The geographically continuous and separate black residential and social space, usually in cities, is termed a ghetto. It evolved with slavery; free blacks and slaves clustered in antebellum urban enclaves. After the Civil War, freedpeople increasingly migrated to them.

Black ghettoization grew during the Great Migration of southern blacks (ca. 1914–70) to northern, midwestern, and western industrial centers. More than 4 million left the South from 1940 to 1970 alone. Facing racial discrimination in education, employment, and housing, many inner-city blacks evidenced what sociologists term a “tangle of pathology,” including high rates of illiteracy, joblessness, poverty, crime, and out-of-wedlock births. But that sociological label underappreciates the community institutions that nurture race pride and resilience, forging a Harlem Renaissance or a civil rights movement.