Black flight

Movement from urban to suburban areas is often thought of as occurring primarily among whites. However, middle-class African Americans have also been leaving cities for suburbs, often settling in primarily Black suburbs.

In the decades following World War II, the United States became an increasingly suburban nation as Americans left cities for suburbs. During the 1940s, the federal government began guaranteeing mortgage loans in order to encourage Americans to become homeowners. These mortgage guarantees went primarily to those buying homes in the suburbs, and they frequently underwrote home ownership in neighborhoods that intentionally excluded Black people. At the same time, the growing use of private automobiles and the construction of the interstate highway system encouraged movement to the suburbs.

As the white population became more suburban, the Black population became more urban. Early in the twentieth century, the African American population had been primarily rural. As agriculture became more mechanized, however, they began moving to urban areas. Black concentration in cities, like white concentration in suburbs, was encouraged by the federal government. The federal Public Housing Administration established public housing largely in central city areas and restricted residence in public housing to the most economically disadvantaged. Because African Americans were proportionately much more likely to be poor than whites were, the availability of public housing in cities combined with housing discrimination in the suburbs to bring Black Americans into urban areas.

By the 1970s, white movement from the cities to the suburbs had become known as “white flight.” Many observers of current events believed that whites were fleeing the cities to get away from Black residents. The racial integration of schools, and especially the busing of children to achieve racial integration, may have contributed to the movement of whites out of the cities, although social scientists continue to debate this point.

However, white individuals and families were not the only ones to move to the suburbs. After the 1960s, the middle-class African American population grew rapidly, and suburban housing became more widely available to them due to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which outlawed housing discrimination (although the practice continued due to weak enforcement provisions). During the 1970s, the African American suburban population of the United States grew at an annual rate of 4 percent, while the White suburban population grew at a rate of only 1.5 percent. African American movement to the suburbs, labeled “Black flight” by some social scientists, continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It was driven by many of the same factors that had been driving “White flight”: the concentration of the poor in central city areas, the deteriorating condition of urban neighborhoods and schools, and the availability of suburban housing.

Black movement to the suburbs did not, however, lead to fully integrated neighborhoods across the United States. Instead, as sociologists Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton maintained, African Americans tended to move into majority Black suburban neighborhoods. Thus, “Black flight” further concentrated minority poverty in the inner city by removing the middle class from inner-city neighborhoods, while largely failing to integrate the American suburbs.

During the twenty-first century, especially during the housing crisis of 2007, the COVID-19 pandemic, and inflation hikes of the 2020s, factors such as a lack of available and new housing shifted Black flight as more African Americans and Black people returned to the South to find more affordable and ideal housing. The Brookings Institute, in a paper published in 2022, called this the "New Great Migration." It notes there was also a rise in certain states experiencing an out-migration of Black people, such as California, as they moved to states such as Nevada and Arizona. Another noted trend was the movement of highly educated African Americans and Black people to economically prosperous areas of the South.

Bibliography

Butler, Tim, and Paul Watt. Understanding Social Inequality. Sage, 2007.

de Graaf, Lawrence B. "African American Suburbanization in California, 1960 through 1990." Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California. Ed. de Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Qunitard Taylor. Autry Museum of Western Heritage, 2001. 405–49.

Demsas, Jerusalem. “Why Are Black Families Leaving Cities?” The Atlantic, 6 Sept. 2022, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/black-families-leaving-cities-suburbs/671331/. Accessed 26 Oct. 2024.

Frey, William H. “New Great Migration: Black Americans Return South.” Brookings Institution, 12 Sept. 2022, www.brookings.edu/articles/a-new-great-migration-is-bringing-black-americans-back-to-the-south/. Accessed 26 Oct. 2024.

Hatchett, David. "The Black Flight to the 'Burbs.'" Crisis Jan. 1995: 30.

Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Harvard UP, 1993.

Perkiss, Abigail. Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia. Cornell UP, 2014. Print.

Woldoff, Rachael A. White Flight/Black Flight: The Dynamics of Racial Change in an American Neighborhood. Cornell UP, 2011. Print.