African-American neighborhoods or black neighborhoods are types of ethnic enclaves found in many cities in the United States. Generally, an African American neighborhood is one where the majority of the people who live there are African American. Some of the earliest African-American neighborhoods were in New York City [1] along with early communities located in Virginia. In 1830, there were 14,000 free Negroes living in New York City.[2]
The formation of black neighborhoods are closely linked to the history of segregation in the United States, either through formal laws or as a product of social norms. Despite the formal laws and segregation, black neighborhoods have played an important role in the development of African-American culture.[citation needed]
The Great Migration was the movement of more than one million African Americans out of rural Southern United States from 1914 to 1940. Most African Americans who participated in the migration moved to large industrial cities such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Minneapolis, Seattle, Detroit, Boston, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Long Beach as well as many smaller industrial cities. Hence, the Migration played an important role in the formation and expansion of African-American neighborhoods in these cities.
While the Great Migration helped educated African Americans obtain jobs, while enabling a measure of class mobility, the migrants encountered significant forms of discrimination in the North through a large migration during such a short of period of time. The African-American migrants were often resented by working classes in the North, who feared that their ability to negotiate rates of pay, or even to secure employment at all, was threatened by the influx of new labor competition.
Populations increased very rapidly with the addition of African-American migrants and new European immigrants, which caused widespread housing shortages in many cities. Newer groups competed even for the oldest
