Was the Late 19th Century a Golden Age of Racial Integration?

Cutler, Glaeser, and Vigdor (JPE 1999) find evidence that the late 19th century was a period of relatively low residential segregation between blacks and whites. Segregation increased substantially from 1890 to 1940 and, despite falling since 1970, remained considerably higher in 1990 than in 1890. Their segregation measure is a weighted average of within-city segregation indices. It does not reflect segregation between cities, which fell sharply over the period as blacks moved from "ghetto cities" in the south to "ghettos within cities" in the north. We study a variety of segregation indices that reflect both within- and between-city segregation. With these improved measures, we find that segregation increased only slightly from 1890 to 1940. In addition, U.S. cities were less segregated in 1990 than in 1890