[x]

You have a point that "residential segregation" has been greater in the North than in the South. The Black population was smaller and more peripheral, so it was easier to "contain" it in various neighborhoods. Especially so, since other ethnic groups, -- Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews -- seemed to have their own turf. The other side of the coin is that legal segregation was greater in the South.

But talk of the Boston busing conflict has a musty air not so far different from Civil War and nullification chatter. It must have made a major impression in the 1970s on those who'd lived through the civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s, but it produces more of an "of course" or a "ho hum" reaction today. I don't know if the Richmond and Charlotte busing conflicts of the same era produced violence, but they certainly produced ill-feeling. Today, we see those conflicts more in a national light.

Is there any popular perception that racial tensions and hostility are less in the North than in the South? I'd say now that the popular perception is the opposite. The feeling is that Blacks have more of a stake and have taken more of a role or a place in the South than in the polyglot, impersonal North. This perception doesn't translate into a tolerance for slaveowners and segregationists, though. The idea of some seems to be that we have to keep discovering Northern vices in order to excuse Southern ones, but most Americans today see them as different aspects of the same American problems.

It does seem to be the case that in a city like Boston or Philadelphia the races are more separated, but are contemporary residential patterns in metropolitan Atlanta or Houston or Charlotte or Richmond really so different from those in the North? I don't know. My guess, though is that what gets attacked as "Northern" patterns of racial distribution is more like the modern suburban norm. One can certainly deplore that pattern if one wishes, but I get the feeling that the differences between the modern or post-modern, industrial or post-industrial North and South are more marginal than significant.

I suppose one can say that Boston or Detroit or Philadelphia are colder and more hostile than Southern cities if one wishes, but this perception will be tested and strained by current developments: the growth of sunbelt cities, gated communites and immigrant populations in the South.

[wardaddy]

Of course talk of Boston or the NYC draft riots is musty. So is going on and on about Jim Crow. Where one lives in the South is today based primarily on wealth. The South simply has more blacks and many are poor and they tend to live in clusters big and small. Here in Nashville where blacks are 20% of the city proper and 8% of metro which is small by Southern standards, blacks and whites in the lower economic strata are more and more living in the same environs and unfortunately adopting the lesser desirable traits of each other. I guess you could call that progress.

Likewise, wealthier blacks may live wherever they wish. It is only an issue here or elsewhere including the North when an area is in decline and poorer minorities move in. It's not a good sign for property values. That's just a fact. My hometown (Jackson)has turned into an East St Louis clone over the past 20 years and it's only going to get worse.

I think that racial distribution in housing today has little to do with race. It's just about money. Folks do usually wish to hang with their own kind the world over but I haven't seen any overt attempts at that in a long time around here. A real estate broker would have to be nuts to openly discriminate or discriminate in a subtle pattern in homeselling around here. Even the hint of it can ruin you. Now a number of brokers have been accused of white flight provocation in Deep South cities where declining home values in certain areas are ripe for this. They sell the black family's home moving "up" from the current ghetto, then they sell the white folks fleeeing from the declining old neighborhood which is soon to be ghetto-ized, and then they get to sell the whites their new home in the burbs. It's an opportunistic cycle. Here in Nashville, that is rarely an issue. It's more in the opposite direction were gentrification is overtaking decayed neighborhoods. They are so desperate in some areas, they will even gentrify and encircle a set of projects that was once deemed to be in an appropriate lower income area in which to place projects. Pockets of entrenched poverty in a sea of prosperity. It's nutty. Reminds me of when fancy co-ops started in Alphabet City in NYC.

Oddly, the Jackson busing alluded to caused no civil unrest but it sure prompted a surge in private schools which continues today.