Abstract:
Most scholarship on racial segregation in U.S. cities retraces the Great Migration from the rural South to the urbanizing, industrializing North. It identifies residential, occupational, and entrepreneurial patterns typical of the South, and very different residential, occupational, and entrepreneurial patterns typical of the North. Arlington County, Virginia, adjacent to the federal government and to the large, prosperous African American community in Washington, D.C., provides a unique opportunity to study processes that transcended this dichotomy. Combining both qualitative and quantitative research methods and mixed data sources, this program of research discovered that life for African Americans in Arlington, Virginia, during Segregation was largely determined by the County's unique context.
