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Why African-Americans left the south in droves — and what's bringing them back

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Although migration from the South had contributed to Chicago’s black community since the 1840s, the city offered few opportunities to dissatisfied black southerners until World War I. Chicago, like the rest of the North, offered freedom from legally sanctioned racial discrimination, bu…

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The hokey style of 1950s educational films makes them richly mockable today. But the real kicker is that they were preemptively mocked decades before they even peaked.

Welcome to , where we'll be firing up the flux capacitor and bringing you 1950s know-how on everything from casserole-making to fallout-shelter-building to the joys of letting kids relax and play with trash.
In 1968, a commissioned retrospective of Encyclopedia Britannica Films, one of the leading companies behind those black-and-white educational films, quoted The New Yorker 's snobbish reaction to the birth of the genre in 1929:

We are troubled by the haunting dread of living in a completely canned civilization where everyone will look like Clara Bow and talk like Eddie Leonard. Without doubting Mr. Fox's honorable intention, we are nonetheless anxious to know whether the talkies are going to approach science and education the way they have approached life. We want to know whether they intend to give truth a happy ending!

While this quote was resurfaced as a gentle "we sure showed them," in hindsight it predicted everything we'd come to think of these films: that they're fatuous, simplistic, and eager to fit all of America into the same well-behaved, charming (and white and Christian) mold.

For decades, EBF (first as ERPI Classroom Films) and competitors like Centron Corporation and Coronet Films produced educational films to be projected in the classroom. They covered traditional school subjects like crustacean biology and the . But the films that loom large in the public memory are the ones that taught children how to behave: how to practice hygiene, social skills, and planning. The Prelinger Archives has both types, in its collections of 41 Centron films and 223 Encyclopædia Britannica Films. Here are some of the best-and what they reveal about the time period.

In , a girl named Adrelene has such bad posture that her bedroom mirror calls her out on it. The film blames all kinds of medical issues on bad posture, and recommends solutions like scheduled rest and well-constructed shoes. In Care of the Hair and Nails, the boy Stanley learns hygiene tips to maintain all his dead cells and not end up a shaggy claw monster. So far so good; while dated, these videos teach habits that we still value today.

But outdated societal roles loom over even the most innocent of these films, and most of the time they barge right into the center. In Why Study Industrial Arts? a boy learns how shop class will prepare him for a life as an engineer, builder, or architect. In Why Study Home Economics? a girl learns how home ec will prepare her for a life as a housewife. (The latter pays some lip service to college prep, for girls who don't get married "right away.")

teaches how much middle-class Americans have to be thankful for, even in hard times, through the eyes of a garage mechanic's family who can't afford a Thanksgiving turkey. The family's list of blessings includes material possessions and conveniences, and a long list of American values like freedom of speech, privacy, and the right to choose a job. The family is white.

Adults got their own film indoctrinations from companies like Sutherland Productions. The 1949 educational cartoon tells workers that wages will catch up to prices if only workers increase productivity-no need to blame the owners and managers if you can't afford your company's own product! And the cartoon It's Everybody's Business, commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce, presents the 40-hour workweek as the natural result of American capitalism, and not the result of government regulation and prolonged worker action fought at every step by corporations.

Today, in-school films are more widely sourced; educational TV provides its own perspectives, and millions of educational videos bloom on YouTube. Now that production requirements are little more than a computer and a smartphone, a classroom can enjoy perspectives that aren't so mainstream and well-funded. Of course, even the best of these might look laughable in another half-century.

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The 1950s Educational Films That Taught Kids How to Live

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The hokey style of 1950s educational films makes them richly mockable today. But the real kicker is that they were preemptively mocked decades before they even peaked. Welcome to , where we'll be firing up the flux capacitor and bringing you 1950s know-how on everything from casserole-making to fallout-shelter-building to the joys of letting kids relax and play with trash.

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Housing Segregation and Redlining in America: A Short History | Code Switch | NPR

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While the electric streetcar of the late-nineteenth century facilitated the outward movement of the well to do, the seeds of a suburban nation were planted in the mid-twentieth century. At the height of the Great Depression, in 1932, some 250,000 households lost their property to foreclosure. A year later, half of all U.S. mortgages were in default. The foreclosure rate stood at more than a 1,000 per day. In response, FDR's New Deal created the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), which began purchasing and refinancing existing mortgages at risk of default. HOLC introduced the amortized mortgage, allowing borrowers to pay back interest and principle over twenty to thirty years instead of the then standard five-year mortgage that carried large balloon payments at the end of the contract. Though homeowners paid more for their homes under this new system, home-ownership was opened to the multitudes who could now gain residential stability, lower monthly mortgage payments, and accrue equity and wealth as property values rose over time.

Additionally, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), another New Deal organization, increased access to homeownership by insuring mortgages and protecting lenders from financial loss in the event of a default. Though only slightly more than a third of homes had an FHA backed mortgage by 1964, FHA backed loans had a ripple effect with private lenders granting more and more home loans even to non-FHA backed mortgages. Though started in the midst of the Great Depression, the effects of government programs and subsidies like HOLC and the FHA were fully felt in the postwar economy and fueled the growth of homeownership and the rise of the suburbs.

Though domestic spending programs like HOLC and FHA helped create the outlines of the new consumer economy, United States involvement and the Allied victory in World War II pushed the country out of depression and into a sustained economic boom. Wartime spending exploded and, after the war, sustained spending fueled further growth. Government expenditures provided loans to veterans, subsidized corporate research and development, and built the Interstate Highway System. In the decades after World War II, business boomed, unionization peaked, wages rose, and sustained growth buoyed a new consumer economy. The Servicemen's Readjustment Act (The G.I. Bill), passed in 1944, offered low-interest home loans, a stipend to attend college, loans to start a business, and unemployment benefits.

