ABSTRACT
Contemporary ghettos-nearly all-black areas within American cities-are the product of several interrelated developments in American and African American history. It reflects the impact of white racial hostility in the wake of the Great Migration; the African Americans’ quest for freedom, work, and social justice; and, perhaps most importantly, the rise of new classes and social relations within the black community. Yet, the “ghetto” as a theoretical construct had its roots in the Jewish experience in urban America and Europe. Social historians have studied ghetto segregation as part of the immigrant experience, sometimes finding less rigid community boundaries than the term implies, and the development in the 20th century of ghettoization for blacks.
