‘White flight’ began a lot earlier than we think
Source: washingtonpost.com
"White flight" is usually described as a post-World War II phenomenon, one that required highways and suburbs and big lawns to flee to.
But whites in northern cities really began re-sorting themselves — specifically away from blacks — in the first decades of the 20th century, and what happened then remains relevant to American cities that are still racially divided today.
"If you want to understand the origins of segregation in the U.S., you have to look at this period between 1900 and 1930," says Allison Shertzer, an economist at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied detailed, digitized census forms from that era with Pittsburgh colleague Randall P. Walsh.
In their new research, they studied how the arrival of blacks in 10 northern cities at the time influenced white behavior. Over the course of the first three decades after the turn of the century, coinciding with the start of the Great Migration of blacks out of the South, this pattern accelerated: As blacks arrived in northern neighborhoods, more whites left. By the 1920s, there were more than three white departures for every black arrival.
Shertzer and Walsh, who tried to account for other reasons why neighborhood populations shifted, believe this was causal. "Whites left the neighborhood as a result of blacks arriving," Shertzer says, "not for other reasons."
The suburbs we know today effectively didn't exist at the time, so whites were leaving these neighborhoods for other neighborhoods in the city. That makes this earlier form of white flight even more striking; their new homes didn't necessarily have lower taxes or better school districts, factors that complicated the motivations of later generations of whites.
The accumulation of all those individual decisions is an important part of explaining why segregation took root in places like Baltimore, Philadelphia and Chicago, as this graph from the paper illustrates. The dissimilarity and isolation indexes are two tools researchers use to measure segregation; one captures the degree to which blacks and whites would need to move around a city to turn homogeneous neighborhoods into diverse ones, and the other captures how isolated blacks are from whites in the neighborhoods where they live.
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