The rapid growth of homeownership and the rise of suburban communities helped drive the postwar economic boom. Suburban neighborhoods of single-family homes tore their way through the outskirts of cities. William Levitt built the first Levittown, the archetype suburban community, in 1946 in Long Island, New York. Purchasing mass acreage, "subdividing" lots, and contracted crews to build countless homes at economies of scale, Levitt offered affordable suburban housing to veterans and their families. Levitt became the prophet of the new suburbs, heralding a massive internal migration. The country's suburban share of the population rose from 19.5% in 1940 to 30.7% by 1960. Homeownership rates rose from 44% in 1940 to almost 62% in 1960. Between 1940 and 1950, suburban communities of greater than 10,000 people grew 22.1%, and planned communities grew at an astonishing rate of 126.1%. As historian Lizabeth Cohen notes, these new suburbs "mushroomed in territorial size and the populations they harbored." Between 1950 and 1970, America's suburban population nearly doubled to 74 million, with 83 percent of all population growth occurring in suburban places.

The postwar construction boom fed into countless industries. As manufacturers converted back to consumer goods after the war, and as the suburbs developed, appliance and automobile sales rose dramatically. Flush with rising wages and wartime savings, homeowners also used newly created installment plans to buy new consumer goods at once instead of saving for years to make major purchases. The mass-distribution of credit cards, first issued in 1950, further increased homeowners' access to credit. Fueled by credit and no longer stymied by the Depression or wartime restrictions, consumers bought countless washers, dryers, refrigerators, freezers, and, suddenly, televisions. The percentage of Americans that owned at least one television increased from 12% in 1950 to more than 87% in 1960. This new suburban economy also led to increased demand for automobiles. The percentage of American families owning cars increased from 54% in 1948 to 74% in 1959. Motor fuel consumption rose from some 22 million gallons in 1945 to around 59 million gallons in 1958.

The rise of the suburbs transformed America's countryside as suburban growth reclaimed millions of acres of rural space, turning agrarian communities into suburban landscapes. As suburban homeowners retreated from the cities into new developments, new developments wrenched more and more agricultural workers off the land, often pushing them into the very cities that suburbanites were fleeing.

The process of suburbanization drove the movement of Americans and turned the wheels of the new consumer economy. Seen from a macroeconomic level, the postwar economic boom turned America into a land of economic abundance. For advantaged buyers, loans had never been easier to attain, consumer goods had never been more accessible, and well-paying jobs had never been more abundant. And yet, beneath the aggregate numbers, patterns of racial disparity, sexual discrimination, and economic inequality persevered and questioned man of the assumptions of an Affluent Society.

In 1939 real estate appraisers arrived in sunny Pasadena, California. Armed with elaborate questionnaires to evaluate the city's building conditions, the appraisers were well-versed in the policies of the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC). In one neighborhood, the majority of structures were rated in "fair" repair and it was noted that there was a lack of "construction hazards or flood threats." However, appraisers concluded that the area "is detrimentally affected by 10 owner occupant Negro families." While "the Negroes are said to be of the better class," the appraisers concluded, "it seems inevitable that ownership and property values will drift to lower levels."

While suburbanization and the new consumer economy produced unprecedented wealth and affluence, the fruits of this economic and spatial abundance did not reach all Americans equally. The new economic structures and suburban spaces of the postwar period produced perhaps as much inequality as affluence. Wealth created by the booming economy filtered through social structures with built-in privileges and prejudices. Just when many middle and lower class white American families began their journey of upward mobility by moving to the suburbs with the help of government spending and government programs such as the FHA and the GI Bill, many African Americans and other racial minorities found themselves systematically shut out.

A look at the relationship between federal organizations such as the HOLC and FHA and private banks, lenders, and real estate agents tells the story of standardized policies that produced a segregated housing market. At the core of HOLC appraisal techniques, which private parties also adopted, was the pernicious insistence that mixed-race and minority dominated neighborhoods were credit risks. In partnership with local lenders and real estate agents, HOLC created Residential Security Maps to identify high and low risk-lending areas. People familiar with the local real estate market filled out uniform surveys on each neighborhood. Relying on this information, HOLC assigned every neighborhood a letter grade from A to D and a corresponding color code. The least secure, highest risk neighborhoods for loans received a D grade and the color red. Banks refused to loan money in these "redlined" areas.

Phrases like "subversive racial elements" and "racial hazards" pervade the redlined area description files of surveyors and HOLC officials. Los Angeles' Echo Park neighborhood, for instance, had concentrations of Japanese and African Americans and a "sprinkling of Russians and Mexicans." The HOLC security map and survey noted that the neighborhood's "adverse racial influences which are noticeably increasing inevitably presage lower values, rentals and a rapid decrease in residential desirability."

While the HOLC was a fairly short-lived New Deal agency, the influence of its security maps lived on in the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) and the GI Bill dispensing Veteran's Administration (VA). Both of these government organizations, which set the standard that private lenders followed, refused to back bank mortgages that did not adhere to HOLC's security maps. On the one hand FHA and VA backed loans were an enormous boon to those who qualified for them. Millions of Americans received mortgages that they otherwise would not have qualified for. But FHA-backed mortgages were not available to all. Racial minorities could not get loans for property improvements in their own neighborhoods-seen as credit risks-and were denied mortgages to purchase property in other areas for fear that their presence would extend the red line into a new community. Levittown, the poster-child of the new suburban America, only allowed whites to purchase homes. Thus HOLC policies and private developers increased home ownership and stability for white Americans while simultaneously creating and enforcing racial segregation.

The exclusionary structures of the postwar economy pushed African Americans and other minorities to protest. Over time the federal government attempted to rectify the racial segregation created, or at least facilitated, in part by its own policies. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer struck down explicitly racial neighborhood housing covenants, making it illegal to explicitly consider race when selling a house. It would be years, however, until housing acts passed in the 1960s could provide some federal muscle to complement grassroots attempts to ensure equal access.

During the 1950s and early 1960s many Americans retreated to the suburbs to enjoy the new consumer economy and search for some normalcy and security after the instability of depression and war. But many could not. It was both the limits and opportunities of housing that shaped the contours of postwar American society.

