As America Desegregates, Will Civil Rights Protections Suffer?

Cities on average are getting a lot better at breaking up racial segregation. More African Americans and whites are sharing neighborhoods than we’ve seen in almost a century. But that could create static for civil rights protections writes the University of Chicago Law School professor Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos.

In his forthcoming article for the University of Chicago Law Review, “Civil Rights in a Desegregating America,” Stephanopoulos pulls together a collection of recent research showing that race relations in housing patterns are certainly improving. He points out that in 1970, 80 percent of African Americans would have needed to move to a different neighborhood in order for them to be evenly spread across most metropolitan areas. By 2010, though, writes Stephanopoulos, only 55 percent would have needed to move to make this true (which is roughly where America was in 1910). He also points out that the average African American lived in a neighborhood that was over 60 percent black in 1970, compared with 30 percent today.