Segregation by Race in Steep Decline

“Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” This was the famously grim prediction of President Lyndon Johnson’s Kerner Commission Report, reflecting America’s deep foreboding in 1968 that growing racial separation may ultimately lead to “a system of apartheid.” Thankfully, that prediction turned out to be largely mistaken. In fact, according to a careful parsing of decennial Census data from 1890 through 2010 by researchers at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (The End of the Segregated Century), black-white separation or segregation has been in steep and continuous decline since 1970.

To be sure, there is still plenty of segregation, especially in public schools (where the decline may have recently stopped or even reversed), and no one imagines that desegregation will automatically shrink the persistent black-white gap in income and wealth. Still, declining segregation in itself is a welcome and dramatic shift that few Americans imagined 40 years ago.

Just how dramatic? According to the Manhattan Institute report, rates of black-white segregation have risen and fallen over the last century like the hump of a giant tidal wave. Rates rose steeply from 1910 to 1950 as millions of African Americans migrated from the rural south to the urban north, where they were excluded from most residential neighborhoods by local regulation, by lending…