Racial residential segregation remains a fact of life in small cities towns across the South, but few studies examine these forms of racial segregation or its consequences. The purpose of this proposal is to investigate racial residential segregation in southern towns, determining how best to measure it and establishing the foundation for research on its consequences. Our preliminary CIS studies indicate that segregation in southern towns differs substantially from the well-documented urban patterns. The smaller scale of towns reduces isolation and increases interaction between blacks and whites; the black population is more likely to be fragmented into several areas; black neighborhoods are located on the edges of towns as well as within town boundaries; and the segregation is political, with black areas systematically excluded from towns by administrative decisions made by elected and appointed officials. This pattern of small scale and fragmented distribution of races means that some existing segregation indices miss aspects of segregation in these towns. The exclusion of blacks just outside the corporate limits presents a challenge in applying segregation indices because the appropriate geographic boundary is unclear. No existing measure of segregation fully reveals the gerrymandered exclusion of blacks. We will use measures of segregation appropriate to the dimensions of segregation found outside large urban areas, thus moving beyond descriptions of the apparent patterns of segregation shown in maps. Well-established measures, such as the Dissimilarity Index, will be adapted to the small-town patterns. To measure appropriate political gerrymandering, we will adapt software developed for analysis in landscape ecology. We expect to find that the ongoing process of segregation in small towns is a function of the politics of growth and annexation. Census data will be used to examine how these trends have affected racial composition and segregation. We present and test three hypotheses addressing the process of racial exclusion. ? ? ? ?