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While the electric streetcar of the late-nineteenth century facilitated the outward movement of the well to do, the seeds of a suburban nation were planted in the mid-twentieth century. At the height of the Great Depression, in 1932, some 250,000 households lost their property to foreclosure. A year later, half of all U.S.

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If there's one thing I've learned over the past couple years, it's that migration patterns are the building blocks of cities. People, and the things that attract them to the city, shape the city form and future. People, and the things that repel them from the city, shape the city form and future, too. Urbanists owe it to themselves to understand earlier migration forces and their impacts, so we can understand the context of current transitions. A recent deep dive I did into scholarly research on the relationship of the African-American Great Migration, white flight and the subsequent impact on central cities gives a great sense of where cities have been and where they're headed in the near future.

UCLA economics professor Leah Platt Boustan has quickly become a favorite of mine, and I cannot figure out why her research has not become more well-known within the urbanist community. She's done some excellent research over the last ten years on the Great Migration of blacks from the rural South to Northern cities that started after World War I and continued through the 1960's, and also the mass migration from Europe that preceded it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her studies include some interesting findings that are worthy of discussion. Here's the abstract from a 2007 paper she did on the Great Migration:

"Residential segregation by jurisdiction generates disparities in public services and education. The distinctive American pattern - in which blacks live in cities and whites in suburbs - was enhanced by a large black migration from the rural South. I show that whites responded to this black influx by leaving cities and rule out an indirect effect on housing prices as a sole cause. I instrument for changes in black population by using local economic conditions to predict black migration from southern states and assigning predicted flows to northern cities according to established settlement patterns. The best causal estimates imply that each black arrival led to 2.7 white departures."

Emphasis added. Boustan is clear that many factors were involved in the making of this correlation. Wealth created by improved economic productivity, particularly after World War II, gave many white residents the resources to seek new housing in suburban locales. The growth and expansion of the Interstate highway system helped to facilitate that. The G.I. Bill offered incentives for veterans to purchase homes, and mortgage finance reforms established during the New Deal firmly took root after the War. But two things were evident when looking at the correlation -- 1) once the Great Migration started in 1915, white outflow from Northern central cities always exceeded black inflow, over the next 90 years; and 2) because of things like racial covenants and restrictive zoning policies, blacks were not able to make the suburban move until much later.

Boustan followed that paper with a 2013 analysis done with Boston University economics professor Robert A. Margo entitled A Silver Lining to White Flight? White Suburbanization and African-American Homeownership, 1940-1980. In this paper they demonstrate that rising black homeownership over the 40-year period was facilitated by white suburbanization, further finding that suburban expansion lowered central city housing demand and prices and opened the housing market to blacks. The study found that the rapid acceleration of black homeownership (from 15 percent to 42 percent of black households over that time, the vast majority of which was in central cities) was confined to that era for three reasons:

1. The Great Migration peaked around World War II and the numbers of black moving North began declining;

2. The infrastructure development that facilitated mass suburbanization, generally Interstate highways, reached its peak in the '60s, leading to more incremental suburban expansion; and

3. Blacks began gaining increased access to the suburbs themselves, beginning in the 1970's.

While Boustan and Margo document that black homeownership increased dramatically over the 40-year period, it's also clear that the manner in which blacks obtained homes -- a greatly increased central city housing supply that created lower priced central city homes, devalued due to the rapid expansion of the suburbs -- meant less equity for black homeowners, and less transferable wealth overall, compared to suburbanites.

Illinois Wesleyan University student Lindsey Haines picked up on the migration story by documenting the impacts of the extension of white flight in suburban areas. Her 2010 paper documented white flight in suburban Cook County outside of Chicago, and illustrates that the process noted by Boustan and Margo is still going on today:

(T)he models support the idea that the suburbs are experiencing urban decline similar to inner-cities in that white flight produces negative economic and social outcomes. First of all, white flight and urban decay significantly impact housing values. Although declining housing values may make housing more affordable, the social problems that accompany urban decay often outweigh this positive.

I admit that these papers do not represent the definitive thinking on American cities and migration patterns. There are critiques and counterarguments to their points, and simply different perspectives on city and metro area evolution. If there are strong critiques or counters to the analysis cited above, I'll be on the search to find them. I'm always seeking new knowledge. Furthermore, I have to be careful to guard against confirmation bias. Simply finding the analysis to support your own claims can close one off from important research.

However, I have to admit that the analysis from these papers align well with my personal experience in Rust Belt cities, and the experience of many I know. When my parents purchased the house at the top of the last post here in 1968, there were several white families still on the block and in the neighborhood. All were gone by 1970. Twenty years later, when my parents purchased another home in the Chicago south suburb of South Holland, the block was evenly divided between white and black residents. Within four years it was all black. Perhaps the pace of change has slowed, but the process is still quite evident.

I'd add a couple of factors that might have fueled the changes described above over the last 35 years. First, the late '80s/early '90s crime wave that was a product of the crack epidemic led to more middle-class blacks leaving for the suburbs, increasing central city poverty rates and ultimately leading to an end to overall increasing black homeownership rates. Second, at just about the same time, the first wave of urban pioneers began moving into cities, generally into the last remaining bastions of relatively safe urbanity that Northern cities had to offer. If a city had many such areas, like New York, the wave accelerates; if a city had few or none, like Detroit or Cleveland, the wave never starts, or only barely takes hold. The roots of today's bifurcated city were formed since 1980, and the trends that created them are dominant today.

Given this history, I think one can extrapolate a plausible future for our metro areas. The pendulum has begun to swing in the direction of central cities. While I don't subscribe to the thinking that the shift of people, and ultimately jobs, to central cities will correspond to a total collapse of the suburbs, it does mean that there will be greater parity between the two, and it will appear that cities are substantially wealthier while suburbs are substantially poorer. And one of the things that will fuel this perception is the accelerated growth of minorities, including African-Americans, into suburban areas.

