While in places like the United States Jews were not isolated and discriminated by decree, many poor immigrants newly arrived from Europe had no choice but to crowd in with other established Jews in places like New York’s Lower East Side ghetto. For centuries, says Mike Gold in his novel Jews Without Money (1930), “the Jew has live in this universal ghetto.”1 A paradeisos without walls or gates which perfectly describes the situation of the African-American ghettos.
These ghettoes, however, emerged through a completely different social process than their medieval ancestors. According to Professor Lance Freeman, “those large sections of many American cities that are home to tens of thousands of blacks and others, are a twentieth-century result of the Great Migration and the forces that shaped black’s incorporation into modern American cities.”2 The migration Freeman refers to was the movement of around six million African Americans from the rural southern states to urban north from 1916 to 1970 because of the segregation and discrimination they experienced below the Mason-Dixon line. However this migration, according to attorney and author Bryan Stevenson, should not be viewed as such: “very few people appreciate that the african americans in those communities did not go there as immigrants looking for new economic opportunities. They went there as refugees from terror.”3
And although since 1917 the American constitution prevented racial zoning in the United States—making the overt establishment of ghettos for Jews or blacks impossible—this was not a real obstacle to the creation of new urban belts of segregation as more African Americans immigrated from the south. In fact, white residents of cities such as Chicago made use of a legal instrument known as “restrictive covenant” to impose discriminatory policies on their neighborhoods. According to Duneier, these contracts worked quite simply and were specially difficult to track:
Whites in a neighborhood would enter into private agreements with one another stipulating that none of their properties would be occupied, leased, sold, or given to blacks (or, in less that 2 percent of the cases, to non-Caucasians). Thus, a standard agreement might state, “the property owners cannot sell, convey, lease, or rent to a Negro or Negroes … any of the said parcels,” with exceptions for maids, chauffeurs, and janitors, who could live in the garage, barn, or servant’s quarters.4
Thus, apart from explicit violence, such as burning down and looting the houses of blacks who arrived in a neighborhood, the whites enforced this type of covenant, which drew “invisible borders” that prevented blacks from accessing decent housing and forced them into a threshold of segregation, poverty and indifference, a non-place in which they were supposedly protected by the constitution when in reality they were victims of everyday discriminatory tactics. A genuine terrible place that spontaneously materialized in all US cities.
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