191 p., How does recent black migration impact Atlanta's geographies of black life? Since 1990, the Atlanta metropolitan region has become a major destination for three groups of black migrants from disparate origins: native-born "return south" blacks from other U.S. regions, Afro-Caribbean immigrants, and sub-Saharan African immigrants. These migrants' ethnic diversity dismantles existing notions of "black" culture, politics, and place. Black Migration to Atlanta revises scholarship by demonstrating that we cannot understand the complexity of black lives in Atlanta without investigating the complex relationship between space, migration, and popular culture. Atlanta emerges not just as an urban core, but as a region --a multiplicity of metropolitan sites--imagined and contested through residential patterns, commercial geographies, and popular culture's attempts to accommodate cultural and geographic shifts brought by recent black migration.
155 p., The present dissertation examines nativity-status and place-of-birth-differences in locational outcomes among native-born black American, and foreign-born black Caribbean and black African households. The main objective is to evaluate the degree to which the spatial assimilation model, which was formulated to capture the experience of white European ethnic groups arriving to the U.S. during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, can describe the outcomes of black immigrant ethnic groups arriving to the U.S. in the late twentieth century. Using data from the five percent Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the 2000 Census extracted from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), I investigate the degree to which native-born black Americans and foreign-born black Caribbeans and black Africans are able to translate their individual-level socioeconomic status attainments, such as income and educational levels, into residence in suburban versus central-city neighborhoods. In addition I also test to see if black immigrants' returns to their socioeconomic attainments differed from those of native-born blacks. This study contributes to the literature on immigrant socioeconomic and locational attainment in three ways. First, it revisits traditional residential assimilation theories, and attempts to identify the factors that enable black immigrants to reside in qualitatively different neighborhoods compared to those in which native-born black Americans reside. Second, it examines intra-ethnic black locational outcomes by place-of-birth/national origin status. Finally, up-to-date census data will provide an updated snapshot of black immigrants' socioeconomic and residential status attainments, an important endeavor given the large increase in size and diversity for this population.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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240 p., Survey and focus group sampling of students in high achieving schools compared to lower achieving schools were used to examine why there are fewer black men graduating from high schools in New York City as well as high schools around the country compared to other groups of students. Race is disaggregated in order to look at the difference in achievement rates for African American, black Hispanic, African, and Afro-Caribbean men.