Just like the rapid increase in black homeownership in the mid to late twentieth century, which was once thought to usher in a new era of economic parity for blacks, this new shift will prove illusory. Blacks will move into suburban areas. Housing demand will decline in suburban areas. Available housing supply will increase in suburban areas. Housing prices will fall in suburban areas, making them more affordable to more people at the lower end of the homebuying spectrum. Conversely, the opposite will happen -- is happening now -- in cities. Demand is rising. Available supply is shrinking. Prices are rising, making them less affordable to more people at the higher end of the homebuying spectrum.

When that transition is complete, who wins, the city or suburban homeowner?

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We Are At The Beginning Of A Reverse 'White Flight' Back Into Cities

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If there's one thing I've learned over the past couple years, it's that migration patterns are the building blocks of cities. People, and the things that attract them to the city, shape the city form and future. People, and the things that repel them from the city, shape the city form and future, too.

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The Segregation Myth: Richard Rothstein Debunks an American Lie | NowThis

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White flight refers to a mass exodus of white people retreating from an increasingly diverse setting-such as, most notably, the mid-20th-century migration of white households from cities to the suburbs as more people of color moved into America's urban neighborhoods.

Seeking to flee the oppression and terror of the Jim Crow South and to pursue new economic opportunities in more industrialized areas, millions of Black southerners migrated to northern and western U.S. cities from 1940 to 1970, in the second half of the Great Migration.

And when cities integrated, whites emigrated. Princeton economics professor Leah Boustan found that, for every Black resident who moved into a northern or western city from 1940-1970, two white residents left for the suburbs-which, not coincidentally, were effectively off-limits to most Black homebuyers, who were thwarted by realtors, mortgage lenders, and racist obstacles.

Boustan contends some white flight was motivated as much by economics as by racism. There was a booming postwar economy, newly prosperous households could afford cars and bigger, newer homes, and the government was investing in highways that made car commuting easier. And cities were already so segregated, she argues, that some white households were leaving all-white urban neighborhoods for all-white suburban ones.

But even "economic" reasons for white flight were underpinned by racism. The Federal Housing Authority's lending guidelines were explicitly racist, instructing banks not to write mortgages in redlined neighborhoods, or areas with Black residents that were deemed undesirable. (The neighborhoods were literally outlined in red on maps, hence the term.) The FHA also subsidized the construction of entire suburbs- including 85 percent of New York-area subdivisions built during the 1930s and '40s -with explicit covenants barring developers from selling to Black homebuyers.

The popular GI bill made it possible for millions of World War II veterans to purchase a home-but not Black veterans, because the Veterans Administration adhered to FHA policy on matters of housing. And mid-century urban renewal projects quite intentionally razed or hemmed in communities of color with federally funded highways so white suburbanites could zip into downtown.

Perhaps no housing practice married racism and capitalism with such sickening synergy as blockbusting. Speculative realtors would sell one home in an all-white neighborhood to a Black family, then approach the other white homeowners on the block and stoke racial fears, warning them to sell quickly and at a discount, before more Black families moved in and property values dropped.

As more white homeowners fled to the suburbs, the remaining ones agreed to sell their homes at deeper discounts, fearful of falling prices. Then, the speculator would resell the homes to Black families at an exorbitant markup of 80 to 100 percent or more-a devil's bargain plenty of Black families accepted, having been previously shut out of the same neighborhood or, indeed, any homeownership opportunity whatsoever.

In 1950, Chicago was 86 percent white, with more than 3 million white residents. By 1980, the city's Black population had more than doubled, from about 492,000 to 1.2 million. At the same time, more than 1.5 million white Chicagoans had moved out. Former first lady Michelle Obama told an audience last year how she witnessed white flight firsthand growing up in Chicago. "As we moved in, white folks moved out, because they were afraid of what our families represented," she said.

The same phenomenon occurred across the country. In 1950, Boston was about 95 percent white. By 1980, the city's black population had more than tripled, from 40,000 to 126,000, while the white population had nearly halved, from 759,000 to 394,000. Oakland was 85 percent white in 1950, with 329,000 white residents and 47,500 black residents. In 30 years, the black population nearly quadrupled to 159,000, outnumbering the 130,000 whites who remained. White immigrants fled cities at this time, too, especially since they were viewed more culturally "white" as they worked to assimilate. They distanced themselves from Black Americans physically and culturally, reinforcing the idea that becoming American meant becoming anti-Black.

White flight wasn't confined to northern or western cities, though. In his book, " White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism," Princeton history professor Kevin Kruse chronicles what he calls a "suburban secession" as whites around the country isolated themselves in white suburbs under a barely-veiled cloak of "freedom of association."

And even in what appear to be well-integrated cities, white families still try to send their children to majority white schools, says Erika K. Wilson, economics professor at the University of North Carolina. Often these are charter schools where more than half the student body is white, even in a neighborhood of more than 70 percent minority residents. "The emergence of white charter school enclaves is the result of a sobering and ugly truth," Wilson says. "When given a choice, white parents as a collective tend to choose racially segregated, predominately white schools ... even when presented with the option of a more racially diverse school of good academic quality."

In fact, one modern manifestation of white flight that Wilson finds fascinating is the vast number of middle-class and affluent white families fleeing predominantly Asian schools in places like Silicon Valley. "The phenomenon cuts counter to the typical retort that white parents are fleeing because of class," Wilson says, because the predominantly Asian schools from which they're fleeing are often high-performing and well-resourced. "[It] underscores the extent to which flight is often about race and a desire to not have their children be in the racial minority."

White flight drains resources from communities of color, particularly Black and Latinx students, Wilson says. "Green tends to follow white," she says. "Schools with fewer white students often have a harder time attracting high quality teachers. They are less likely to have sufficient money per pupil. They miss out on the intangible benefits that a racially and economically diverse student body brings."

