Chase Arline

Class of 2019

During recent years, there has been a question in social politics as to how much economic mobility African Americans have in the United States. Research has been done that displays the differences in the neighborhoods that African Americans reside in compared to the overall population. Most of the research on this topic has concluded that because of the residential segregation that a substantial amount of African Americans faced after the Great Migration, they have very limited economic and migrational capability.

This could show whether blacks have been either able to or wanting to migrate to different areas in the United States since the civil rights movement. Various studies are being held in order to identify which factors are holding back African Americans from attaining a higher economic mobility, yet few seem to focus on the differences that may arise in these groups while living in different states across the country.

The goal of the methodology is to provide potential trends about the locations that African Americans are experiencing considerable changes in their population relative to that of the overall population change. that researchers can analyze and complement with credible causal or correlational relationships. This type of research methodology is a single-variable data visualization. 

The reason for the visualization of the data is so that other researchers can find trends that may have been missed upon first inspection. The most important part of the approach is to be able to visualize the data so that any trends can be pointed out easily across states. In his paper “Trends in quantitative methods III: Stressing the visual”, Stewart Fotheringham expresses why visualizing data as a quantitative method is important and can reveal trends unknown before. 

African American: defined according to the self-reported data in the United States Census. 

Second Reconstruction - from 1945 to 1968. 

The hypothesized result will be that the lower amount of segregation an area experiences, the higher amount of African American population growth because those kinds of areas will benefit them more, leading to more migration to the area and higher birth rates.

The findings were that the areas with the most amount of segregation had the highest relative change in population for African Americans. The most notable difference was that from 1980 to 2010, the Migration Series maps showed a trend of African Americans moving from the Northeast and Midwest back into the Central South and Southeast. On the contrary, the maps that factored in the movement of the general population showed only that the only continuous growth throughout the period was that in the Midwest. 

This spatial distribution of population growth or segregation may also have potential links with the data relating to the distribution of felony records in the United States. A separate investigation could determine how much population change there is in the rural versus metropolitan areas of the states to determine if African Americans are migrating to one or the other. 

There are multiple trends observed in the data, and some of the trends perceived in the constructed maps have potential connections which require further inquiry. These may be recognized as being lingering effects from the Second Great Migration, considering these same changes in population occurred during that time period. 

This could be improved by specifically looking at cities instead of states because it would provide further insight on where specifically the migration is happening. This could be done by using professional GIS software. A future investigation on this subject would be to investigate how the rate of single motherhood- a problem that plagues the African American community- varies between different locations, and to see if it correlates with the residential segregation that these groups face.

Fotheringham, S. (1999). Trends in quantitative methods III: Stressing the visual. Progress in Human Geography, 23(4), 597-606. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/030913299667756016

Hacker, J. D. (2013). New estimates of census coverage in the united states, 1850-1930. Social Science History, 37(1), 71-101. From doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0145553200010579