Watch These American Cities Segregate, Even As They Diversify

Data from the 2010 Census have offered up another benchmark for use in tracking the feel-good demographic story of America’s steady desegregation. Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor looked at the latest statistics earlier this year and went so far as to declare, in a widely circulated paper for the Manhattan Institute, that we have reached "THE END OF THE SEGREGATED CENTURY."

Their best evidence is condensed in this chart, which tracks two common academic indices of segregation over the past 120 years (tracing the peak of segregation following the Great Migration of blacks out of the South into Northern cities, through its persistent decline over the last four decades):