But Wilson says white flight fails white kids as well. "Because white students are more likely to live in racially segregated places, white flight out of schools with significant minority populations means that white students are having limited exposure to people of color on a peer to peer level," she says. Negative stereotypes get reinforced, and they never learn how to live in a racially diverse environment. "There is even recent empirical research that shows that police killings in places like Ferguson, Missouri, might have some roots in the fact that the white officers attended racially segregated, predominately white schools and lacked the proper context to deal with Black citizens in an appropriate manner. I think it is really important to note that it's been harmful for our democracy as a whole."

Jon Gorey

Contributor

I'm a past-life musician, part-time stay-at-home dad, and founder of House & Hammer, a blog about real estate and home improvement. I write about homes, travel, and other life essentials.

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How "White Flight" Segregated American Cities and Suburbs

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White flight refers to a mass exodus of white people retreating from an increasingly diverse setting-such as, most notably, the mid-20th-century migration of white households from cities to the suburbs as more people of color moved into America's urban neighborhoods.

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American segregation, mapped at day and night

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On this date 42 years ago-February 10, 1969-federal district judge Richard B. Austin issued a ruling aimed squarely at a persistent Chicago problem. "Existing patterns of racial segregation must be reversed if there is to be a chance of averting the desperately intensifying division of whites and Negroes in Chicago," Austin wrote.

The case, Dorothy Gautreaux v. the Chicago Housing Authority, concerned the location of public housing-projects were being built only in the city's black ghettos because whites didn't want blacks in their neighborhoods. But the broader issue, as Judge Austin noted, was residential racial segregation, a matter of much concern throughout America back then.

The nation was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white-separate and unequal," the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders had declared a year before Judge Austin's ruling. Chaired by Illinois governor Otto Kerner, the commission called for sustained efforts to end segregation.

Chicago's ghettos in the 1960s were notorious for their shootings, robberies, rapes, fires, joblessness, single-parent families, dreadful schools and high dropout rates, rampant alcoholism and heroin addiction, abandoned buildings and vacant lots.

Lucky we fixed all that.

We must have fixed it-otherwise why isn't racial segregation an issue in the mayor's race?

Try finding a mention of it on the websites of any of the candidates. Editorial boards have decreed Chicago's most important concern to be its budget problems. Other issues winning attention have been school and ethics reform, job creation, the head tax, crime, transportation, privatization, the O'Hare airport expansion.

The city's finances are indeed a mess. But financial troubles come and go for Chicago. Segregation endures.

Check the map below. We aggregated recent census estimates from 2005-2009 for the city's 77 community areas. Citywide, Chicago's population of 2.8 million is tri-ethnic: 34 percent black, 33 percent white, and 27 percent Latino.

Credit: Paul John Higgins

But most African-Americans are clustered in two areas, as they were in the 1960s: a massive one on the south side, and a smaller one on the far west side. The south-side section, between Western Avenue and the lake, stretches more than a hundred blocks north to south, from 35th Street to the city limits at 138th. This African-American subdivision of Chicago includes 18 contiguous community areas, each with black populations above 90 percent, most of them well above that. The west-side black section includes another three contiguous 90 percent-plus community areas. Fifty-five percent of Chicago's 964,000 African-Americans live in these 21 community areas, in which the aggregate population is 96 percent black. Two-thirds of the city's blacks live in community areas that are at least 80 percent black.

On the flip side are the 33 community areas, most of them on the north and southwest sides, with less than 10 percent African-Americans. In 26 of these community areas less than 5 percent of the residents are black.

Latinos are segregated in some neighborhoods, too, but not nearly as dramatically; they're a buffer group, living in community areas with whites or with blacks, and sometimes with both.

The maps for 1970 and 1980 show that the south-side "black belt" was still swelling in the 70s, to the south and west; the last wave of migrants was arriving from Mississippi and other southern states. From 1980 on, what's remarkable about the maps is their consistency from decade to decade.

Credit: Paul John Higgins

Blacks in certain neighborhoods, whites in others.

This pronounced, persistent separation of the races would be worrisome, or at least curious, even if separate were equal-which of course it isn't. The hypersegregated black neighborhoods continue to lead the city in the same wretched problems as in the 60s. In some ways, things are worse. There's not just a lack of legitimate jobs in these areas today, but also a surplus of people without skills-and more of them have criminal records now as well, from the war on drugs. Predatory lending has multiplied the number of abandoned buildings in these neighborhoods.

So why aren't the candidates talking about how they'd deal with segregation?

"Politically, it doesn't play," says Alexander Polikoff, the lawyer who brought the Gautreaux case. "People aren't anxious to be reminded of the fact that we've got residential segregation. And doing something about it is damnably difficult." Polikoff pursued remedies for segregation through Gautreaux for 40 years. He never got much housing built for CHA families in white areas, but he was able to start a "mobility" program which allowed several thousand CHA families to move to the suburbs with rent vouchers-a significant victory, but not enough to greatly change the overall picture.

Segregation is "a very difficult and intractable problem," says Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey, one of the nation's leading researchers of the subject. "Politicians don't like to face up to difficult and intractable problems, whatever their nature, as we've seen with global climate change. And because this one involves race, it's especially third-rail in American politics." Massey says the inattention to segregation may explain why "Chicago and New York and Philadelphia and Detroit have hardly changed in 40 years in terms of their overall levels of segregation."

The neglect of racial segregation this election is nothing new; it hasn't been an issue in a mayor's race here in decades. Back when segregation was discussed, mayoral candidates were mainly eager to assure voters they'd do nothing to upset it.

In 1971, the Gautreaux case was still inching along in Judge Austin's courtroom. In March, a month before the mayoral election, the CHA complied with Austin's order to plan public housing in white neighborhoods as well as black by listing 235 proposed sites in white neighborhoods. But the sites needed city approval. Mayor Richard J. Daley quickly called the proposal "detrimental" and said the units "should not be built." His Republican opponent, Richard Friedman, declined to guarantee to block the units if elected, noting instead that open housing was "the law of the land." The Independent Voters of Illinois called Daley "racist" because of his opposition to the sites. But Daley knew "racist" was better in Chicago than "integrationist." He trounced Friedman. The Tribune observed afterward that Friedman's campaign had become a "lost cause" because of his stance on the housing list.

