White Flight

White flight is defined as whites moving away out of urban areas, and it started after World War II. Suburbs were built and white flight took off. This movement became rampant again in the 1970s when schools started integrating. White segregationists simply moved to all-white communities in order to avoid having to send their children to integrated schools. Although historians claim there many reasons why whites have left cities, one reason remains clear. Undeniably, the main reason for white flight was to avoid integration.

One city greatly affected by white flight was Chicago. Starting in the 1940s and continuing all the way through the 1990s, white population in neighborhoods and counties throughout the city plummeted. Looking at maps of racial demographics collected from each decade, counties that were predominately white before World War II became predominately black over the next following years [1]. Chicago’s whitest neighborhoods have a presence of black citizens, but the black neighborhoods have almost no white citizens. An article in NBC Chicago states, “The absolute most racially polarized neighborhood in Chicago is Englewood, which is 98.5 percent black, 0.6 percent white and 0.4 percent Latino” [2]. This further confirms that fact that whites, not blacks, intentionally relocated with the intention of leaving intgregated communities. This sad reality is coined in a saying: “Integration is the period between the arrival of the first black and the departure of the last white”[1].

            Although some may claim that reasons other than race drew whites away from the cities, a journalist from the New York Times did a study showing otherwise. She compared the numbers of black migration into cities versus the numbers of whites leaving cities from 1940 to 1970. Her numbers were clear: “for every black arrival, two whites left the central city” [3]. Though some may blame economic problems for this change, the stats show the truth. Whites left as blacks came in. Even if some white people try and defend themselves or offer alternate theories as to the causation of white flight, this study makes it clear that racism was the root issue. As black people started moving into the cities, white people moved out even faster. This is heartbreaking, but shining a light on reality is the first step in getting to the root of the problem and trying to establish a new path for the future.

            From 2000 to 2010, the census for Chicago showed that there was little to no change in racial demographics, concluding that white flight has finally subsided. There still remains the problem, though, of segregation. Although systematic segregation is illegal, cities are essentially still segregated. The effects of white flight are evident all around us, and probably will remain that way society somehow knocks down the invisible walls that physically separate people.

Erbentraut, Joseph. “Chicago Racial Demographics, 1910-2000.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 29 Jan. 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/29/chicago-racial-demographi_n_2575921.html.

McClelland, Edward. “White Flight, By The Numbers.” NBC Chicago, NBC Chicago, 6 May 2013, www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/White-Flight-By-The-Numbers-206302551.html.

Boustan, Leah. “The Culprits Behind White Flight.” The New York Times, The New York Times,15 May 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/opinion/white-flight.html