Before reading the article, "Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law," I first looked an an interactive map at the top of the page. It was a map of the US and highlighted, by percentage, the black population living in areas of the US. As you scrolled across, the map changed, showing movement of this population across the years (1890-2010). At first the results were as expected, in the 1820 map the black population was solid 80+% in the south and east of the US. However, as I moved across the map, a interesting change, or better, lack of changed, startled me. Throughout he 1900's and even into 2010, the black population was still overwhelmingly concentrated in the south and east. While it was not a solid 80+%, it still had very concentrated pockets in these areas. We have discussed a number of limits to the mobility of back people from moving out of the south--such as money, family, home-pride, bonded labor, etc--but to see that the majority of the population has not more evenly dispersed across the country is baffling. This puzzle led me to the remainder of the article.
One of the main historically influenced discussed that possibly caused this lack of migration was the failure of the Federal government. Presidential tenures repeatedly denied, avoided, or delayed numerous movements to end segregation. A large example was President Nixon's administration declining to fight segregation and enforce Federal law and programs. President Obama is quoted saying that this could have cut segregation in half had the original effects/intents been successful. Additionally, the Obama administration has held a higher accountability for enforcing anti-segregation practices and has even denied federal funding to cities for their failure to meet desegregation efforts.
This brings me to a pondering thought, because of this failure of previous administrations, what will it take to be effective in overcoming lingering segregation? I found an interesting project done which colored certain cities by ethnicity and Memphis was one of the selected cities. It is evident in Memphis and in the other cities in the project that racial segregation, whether influenced by institutions, culture, economics, etc, still readily exist even in some of the biggest cities in the country.
Living Apart Article: http://www.propublica.org/article/living-apart-how-the-government-betrayed-a-landmark-civil-rights-law
Images of Cities colored by race (2010 census): http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/5560473024/
I feel like this, along with many other race issues, is a culmination of so many things that identifying a solution to the problem is difficult because the proximate and root causes are different, and they each have different solutions. To change this, there needs to be a major change in the way American's view race issues. All of the reasons that you cited above play a huge part in it but there is also the issue of being incapable of "regulating morality". America needs a perspective change before anything will ever be uniformally integrated
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