About that time, many liberals throughout the country stopped pressing for desegregation, and the issue largely disappeared from the nation's agenda.

It's not just politicians who don't like dealing with the issue. Candidates would have to answer questions about it if citizens were asking them-but we prefer a sunnier view of Chicago.

"Out of our diversity comes our city's greatest strength," Mayor Daley said in 2008, when he was pushing Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics. He didn't mention that the city's blacks and whites live in separate neighborhoods.

Blacks in Chicago weren't always severely segregated-it's just been that way for about the last 110 years. As black migration into the city rose modestly around the beginning of the 20th century, the black belt formed on the south side between railroad tracks.

Other ethnic enclaves have existed in Chicago, of course, but they were never nearly as concentrated, and their residents tended to assimilate and disperse fairly quickly. For Chicago's blacks, dispersal wasn't an option; given the violence that greeted them when they moved into white neighborhoods, the safest mode of expansion from the black belt was into adjacent neighborhoods. Blacks were met there with bricks and bottles and occasionally bombs, but there was some safety in numbers. Various legal or quasi-legal methods were used to hem blacks in as well, such as restrictive covenants that forbade white property owners in border neighborhoods to rent or sell to blacks.

In the middle decades of the 20th century, southern blacks streamed into Chicago and other northern cities, seeking jobs. Chicago had three kinds of neighborhoods then: white, changing, and black. Or, as white Chicagoans knew them, good, going, and gone. Whites continued to resist the incursions, sometimes violently, but before long they usually fled, moving west within the city or following the newly built highways into the suburbs. Many of the city's biggest employers moved to the suburbs as well. In the ghettos left behind, unemployment and poverty grew.

In the late 1960s, efforts to improve the circumstances of urban blacks began to change from desegregation to "community development"-programs aimed at making ghettos more habitable. White conservatives favored anything that might keep blacks where they were. White liberals liked the money that community development programs provided. Black politicians grew fond of segregation, too, since it provided a stable electoral base.

One of the insidious traits of segregation is how easy it makes it for the haves to ignore the plight of the have-nots. For most whites, concentrated poverty and its many ills are an abstraction-something they read about but rarely see, since it exists in parts of town they don't live in or work in or visit. On the north lakefront, where the neighborhoods are more diverse than most in Chicago, residents may also be fooled into thinking it's the norm throughout the city.

A common assertion about segregation is that it's merely an expression of group preferences: black neighborhoods are overwhelmingly black because that's the way blacks want it-segregation results from "innocent private decisions," as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas put it in a 2007 school desegregation case.

"The people opposed to desegregation have always said that, but that's not what blacks say in opinion polls," Massey says. "They much prefer to live in an integrated neighborhood, and have much more tolerance for different [racial] configurations of neighborhoods than whites do. Whites are the group that prefer substantially own-group neighborhoods."

The community development approach that came into vogue in the late 60s has remained the dominant strategy nationally, and certainly in Chicago. For decades now, when mayoral candidates here talk about uplifting poor neighborhoods, they promise to do it by reducing crime in those areas, improving their schools, and providing more jobs. They'll make separate equal. They also tend to insist the crucial problem isn't race but class.

But perhaps the greatest evil of racial segregation is how it concentrates the poverty of blacks, as Massey and others have shown. Because of historical-and some continuing-discrimination, blacks are more likely to be poor. When this is combined with segregation, it means blacks are far more likely than any other group to live in concentrated poverty. It's hard to be poor; it's much harder to be poor and surrounded by poverty and all the harmful cultural norms and behavior, such as crime, that accompany it. It's a kind of poverty whites rarely experience, and one tough to escape.

When Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson studied Chicago residents in the most disadvantaged quartile of the city's census tracts a few years ago, he found that no white families, and only a few Hispanic families, were represented. "Residents in not one white community experience what is most typical for those residing in segregated black areas," Sampson wrote in 2009, in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. "Trying to estimate the effect of concentrated disadvantage on whites is thus tantamount to estimating a phantom reality."

Sampson has been studying poverty in Chicago for much of the last two decades. He's found that in Chicago, poverty, like segregation, persists: neighborhoods that were poor and black in 1970 were generally poor and black in 2000. (From 1970 to 2000, not a single Chicago neighborhood changed from black to white.) The neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are also high in cynicism and distrust, he's written. In a longitudinal study, Sampson focused on the verbal ability of children growing up in Chicago's poor black neighborhoods and found "detrimental and long-lasting consequences for black children's cognitive ability rivaling in magnitude the effects of missing one year of schooling." Verbal ability, he noted, is a "major predictor of life outcomes."

These kinds of deep, neighborhood-based problems, linked inextricably in Chicago to racial segregation, are why desegregation advocates continue to maintain that segregation itself needs to be confronted.

The present mayoral candidates talk about improving the city's schools by "empowering principals with greater autonomy" (Rahm Emanuel), putting a "Parent Academy in every school" (Gery Chico), "making neighborhood schools the priority" (Carol Moseley Braun). Emanuel promises a "world-class learning experience" for every child in every neighborhood.

In a 2010 book, Organizing Schools for Improvement, the University of Chicago's Consortium on Chicago School Research studied school system decentralization here in the 1990s. The authors concluded that decentralization improved schools significantly-in certain neighborhoods. The schools that didn't improve were in the poor African-American neighborhoods of the south and west sides. "In Chicago, extreme poverty combines with racial isolation," the authors wrote. "Integrated, Latino, and racially diverse schools were much more likely to progress than schools that were predominantly minority (a combination of Latino and African-American students) or predominantly African-American."

