Lured by the prospects of better wages and better jobs with companies like Winchester Repeating Arms, thousands of Blacks migrated to New Haven during the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
The Great Black Migration and New Haven
In light of the avid interest in The Jamestown Project’s curriculum project being tested in New Haven, we asked Darryl McMiller, Ph.D., University of Hartford Professor of Social Science, to provide an overview of social factors that have shaped the current quality of life in the Elm City, particularly in African American communities.
Lured by the prospects of better wages and better jobs with companies like Winchester Repeating Arms, thousands of Blacks migrated to New Haven during the 40s, 50s, and 60s. As a result of their move to the North, the number of Black men working as machine operators, factory laborers, and blue-collar craftsmen rose significantly. Similarly, Black women who had been locked in domestic work and farming began to move into positions in factories, shops, offices, and eventually, even some professional and managerial positions.The material conditions of Blacks who migrated to the cities like New Haven also improved rather dramatically. New arrivals gained, some for the first time, access to inside plumbing, electricity, refrigeration, telephones, automobiles, radio, and eventually television.
Black migrants who moved north were not constantly at risk of being lynched or terrorized by white racists. They also enjoyed certain civil liberties, such as the right to vote, and over time, some even held influential positions in city government.
No Promised Land
New Haven was no “Promised Land.” Discrimination was a problem. In many factories, the very best jobs were beyond the reach of Black workers. Blacks were often the last hired and the first fired. They were also restricted to the most menial jobs and less progressive labor unions excluded them from many skilled positions.
Housing was also a problem. A combination of a lack of access to cash or credit to make a down payment, or outright discrimination resulted in most New Haven neighborhoods being closed to the city’s new black residents. The Black population was concentrated on perhaps a hundred city blocks out of more than a thousand. Dixwell Avenue, located near the Winchester factory, with its racially and ethnically mixed working class neighborhood was one of the few areas of the city Blacks were able to find housing. If you went strolling down lower Dixwell Avenue, you would have seen churches, halls, barbershops and hair saloons, restaurants, poolrooms and stores catering to the city’s Black population (Rae, 2003).
Urban Renewal
Shortly after Richard C. Lee was elected mayor in 1953, the city of New Haven made a massive commitment to large scale redevelopment of its business and residential areas. From 1954 to 1969, some 25,000 people were relocated from their homes in an effort to rejuvenate the city’s decaying infrastructure. Because urban renewal occurred on such a massive scale, New Haven was dubbed the “Model City.”
Practically every neighborhood in New Haven was targeted for renewal. One of the city’s most ambitious undertakings was the Dixwell Project in New Haven’s predominantly Black neighborhood. City leaders argued that the Dixwell neighborhood was filled with slum dwellings that needed to be destroyed. Beginning in 1961, more than 700 residential units and a number of older commercial and church buildings were razed to build a strip-mall shopping center on Dixwell Avenue and cooperative housing projects (mixing low- and middle-income families) in the neighborhood. (Life in the City, 2006).
Critics of urban renewal were rightfully concerned about the fate of people being forced out of their homes to make room for expressways, department stores, hotels, and parking lots. For the city’s Black population, those fears were not unfounded. In 1969, the New Haven Redevelopment Agency issued a report about the status of families and individuals relocated because of urban renewal projects across the city: of the 70 percent who were relocated to private housing, 57 percent were white; of the 15 percent who purchased homes, 80 percent were white and of the 15 percent relocated to public housing, roughly 80 percent were black (Powledge, 1970).
Growing Inequality
New Haven’s demography has changed significantly in the post-World War II years. In 1940, Black New Haven accounted for a little less than 5 percent (6,235 people) of the city’s population. The city’s white population stood at 154,262. Between 1950 and 1980, the white population dropped by half, from 154,616 to 78,326. During the same period, the Black population increased fourfold, going from 9,605 to 40,235. Since the 1960s, Latinos have been a growing segment of the city’s population. Between 1970 and 1980, the Latino population increased from 4,916 to 10,042. By 2000, the Latino population stood at 26,443 compared to Black population of 46,181. Meanwhile, white New Haven has continued to shrink, down to 53,723 by 2000 (Rae, 2003).
Unfortunately, Blacks and Latinos were arriving in New Haven just as the city’s economy was starting to take a turn for the worse. Thousands of manufacturing jobs in factories like the Winchester plant would soon leave the city. Today, as a result of deindustrialization and white flight, New Haven is characterized by high rates of poverty, unemployment, and single-parented households. According to a February 2005 report by American City Business Journal, the “Elm City” is one of the most socio-economically stressed cities in the nation (Thomas, 2005). ACBJ, using raw data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, constructed a seven-part formula to measure socioeconomic stress among cities with 100,000 or more residents. New Haven ranked number 12 in the nation (Hartford ranked number 1; Bridgeport ranked number 21). The unemployment rate stood at 13.8 percent. More than one-out-of every 4 adults did not have a high school diploma. About one-third (30.4 percent) of households were headed by a single adult.
Table 1 – Socioeconomic Stress Among Three Connecticut Cities
| Hartford | New Haven |
Bridgeport |
|
| Rank |
1 | 12 | 21 |
| People in poverty |
30.6% | 24.4% | 18.4% |
|
Low-to-high income ratio(number of households under $25,000 for every household above $100,000) |
12.4% | 6.5% | 10.5% |
| Unemployment rate (2000) | 15.9% | 13.8% | 35.0% |
| Adults (25 or older) without high school diplomas |
39.2% | 26.4% | 13.3% |
| Households defined as linguistically isolated | 15.9% | 7.7% | 26.7% |
| Families headed by one adult (no spouse present) with children |
39.5% | 30.4% | 26.7% |
| Vacant homes (not including vacation homes) |
10.1% | 9.1% | 6.6% |
Source: American City Business Journal
Poverty is particularly pernicious. ACBJ data reveals that roughly a quarter (24.4 percent) of the city’s population lives in poverty. According to Connecticut Voices for Children (2006), poverty touches nearly a third of the city’s most vulnerable population (32 percent of children live in families of 4 earning under $20,000/year). “Concentrated” poverty (defined as greater than 40% in neighborhood poverty) is also a problem in the “Elm City.” Roughly 10 percent of its Black population and about 16 percent of its Latino population live in concentrated poverty tracts. Sixty-nine percent of New Haven’s children live in “high” poverty neighborhoods (greater than 20% in neighborhood poverty). By comparison, about 12 percent of children statewide live in high poverty neighborhoods.
References
Connecticut Voices for Children. (2006, June 10). A Tale of Two Cities. PowerPoint presentation retrieved July 20, 2006 from http://www.ctkidslink.org/publications/econ06tale2cities.pdf.
Powledge, F. (1970). Model City. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Rae, D. W. (2003). City: Urbanism and its end. New Haven: Yale University Press.
The New Haven Oral History Project. (2004). Life in the city: Stories of urban renewal in New Haven. Retrieved July 20, 2006 from http://www.yale.edu/nhohp/modelcity/index.html
Thomas, G. S. (2005). Hartford carries the heaviest economic stress of any large city. American City Business Journal. Retrieved July 22, 2006 http://www.bizjournals.
Darryl L. McMiller, Ph.D., is assistant professor of political science and social science at the University of Hartford, Hillyer College.
