Progress toward Racial Residential Integration

• In Event: 189 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 08. Racial and Ethnic Segregation

Abstract

Studies of racial residential segregation find that Black-White segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas has declined slowly but steadily since the early 1970s. Today Black-White residential segregation in the U.S. is about 25 percent lower than in 1970. To identify the sources of this decline, we use individual-level, geocoded data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on the residential attainment of different cohorts of Blacks. We analyze these data using Blinder-Oaxaca regression decomposition techniques that partition the decline in residential segregation among cohorts into that part resulting from (1) changes in the social and economic characteristics of Blacks and (2) changes in the association between Blacks’ social and economic characteristics and the level of residential segregation they experience. Our findings show that progress in the residential integration of Blacks is largely due to the educational gains made by Black cohorts entering adulthood after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We find that the return migration to the South of Black cohorts entering adulthood in the Civil Rights and post-Civil Rights era also played a significant role in the decline in Black-White segregation, as did the increased ability of more recent cohorts of Black high school graduates to access more racially-diverse neighborhoods.

Authors

• Robert L. Wagmiller, Temple University

• Elizabeth Gage-Bouchard, Roswell Park Cancer Institute