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Blacks and other peoples of color. And within what must objectively be considered
the shared American cultural matrix, there was and is a severe division that tends to
declare one portion inferior and in a certain sense non-American. African
Americans and, say, Irish Americans may both be ethnic groups, but they are ethnic
groups of different types.
Demographically speaking, Baltimore in 1930 had a distinctive place among
U.S. cities in relation to the two basic processes of ethnic subordination and
assimilation, as indicated by a comparison of the proportions of European ethnic
populations and African American populations in various cities of that era. Table
3-1 lists the percentages of the populations of selected Northern and Southern cities
that were European immigrant, European immigrant plus white native born with at
least one European-born parent (approximating the first two generations of
immigrant ethnicity), and native-born Black. Baltimore, true to its "border city"
character, was right in the middle. It had significantly more European immigrants
and ethnics than the Southern cities, but significantly less than the Northern ones; it
had qualitatively less African Americans than the much of the urban South, but
qualitatively more than the urban North.
The demographic distinctiveness - the "in-betweeness" — of Baltimore's
place, as indicated by the table, was even more dramatic before the great Black
migration from the South in the 1910s and 1920s, especially when contrasted to the
other port cities of the North Atlantic. Unlike Baltimore, much of the Black
population of these Northern cities, especially those most accessible to the rural
South, came with this demographic movement. Baltimore's Black population in
1910 was 15.5% as against 17.7% in 1930, while those of Philadelphia, New York,
and Boston in that year were 4.8%, 2.7%, and 2.0% respectively in
1910 as against 11.3%, 4.7%, and 2.6% in 1930. However, while by 1930 some
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