When urban centers in America were beginning to take shape, people moved in droves to these industrial metropolises to find work and success. We studied earlier the effects of this mass immigration to cities and saw the horrid living conditions that people endured to find work. The overcrowding of cities made ghettos obvious and wealth was not directly associated with the masses of people moving in. Through the years, urban areas grew with new suburban towns encircling the city. Wealthier people inhabited these suburban areas with the ability to move in and out of cities at their own will.

Cities became a melting pot of cultures in a small area. People of the same ethnic background often moved into neighborhoods in which their own culture was dominant as to fit in and feel more at home. These areas are obvious in places such as

Slums were still a problem in urban America, partly due to the people caught in the cyclical poor lives of urban dwelling. During what is called the “white flight”, blacks and other ethnic groups were caught in the city while their white counterparts fled to economically prestigious suburbs. After the war, military loans and low mortgage rates were gives to GI’s, making it easier for these predominantly white soldiers to move into suburban real estate .

Segregation, however, was not due strictly to people choosing where they wanted to live. In the South, segregation laws made it impossible to mix cultures publicly. Activism in the south, led by a well-known man by the name of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., engaged the public and northern eyes of the country on civil rights and the wrongness of segregation. Discrimination in the South was looked at very carefully, and a huge breakthrough was made in court cases de-segregating schools and other public areas.

Chinatown, or “Little Italy”. Southie, in Boston is dominated by the working class Irish people that came to the American cities as many others did: looking for work, and the American Dream. These social groupings are one way that cities become segregated. This segregation is not the discriminatory term

Some topics in this essay:
American Dream, Segregation Urban, Lyndon Johnson, American Indians, Discrimination South, Chicago Detroit, King Jr, Southie Boston, segregation cities, urban centers, american dream, american cities, blacks ethnic, move cities, industrial cities,