As Negroes move in from the South and whites move out to the suburbs, a new pattern of segregation emerges in the big cities of the U.S., bringing with it significant economic, social and political problems

The white and non-white citizens of the U. S. are being sorted out in a new pattern of segregation. In each of the major urban centers the story is the same: the better-off white families are moving out of the central cities into the suburbs; the ranks of the poor who remain are being swelled by Negroes from the South. This trend threatens to transform the cities into slums, largely inhabited by Negroes, ringed about with predominantly white suburbs. The racial problem of the U.S., still festering in the rural South, will become equally, perhaps most acutely, a problem of the urban North.

The trend is most pronounced in the 14 largest metropolitan areas, those with more than one million population, where nearly one third of all U. S. citizens reside. These cities have long attracted Negroes from the South. For several decades their Negro population has been increasing much faster than their white. The decade of war and full employment between 1940 and 1950 saw the most rapid growth. While the total white population within these 14 cities rose only 4 per cent, the Negro population of the same cities leaped upward 68 percent. Negro migration to the cities has since continued at a high, but probably less extreme, rate. A special inter-decennial census for Los Angeles shows that its non-white population increased 45 per cent between 1950 and 1956, as compared with a 10 per cent gain in the white population.

As late as 1950 non-whites constituted only a minor fraction of the total population in most of the central cities of the 14 largest metropolitan areas. But the Negro migration, the comparatively greater rate of natural increase among non-whites and the exodus of whites to the suburbs will dramatically raise the proportion of non-whites in central cities. In Los Angeles non-whites have moved up from 6.5 per cent of the population in 1940 to nearly 14 per cent in 1956. In Chicago, according to a careful estimate by Otis Dudley Duncan and Beverly Duncan of the University of Chicago, Negroes now comprise 19 per cent of the total, compared with 8 per cent in 1940. The city is expected to be one third Negro by 1970. New York City officials forecast that in 1970 Negroes and Puerto Ricans will constitute 45 per cent of the population of Manhattan and nearly one third that of the entire city. Washington, D.C., may already have an actual Negro majority.

Estimates of future population trends must take into account some reurbanization of white suburbanites, as the proportion of older people increases and the suburbs become less attractive to those whose children have grown up and left home. Even making allowance for shifts of this sort, all evidence makes it highly probable that within 30 years Negroes will constitute from 25 to 50 per cent of the total population in at least 10 of the 14 largest central cities.

The suburbs of the metropolitan areas exhibit quite different population trends. Negroes made up only 4 per cent of their populations in 1940 and no more than 5 per cent in 1950. The only notable recent Negro suburban population growth has taken place in industrial fringe cities such as Gary, Ind., and in segregated Negro dormitory communities such as Robbins, Ill.

The sheer cost of suburban housing excludes Negroes from many suburban areas. Furthermore, the social satisfactions of slum or near-slum existence for a homogeneous population have been insufficiently studied, and it may very well be true that many Negro urban dwellers would not easily exchange current big-city life for even reasonably priced suburban homes. The crucial fact, however, is that Negroes presently do not have any free choice in the matter. They are excluded from suburbia by a wide variety of devices.

Social antagonism alone has been highly effective. In addition, the suburban towns have employed restrictive zoning, subdivision and building regulations to keep Negroes out. Some, for example, have set a minimum of two or more acres for a house site, or required expensive street improvements, and have enforced these regulations against undesirable developments but waived them for desirable ones. A builder in a Philadelphia suburb recently told an interviewer that he would like to sell houses to Negroes, but the town officials would ruin him. He explained: The building inspectors would have me moving pipes three eighths of an inch every afternoon in every one of the places I was building, and moving a pipe three eighths of an inch is mighty expensive if you have to do it in concrete!