Informal Social Ties Among Urban Black Americans

Reports over the last several years have been forming a profile of social organization among blacks in the United States that has balanced and corrected the overly emphasized and sometimes inaccurate view of the disorganized and pathological community life of urban blacks cited in often quoted works (for example, Myrdal, 1964; Clark, 1965; Moynihan, 1965). General studies of ethnic subcommunities by Whyte (1948), Gans (1962), Suttles (1968), Hannerz (1969), and Stack (1974) have demonstrated that ghettoes are often highly complex and organized, and bear little resemblance to the stereotype image of the disorganized neighborhood. The applicability of this generalization to the black low income ghetto has been a specific aim of the more recent studies. On another front, studies of formal participation among blacks and whites have shown that black participation is not necessarily lower as had been previously reported (Wright and Hyman, 1958), but may be associated with lower socioeconomic status (Orum, 1966) and, especially when controls are introduced, is generally much higher and extensive than often imagined (Babchuk and Thompson, 1962; Renzi, 1968; Olsen, 1970; Williams et al., 1973; Antunes and Gaitz, 1975). Evidence on black informal social participation, however, has been even less frequently reported. Yet, such informal participation has been identified as particularly critical for the basic fabric of community organization (Liebow, 1967;