The term “ghetto,” originating in the Jewish urban enclaves of Europe, was adapted to the urban ethnic communities in the US at the beginning of the twentieth century It found its most lasting association with the residentially segregated inner-city African American neighborhoods. Such neighborhoods first developed in northeastern cities, primarily in the 1920s, following the mass migration of blacks from the South. In the twentieth century the “ghetto” referred almost automatically in speech and media to the most depressed and dangerous elements of black urban life.

These areas have changed themselves over time. Initially new residents in these areas came full of expectations that they would secure industrial employment. Such jobs were not forthcoming, however, except in the period during and immediately after the Second World War. In the 1940s and 1950s, access to these jobs dried up as industries closed or moved out to the suburbs. In addition, whites moved out to these areas, leaving innercity communities economically blighted.

In the 1960s, with urban race riots, a strong sense of nostalgia developed in relation to the old ghetto. New neighborhoods were seen as onedimensional in their poverty having once been viable, vibrant communities—sites of black churches, fraternal orders and other associations. The growing literature on ghettos and ghettoization, therefore, tends to describe a point at which the areas began to develop supposedly dysfunctional characteristics, such as weak families, high levels of poverty violence, prostitution and drugs. The riots themselves damaged the remnants of community that had survived.

Ghettoization was also described as a form of internal colonialism. In conjunction with the Black Power movement, many assumed that these areas needed to be decolonized and that blacks had to gain some self-determination before improvements would occur.

Any potential for this to happen, tied to the War on Poverty, was lost with the economic downturn brought on by the Vietnam War and the OPEC crisis.

A recent tendency has been to accentuate the “culture of poverty” of people in these communities, suggesting, as Nicholas Lemann did in The Promised Land (1991), that such people brought a “sharecropping culture” with them from the rural South. This has tied in with the short-sharp-shock approach to welfare reform, which suggests that it is no longer advisable to give support to members of these ghettoized communities, especially single mothers vilified as “welfare queens.” They must be removed from these environments and the mindsets fostered by the culture there by being forced to work.

Such theories have been countered by scholars like Robin D.G. Kelley, Michael Katz and Adolph Reed.