Building upon Arnold Hirsch’s pioneering work on the creation of the “second ghetto” in Chicago, historians have stressed the role that housing policies and markets played in dividing metropolitan areas along racial and class lines. ![]() 2 In addition to Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, see Freund, Jackson, Kruse, Lassiter, “De Jure/De (.)ģ While the expansion of black urban ghettoes was a national phenomenon in the twentieth-century United States, the prevailing historical interpretation of this process is incomplete.With somber maps and statistics, TCA clarified that the black ghetto, which exploded into the national consciousness following the 1960s uprisings in the urban North and West, was also alive and well in the Crescent City (3-5, 18, 20-21). Residents in this section of the city were among its least educated and least employed, and TCA’s report documented that they had “the high birth and death rates of the typical under-developed society” (4). This impoverished black ghetto sliced through the heart of New Orleans’ famed crescent, its unwieldy shape mirroring the Mississippi River’s serpentine curvature. ![]() The city’s poor population was concentrated in what TCA described as an “inner city sprawl amidst affluence” (5), and the organization noted that ninety percent of the residents living there were black. “New Orleans has had a city within a city for some time”, a 1973 report by the anti-poverty organization Total Community Action, or TCA, concluded (4). By the 1970s, however, this was certainly not the case. ![]() Blacks and whites, rich and poor, and immigrants and natives lived near one another on the highest, driest land they could find between the Mississippi River and what New Orleanians called the woods, the brackish cypress swamps that drained into Lake Pontchartrain. 1 New Orleans’ sodden landscape made residential integration a necessity for two hundred years.
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