Black/white segregation in Southern cities is lower than in Northern/Midwestern cities for several reasons. Historically, urban white Southerners used blacks as domestic servants, so urban life was always more residentially integrated than in the North, notwithstanding the post-Civil War segregation of public accommodations. Moreover, due to the disenfranchisement of blacks in the South until the late 1960s, and other means of maintaining white supremacy, white Southerners did not have to exclude blacks from their cities to retain a monopoly on power. Southern cities have also profited from more dynamic economies in the last 30 years than their Rust Belt counterparts, which has made residential patterns more fluid than in the North.

To learn more, see Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; Nancy Burns, The Formation of American Local Governments (Oxford University Press, 1994); Robert Bullard, Glenn Johnson, and Angel Torres, eds., Sprawl City : Race, Politics, & Planning in Atlanta (Island Press, 2000).