Name: Dividing Lines: How Norfolk remains deeply segregated, in 8 maps
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Dividing Lines: How Norfolk remains deeply segregated, in 8 maps

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NORFOLK — Norfolk’s segregation isn’t hard to see. The city is close to half Black and half white, according to the most recent Census data. But there aren’t a lot of neighborhoods where you see that kind of split. By and large, there are Black neighborhoods and there are white neighborhoods, especially in the older core of Norfolk. Decisions made 60, 80 or 100 years ago segregated neighborhoods by race and deprived Black residents of economic and educational resources afforded to those in white neighborhoods. Advertisement Many Black residents were left trapped in crumbling communities with few options for escape. Over the past several decades, even as some of the country’s racial divisions have narrowed, the barriers between Norfolk neighborhoods have remained remarkably firm. You can see them from ground level and — even more clearly — from above. Look at a map showing the city’s racial divisions and compare it to maps showing poverty, education and health. It’s hard to tell them apart. So, to kick off a project exploring the city’s divisions, The Pilot is showing you what they look like. In an upcoming installment, we’ll take a deeper dive into how they got this way. Norfolk wasn’t always this segregated. During Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War, whites and Blacks lived alongside each other. One historian described Norfolk’s streets before the turn of the century like the keyboard of a piano — white households and Black ones side by side like alternating keys. Even 1910 census data — the earliest that can be reliably translated into maps — shows neighborhoods tended to be more mixed than today. Norfolk’s segregation didn’t happen by accident. It happened by design, guided by powerful people and institutions. Starting in the early 1900s, after Reconstruction ended, racist laws and housing covenants began to take root, pushing Black residents out of certain areas of the city. Below is perhaps the most well-known example of government-induced segregation: the redlining maps. The federal government released them between the late 1930′s and the early 1940′s to tell banks and mortgage lenders where it was safe to invest and where it wasn’t. Most white neighborhoods were marked in green and blue, indicating a safe place to lend money and build new homes. Black neighborhoods were marked in red, indicating a dangerous investment. This formalized discrimination in lending ultimately trapped these Black neighborhoods in a cycle of disinvestment and poverty. The economic damage was so profound that it still dictates the geography of cities around the nation 80 years later. As you can see, the same neighborhoods that were redlined in 1940 are still almost entirely Black, 80 years later. And the few redlined neighborhoods that were mixed or largely white in 1940 are significantly Blacker today. The push for residential segregation in the city was driven, at least in part, by an effort to keep schools segregated. And it worked, until the federal government and courts forced integration. Forced integration meant sending students to schools outside their neighborhoods, because each community was nearly all one race and integration wouldn’t happen otherwise. You may know these types of student assignments as “busing,” but the opposition to busing, in Norfolk and other communities, generally wasn’t about the transportation students took to get to school. In the 1980s, Norfolk became the first city to be relieved from its federally mandated busing obligations, arguing that segregation was over and children deserved to attend neighborhood schools. But the neighborhoods were still segregated. Which meant the schools were re-segregated. Now, in a city where the population is split evenly between white and Black residents, some schools are more than 95% Black. The school system as a whole is just under 60% Black and about 20% white. This segregation has consequences beyond the race of the family next door or the makeup of the student body at a school. Black neighborhoods in Norfolk are poorer than white ones. Blacker neighborhoods also have higher poverty, lower household incomes and lower home values. And they have worse educational attainment. It’s true a handful of working-class white neighborhoods in Norfolk are predominantly high-school educated. But many others have the highest levels of education. In those formerly-redlined, Black neighborhoods, residents are far more likely to drop out of high school or never go to college. Race and class also heavily influence how long people live and how healthy they are. The neighborhoods in Norfolk with the lowest life expectancy, the worst access to medical care, the highest rates of diabetes, asthma and coronary heart disease, are consistently the city’s poor, Black and brown neighborhoods. The inverse is also true — study after study has shown that quality of life, incomes, health and educational outcomes all improve for residents in socioeconomically mixed neighborhoods. And it isn’t just the residents of these poor communities that benefit. One recent study of Chicago argues that segregation doesn’t just damage the economic prospects of the residents of the impoverished neighborhoods — it costs that city $4.4 billion a year in lost potential economic activity. But even today, residents of historically white neighborhoods in Norfolk the of housing. Segregation in Norfolk did not happen by accident. It’s unlikely to be undone without deliberate efforts. This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program. Johnny Finn, an associate professor at Christopher Newport University and the director of the Living Together/Living Apart Project, assisted The Virginian-Pilot with data collection, mapping and analysis for this piece. Ryan Murphy, 757-739-8582, Sara Gregory, 757-469-7484, ___ All 2018 demographic and economic data are from the U.S. Census American Community Survey (2014-2018), and data on the changing racial geography of Norfolk from 1950-2010 are based on the decennial U.S. Census. Both are used courtesy of IPUMS NHGIS at the University of Minnesota. Data on the changing racial geography of Norfolk from 1900-1940 are based on the decennial U.S. census and used courtesy of the Urban Transition Historical GIS Project at Brown University. The original and digitized versions of the 1940 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation “Redlining Map” of the city of Norfolk are used courtesy of the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab. All health data are based on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “Places” project. Data on the racial make-up of elementary, middle, and high schools in Norfolk are from the Virginia Department of Education and are based on school zone boundaries accessed via the city’s open data website. Advertisement Advertisement

NORFOLK — Norfolk’s segregation isn’t hard to see. The city is close to half Black and half white, according to the most recent Census data. But there aren’t a lot of neighborhoods where you see that kind of split. By and large, there are Black neighborhoods and there are white neighborhoods, especially in the older core of Norfolk. Decisions made 60, 80 or 100 years ago segregated neighborhoods by race and deprived Black residents of economic and educational resources afforded to those in white neighborhoods. Advertisement Many Black residents were left trapped in crumbling communities...

Dividing Lines: How Norfolk remains deeply segregated, in 8 maps

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