The authors noted that many urban children contend with homelessness, domestic violence, abuse, and neglect. "Such children can make extraordinary demands on teachers when they appear in their classrooms. . . . If the number of students presenting substantial needs is too large, even extraordinary teachers can be quickly overwhelmed." The African-American schools had "substantially higher" percentages of abused or neglected children than other schools studied; racially integrated schools had the fewest of these children. "As we factor in the presence of additional students who might be homeless or living in foster care, or in households with chronic domestic violence, one begins to develop a sobering picture of the magnitude of the overall personal and social needs facing some schools," the authors wrote. "While it is still possible for schools to improve" in such circumstances, "the barriers appear almost insurmountable."

I sought to speak with the six mayoral candidates about racial segregation, and five of them obliged. (Carol Moseley Braun's spokesperson didn't answer numerous calls and messages.) None of the candidates have a comprehensive plan aimed at directly addressing racial segregation, and I got the impression they hadn't thought about the issue much. Desegregation strategies are being tried elsewhere in the country; more on that later. All of the candidates favor affordable housing-just as they're all opposed to crime-but none of them have developed an approach to ensure that affordable housing desegregates or deconcentrates poverty.

Racial segregation in Chicago today is "less of a problem than when I was growing up," said Miguel del Valle, who came to Chicago from Puerto Rico in 1955, when he was four. "We are not the city that we were 40 years ago, or 50 years ago, when the lack of mobility was due to race. Today the lack of mobility is due to economics. A Latino family or an Asian family or an African-American family can move into any neighborhood in the city of Chicago-there aren't the kind of roadblocks there once were. That is not to say that there isn't still some resistance. But in those days, that resistance was blatant-people burning down houses because of who moved in. I lived through that period, and that's a thing of the past."

When I asked him about the continued hypersegregation of African-Americans on the south and west sides, del Valle said the key was economic: "We have to build a middle class, and create job opportunities, and give people choices. If we want more racial integration in the city of Chicago we've got to elevate people economically."

Can that be done in poor, hypersegregated neighborhoods? "We haven't been successful in breaking into that cycle, but it can be done," del Valle said. "That's why I'm such a big believer in strengthening community schools, beginning with early childhood education where you're working with the parent and helping that child develop. You make the school an anchor, and then you deal with the surroundings."

Del Valle said he also backed more affordable housing. "People should be able to live where they want to live," he said. "They should be able to go anywhere in Cook County, anywhere in the state of Illinois with a rent voucher." He supports the proposed Sweet Home Chicago ordinance, which would use tax increment financing money to build affordable housing. It's not clear yet where that housing would be built and whether it would therefore decrease concentrated poverty or segregation.

Gery Chico and Rahm Emanuel would only answer questions by e-mail. Chico said he'd address segregation with policies "that create more jobs, provide affordable housing and reform the education system to give children an opportunity for a job and a better life. I see lack of jobs as the biggest factor that keeps Chicago segregated." Chico said that as mayor, he'd lead by example by "staffing my leadership with a diverse, talented team." He'd also stay "in touch with Chicagoans of every race, color and community" and "spend time in all our diverse, vibrant neighborhoods." He didn't respond to follow-up questions.

"Chicago draws its strength from its diversity," Emanuel's response began. He said he'd promote policies ensuring "safe streets, strong schools, and good-paying jobs throughout the city with the goal of lifting all neighborhoods up." Accomplishing that would lead to "other positive benefits, like promoting integration." He said he'd make sure there were "affordable housing options throughout the city, and that every neighborhood has access to a great public school, public transportation and healthy food. This will give every Chicagoan the resources and access they need to build a better life for their children."

I asked him in a follow-up how a city could provide those things in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty.

"We start by promoting economic development," his response said, "and that can begin by establishing strong anchors in each community-a grocery store where there isn't one, a transportation hub that helps residents access job opportunities, a great school that serves as a community center for job training." He offered as an illustration the Old Town School of Folk Music's move in 1998 to Lincoln Avenue, into a space "that had little economic vitality. By creating a strong anchor in the community and pushing small businesses to fill in around it, a vibrant local economy that creates jobs and produces revenue for the city can be established. We need to do this in more communities."

That may be a good example of neighborhood economic development, but it seems unrelated to addressing concentrated poverty. Lincoln Square's individual poverty rate was 13 percent in 1990 and 11 percent in 2000-well below the citywide rates of 22 percent and 19 percent those years. If Lincoln Square had been an area of concentrated poverty, would the Old Town School have even considered moving in?

I asked Emanuel if he'd make any direct efforts to desegregate neighborhoods, or if he saw desegregation as mainly a by-product of the safe streets, good schools, and jobs he'd ensure. "The latter," he said.

He noted that he'd worked on the Plan for Transformation as vice-chair of the CHA. This was the federally funded program under which most of the city's high-rise projects were demolished. A few of the residents got units in mixed-income developments built on the sites of the old projects; most were given rent vouchers and settled elsewhere. "While the policy was not perfect, combating the cycles of poverty that were fostered by the CHA high rises and building mixed-income housing developments scattered throughout the city has helped promote integration," he said.

The tearing down of the high-rises offered an extraordinary chance for widespread desegregation, which might have happened had the displaced residents gotten more counseling and support to help them move to middle-class neighborhoods. But a study of the plan in the 2009 Journal of Public Affairs found that most of the displaced residents merely moved from their vertical ghettos to horizontal ones, settling in "disadvantaged, predominantly black neighborhoods."

William "Dock" Walls and Patricia Watkins-the two African-American candidates besides Braun-both believed that segregation ought to be addressed directly, but their proposals for doing so were modest.

Walls said segregation isn't discussed "because people don't want to face reality. People believe that's just the way it is in the city of Chicago." He graduated from Chicago Vocational high school, in the southeast side neighborhood of Avalon Park, in 1975, with only one white classmate. "In Chicago, we think such racial segregation is normal, but it's not," he said. He suggested neighborhood festivals "so people can come into different neighborhoods and see how different people live."

