The Influence of Geography on the Lives of African American Residents of Arlington County, Virginia, During Segregation

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.;Using 1900-1940 manuscript census data, 1950-1970 aggregate census data, and segregation indexes the study measured five dimensions of segregation and discovered high residential segregation resembling neither Northern nor Southern patterns. The results of the indexes demonstrated that some indexes are inappropriate for measuring segregation in Arlington. The study introduced a new procedure for aggregating manuscript census data for use with the indexes. Semi-structured interviews and oral histories of Arlington's elderly black residents documented the influence that proximity to the federal government had on Arlington's residential patterns.;Scholarship on occupational choice describes the enormous impact that environment plays on such choices. This program of research studied the impact, both positive and negative, that two phenomena in the environment of African Americans in Arlington - Segregation and proximity to the federal government - had on occupational choice for the African American community as Arlington grew from a scattering of farm settlements to a prosperous white suburb of Washington, D.C. (the District). The District's black high schools offered excellent career training and the government offered Civil Service employment. The arrival in Arlington of the Pentagon and large numbers of white federal workers provided new sources of employment, but obliterated existing farm and brick factory work.;During Segregation Arlington's African Americans were limited to living and doing business in three of the County's 38 census tracts. This program of research discovered that neither the entrepreneurial patterns typical of Northern nor those of Southern cities were found in Arlington's African American community. Using census data, interviews, and telephone books this study explored the businesses built by entrepreneurial African Americans in Arlington during Segregation. It discovered that the black neighborhoods were dispersed, lacking public transportation, with insufficient customers to support the self-contained business infrastructure found in many segregated cities of similar size. Conversely Arlington's black residents were welcomed in the extensive black-owned business infrastructure of nearby Washington, D.C.;The study concluded that Arlington's geography, its location on the border between North and South and its proximity to the federal government influenced the residential patterns, the occupational choices, and the entrepreneurial activities of its African American community during the years of Segregation.