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Despite its reputation as a hotbed for abolitionist sentiment in the nineteenth century, Boston never fully granted its Black population substantive political and economic equality. The city had a small but segregated Black population before the Civil War, which grew in the early twentieth century as Black families moved from the U.S. South as well as from overseas. While Boston and Massachusetts had relatively few outright legal restrictions on where Black people could live, a more sinister pattern of racist exclusion stood in the way of both spatial and social integration. In the years after World War II, as white people and their money increasingly fled outside of city lines to the car-dependent suburbs, the neighborhoods where Black residents lived suffered from disinvestment. Fights over school boundaries and where to direct redevelopment funds illustrated just how entrenched the “color line” had become in Boston. Political and social struggles to build a more just racial geography in the Boston region are ongoing today, even as contemporary maps continue to document stark racial inequalities.