Walls said some African-Americans aren't interested in hearing about desegregation, not because they wouldn't like to see it happen, but because they have pressing problems and want quicker solutions. "It's hard for people to think about something like desegregation when they're not eating and they don't have jobs, even if segregation is related to why they're not eating and don't have jobs," he said. "They want to eat right now. People today want instant oatmeal, they don't want hominy grits."

"Chicago is hypersegregated," Patricia Watkins said. "I think it needs to change because if we're going to benefit as a city, we have to have experiences with other cultures besides our own." In black neighborhoods, she said, "when the kids go to school, they see all black faces, when they go to the store, they see all black people, when they go to church, they see all black people. They only have experiences with other ethnicities by television."

She said she'd seek to provide affordable housing in all 77 Chicago communities "to help diversify the neighborhoods." She'd organize a festival-exchange program between neighborhoods "so people can get used to being around each other so they can build relationships and eventually live together." She'd also like to create "tourist attractions" in every neighborhood, including the hypersegregated black ones, to encourage Chicagoans to visit them "once we bring the violence down."

"The mayor of Chicago is the mayor of Chicagoland," Myron Orfield says. Orfield, who used to live here, has been a leading force for desegregation in the Twin Cities-he's the executive director of the Institute on Race & Poverty at the University of Minnesota. He says a Chicago mayor carries much clout with suburban mayors, and could use it to help ease segregation in the city and the near suburbs.

Orfield went to law school at the University of Chicago before moving to Minnesota, where he served five terms in the state house and one in the senate. He authored many metropolitan law reforms that have helped deconcentrate poverty and desegregate Minneapolis and Saint Paul and some of its surrounding suburbs.

Wealthy suburbs benefit from a vibrant central city-it's often what attracts businesses and people to a region. But those wealthy suburbs tend not to do their share when it comes to dealing with the region's social problems, Orfield maintains. He says this is especially true of what real estate consultants call the "favored quarter" in a metro area-newer suburbs with the most expensive commercial and residential developments. These suburbs get a big share of government money for highways and infrastructure, but build only expensive housing to keep their tax base high, making sure the poor are someone else's concern. In the Chicago area, the favored quarter is the northwest suburbs, Orfield says.

For desegregation to succeed, affordable housing needs to be available throughout a metropolitan area, he says, including its favored quarter and other thriving suburbs. And he believes the richer suburbs should share some of their wealth to help pay for the region's social needs: people of lesser means shouldn't have inferior schools and services just because they can't afford to live in the metro area's richer communities. Much of this would entail new state laws -but Orfield thinks a Chicago mayor could be instrumental in bringing those about. A favored quarter means a less-favored three-quarters - the central city and older suburbs, many of which are also struggling with racial segregation and the costly problems that accompany it. "A mayor of Chicago could lead a regional coalition of areas that are being hurt by segregation, to try to reduce it," Orfield says.

The efforts of Orfield and others in the Twin Cities' region have induced wealthy suburbs to build nearly half of the region's new affordable housing units in recent years - "which is not what it ought to be, it should be more than half, but it's vastly better than in the Chicago area," Orfield says. About 40 percent of those units are held by black and Latino families. Wealthy suburban school districts have also redrawn their boundaries to increase integration in their schools.

Alexander Polikoff-the Gautreaux lawyer-also advocates a metro strategy. But instead of focusing on the building of new affordable housing throughout a region, which he thinks is prohibitively expensive and politically problematic, he'd like to see more federal money spent on an expansion of the Gautreaux "mobility" program, with more housing vouchers for the poor to use in middle-class suburban neighborhoods. "There has never been a serious effort to desegregate via the voucher program," he says. "I'd like to see it tried."

Because this would require federal money, the mayor of Chicago couldn't do it on his own; he'd need backing in Washington. One Chicago mayoral candidate is familiar with President Obama, of course. But Obama so far has been a disappointment to desegregation advocates. "The national administration has backed away from mobility proposals," Polikoff says.

Myron Orfield's brother, Gary Orfield, is a prominent desegregation advocate who focuses on schools. Codirector of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, he taught at the University of Chicago in the 1980s and has returned to Chicago often for school-based research. School desegregation has become even more difficult in the wake of a five-to-four Supreme Court decision in 2007 that barred most programs aimed at racially integrating schools.

Gary Orfield says a Chicago mayor interested in furthering school desegregation would make sure his city's magnet and charter schools had explicit diversity goals and worked hard to achieve them. Magnet schools in white neighborhoods should recruit a diverse student body, but often don't, he says. He'd like to see a push for statewide magnet schools "set right in the middle of Chicago." Statewide magnets, often residential, are open to students from across the state; Illinois has one in Aurora-the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.

Charter schools could also attract more diverse student bodies, Orfield says. "The problem is they're not being held accountable in a serious way-they're just assumed to be better by definition." They often don't have diversity goals or provide the kind of transportation needed to build a diverse student body, he says. (A 2009 study found that African-Americans who transferred from Chicago public schools to charters on average ended up in schools 84 percent black instead of 90 percent black.)

Orfield and others have managed to increase school integration in some metro areas despite the Supreme Court decision. Though a plan he crafted in Louisville two decades ago was struck down by the court's ruling, Louisville board members have asked him to help them design another one to achieve diversity. When he talks about moving toward diversity in Chicago, "people look at me like, this is just impossible. And I say, 'Well, I did it in Saint Louis, I did it in Louisville' - they don't believe it.

"Segregation didn't happen by accident, and integration doesn't happen by accident," Orfield says. "It can be done, but you really have to plan to do it. You have to make it a goal."

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Separate, Unequal, and Ignored - Chicago Reader

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On this date 42 years ago-February 10, 1969-federal district judge Richard B. Austin issued a ruling aimed squarely at a persistent Chicago problem. "Existing patterns of racial segregation must be reversed if there is to be a chance of averting the desperately intensifying division of whites and Negroes in Chicago," Austin wrote.