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Originally Posted by Crawford
I'm not getting the difference here. When Harlem became a black community 100 years ago, the whites generally left. When some sprawlburb of Atlanta or DC becomes a black community today, the whites leave.
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The term "white flight" was developed to describe a particular period in U.S. history, and happened for a particular set of historical reasons. Just because the white percentage in an area declines does not mean the population is moving away. For example, it could be differences in birth rates, or newer higher-density development which nonwhites move into. And even if the population does move away, it doesn't mean that it was fleeing, or if it was fleeing, it had anything to do with racial animus.
For example, consider some of the dying small towns of the Coal Region of PA. Basically the jobs in these areas dried up generations ago, with the population disproportionately elderly and shrinking (the children have long since moved on). In some of these towns, there has been a big influx in recent years of Latinos, who are moving there because there is a lot of dirt-cheap vacant housing and they aren't that far of a commute away from family in the New York area. The white population declined, and the Latino population boomed, but the latter didn't cause the former. Hence it's hard for me to see calling it "white flight" in the classic sense.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Blacks migrated to Northern cities to escape white mobs in the rural south? I don't think this is generally true. There was horrible oppression, of course, but but the movement north was due to a number of economic and social factors.
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No, in the rural north.
Immediately after the Civil War, there was a modest migration of blacks to the north. They mostly moved to rural areas and small towns, which made sense, considering at that time most black people were from rural areas as well. The first few decades after the civil war, these small black communities were tolerated, but as white supremacy became more prominent in the North (known as the "nadir of race relations" by historians), these communities became less and less tolerant of the few blacks in their midst. They were chased out by armed mobs, or in some cases by the passage of "sundown" laws, which made it illegal for any black people to be in town after the sun went down.
This book is a very good primer, if you have the time.