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A standard interpretation of the intensification of segregation in the early twentieth century is that residents of Northern cities reacted against a growing African American presence, using segregation as a tool of social control that was less needed in the South. Evidence from newly available data for 134 cities in 1900–1940 puts this interpretation in question in several ways. We find that segregation was already high in 1900 at the neighborhood scale. Not only was it rising, but it was changing its spatial scale as clusters of Black settlement in side streets and alleys disappeared from White districts while expanding into large Black zones. Finally, multivariate analyses show that trends were similar in the North and South, and in neither region was Black population size (i.e., “Black threat”) a significant predictor of increasing segregation. The general trends of rising segregation and increasing spatial scale became a nationwide pattern. 

Abstract The three decades from 1940 through 1970 mark a turning point in the spatial scale of Black–White residential segregation in the United States compared with earlier years. We decompose metropolitan segregation into three components: segregation within the city, within the suburbs, and between the city and its suburbs. We then show that extreme levels of segregation were well established in most cities by 1940, and they changed only modestly by 1970. In this period, changes in segregation were greater at the metropolitan scale, driven by racially selective population growth in the suburbs. We also examine major sources of rising segregation, including region, metropolitan total, and Black population sizes, and indicators of redlining in the central cities based on risk maps prepared by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the late 1930s. In addition to overall regional differences, segregation between the city and suburbs and within suburbia increased more in metropolitan areas with larger Black populations, but this relationship was found only in the North. In contrast to some recent theorizing, there is no association between preparation of an HOLC risk map or the share of city neighborhoods that were redlined and subsequent change in any component of segregation.