taxes to solve them.

Dr. Dorothy J. Phillips (Fig. 2.1) is a retired industrial chemist and a member of the Board of Directors of the ACS. Dorothy Jean Wingfield was born in Nashville, Tennessee on July 27, 1945, the third of eight children, five girls and three boys. She was the second girl and is very close to her older sister. Dorothy grew up in a multi- generational home as both her grandmothers often lived with them. Her father, Reverend Robert Cam Wingfield Sr., born in 1905, was a porter at the Greyhound Bus station and went to school in the evenings after he was called to the ministry. He was very active in his church as the superintendent of the Sunday school; he became a pastor after receiving an associate’s degree in theology and pastoral studies from the American Baptist Theological Seminary. Her mother, Rebecca Cooper Wingfield, occasionally did domestic work. On these occasions, Dorothy’s maternal grandmother would take care of the children. Dorothy’s mother was also very active in civic and school activities, attending the local meetings and conferences of the segregated Parent Teachers Association (PTA) called the Negro Parent Teachers Association or Colored PTA. For that reason, she was frequently at the schools to talk with her children’s teachers. She also worked on a social issue with the city to move people out of the dilapidated slum housing near the Capitol. The town built government subsidized housing to relocate people from homes which did not have indoor toilets and electricity. She was also active in her Baptist church as a Mother, or Deaconess, counseling young women, especially about her role as the minister’s wife. When Dorothy went to school in 1951, Nashville schools were segregated and African American children went to the schools in their neighborhoods. But Dorothy’s elementary, junior high, and high schools were segregated even though the family lived in a predominately white neighborhood. This was because around 1956, and after Rosa Park’s bus boycott in Montgomery, AL, her father, like other ministers, became more active in civil rights and one of his actions was to move to a predominately white neighborhood.

This chapter analyzes the emergence of the racial self among this migrant group of “Black Appalachians.” How does a child come to learn that they are a black child? What are the institutions and practices that inform and reinforce one’s understanding of his or her own racialization? What are the ways in which this generation of African Americans affirmed and valued their own lives within the dehumanizing context of Jim Crow? Drawing on the oral history testimony of Brown’s research participants, this chapter offers a phenomenological analysis of the ways in which African American children of that generation experienced, perceived, and made sense of racism, prejudice, and segregation. The chapter argues that while the racial landscape was much different from that of their parents who grew up in post-Reconstruction era Alabama, the structure of feeling that articulates the ‘us and them’ along racial lines is the same.

Many of the African American non-military families that adopted Korean black children did not conform to the gender and race conventions that child welfare officials desired in adoptive families. Often, these families included wives that worked, and would continue to work, outside of their homes even after they adopted a Korean black child. A number of these adoptive families were also interracial couples or they lived in interracial neighborhoods. Adoptive families that included interracial couples and working wives forced some social workers and child welfare officials to reframe these family patterns as ideal for Korean black children. The reforms that some social workers made to increase adoptions of Korean black children by African American and interracial couples also informed their responses to the small number of white families that adopted Korean black children. Agencies affiliated with International Social Service frequently emphasized the international political implications of Korean transnational adoptions because they understood transracial and transnational adoptions to be liberal and antiracist endeavors. However, many of the African American and interracial families that pursued transnational adoptions did not base their adoptions on political motives. Instead, they imagined a kinship with Korean black children because of the racism the encountered in Korea.