Consider: in 1985, according to a Boston Redevelopment Authority
(BRA) study, blacks made up 25 percent of Boston's total
population – 76 percent of whom were concentrated in the
adjoining, and predominantly black, neighborhoods of Roxbury,
Mattapan, and South Dorchester. And while another 17 percent of
the city's blacks lived, according to the BRA study, in the
mostly white neighborhoods of Hyde Park, North Dorchester, and
the more evenly integrated Jamaica Plain, that can be attributed
less to integration than to an expansion of Boston's growing
minority population into areas that border the city's
established black core. Meanwhile, six of Boston's 16
neighborhoods were found to be more than 90 percent white. Four
of them – South Boston, Charlestown, East Boston, and downtown –
had zero percent blacks living in them; Allston-Brighton,
Roslindale, and West Roxbury all had black populations of two
percent or less. And according to 1980 census data of 22 cities
and towns surrounding Boston, 19 had black popula