January 17, 2003 communication from George Stanley, Journal Sentinel Managing Editor, to John Logan:

Dear Dr. Logan:

I am responding to the email messages you sent to several of our editors. Thank you for the letter to the editor; we will be publishing it Sunday's newspaper.

I discussed with Bruce Murphy the points you made in your email message. Your own segregation table is titled "Black-White Segregation in Top 50 Metro Areas'' and this is how it was widely reported in the media, including this newspaper. Although elsewhere on your web site you explain that this table does not include cities with fewer than 50,000 African Americans (as Murphy accurately reported in his series), your table does not identify it this way. Nor did you ask newspapers, including this one, for a correction when we misreported the numbers as representing the top 50 metro areas the first time around. In fact, the table includes Shreveport, LA, which is the 130th largest metro area in the United States. Twelve of the true top 50 metro areas do not appear in your table despite its title and how it has been described in widespread reports. You told Murphy that there was no scientific basis for leaving places like Salt Lake City and Orange County off the list.

The series never said that you relied only on the dissimilarity index for your research. You did say, however, that it is by far the most popular index used by academics in this area of study. It also is the measure that has brought the most attention to Milwaukee and other northern cities, labeling them as the most segregated in America. The UWM methodology found a higher number of integrated neighborhoods in these cities than in many others, including western cities that rate high in the widely reported dissimilarity index.

Every sociologist Murphy interviewed for the series said that the research in the field has focused on census tracts, not city blocks. Your website reveals no block level analysis that may have been done by you, and you told Murphy you hadn't analyzed block-level data since 1990. The site merely lists an Associated Press news story that provided some block level data.

UWM's block-level analysis is quite different from previous research because it picks up both more and less integration than an approach that averages the integration for the 125 blocks in a typical census tract.

When researching the story, Murphy asked for your opinion of an approach that measures what percent of the population lived on blocks that were at least 20% black and 20% white. You told him: "I think it's a useful measure. It measures something important about neighborhoods.'' This is how he reported it in the series.

After talking to Murphy, I don't see anything at this point that needs to be corrected. Please let me know if you think there are factual errors that I overlooked.

Sincerely,

George Stanley
managing editor
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel