“White Flight”

recently wrote an article about what it was like for elderly white citizens, but particularly women, to be left behind in a formerly all-white neighborhood that had turned predominately black by 1980. In short, the experience was harrowing. It included harassment, burglary, robbery, home invasion, physical assault, and sexual violence. Most on the Left would prefer to forget about that saga. They prefer to remember an image of Martin Luther King Jr. walking arm-in-arm with fellow protesters through the streets of Selma as emblematic of the period.

The term “white flight” has a strong negative connotation in polite society. It is a term often used to tar the motives of my father’s generation who, after returning from service in WWII, chose to live in the suburbs rather than return to the confines of the cities in which they had grown up. Their motives were many; however, as white flight continued throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, there is no question that it was driven by the knowledge that city neighborhoods that were formerly inhabitable were falling into disarray with the influx of blacks that had moved there. To say otherwise, flies in the face of what was observed at the time and exists today in tangible form in cities like Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Newark, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, to name a few.