Transcription
While whites were moving to suburbs, the African American exodus to urban areas, originally stimulated by war production in the 1940s, continued. Whites were moving to the suburbs for a number of reasons. One of them was getting away from blacks. Another was protecting their property values. They were trying to maintain a white community. And there were also a mix of other reasons. And as they began extending out to the suburbs, blacks were relocating to the inner city.
Over 1 million blacks moved out of the South into predominantly urban areas in the 1950s. The areas in the city that blacks moved into had previously been built and inhabited by other groups of people. That goes for the vast majority of the urban areas that are known as black neighborhoods today. So, over 1 million blacks moved out of the South and moved into these existing urban areas in the 1950s.
In terms of African American conditions in the 1950s, there were two flies in the ointment. Unemployment and residential segregation. Let's talk about it. Starting in the mid-1950s, black unemployment grew in absolute terms relative to that of whites. A principal reason, ironically, was the movement out of the South, where black employment was high and wages low, into northern manufacturing jobs, where the pay was much higher, but job security was precarious. So, basically, the jobs paid less in the South, but they were more consistently available for the blacks that lived there. Now, in contrast, the jobs up north paid much more money, but they were less stable, which led to higher unemployment rates for blacks.
The other problem was the explosive urban communities of low-income blacks. This was, of course, a problem only from certain perspectives. Well, which perspectives were and were not a problem? From the standpoint of the long, hard climb out of virtual serfdom in the South, the urbanization and northernization of African Americans must be seen in a very positive light. It fostered history-making socioeconomic and civil rights advances. That's obvious, right? More opportunities to work and more opportunities to make more money and advance their rights. That was a positive things for blacks, for sure.
But violent crime is what concerns us here. And from that perspective, the growing lower-class black population in America's biggest cities proved to be a disaster. He's speaking strictly on the crime aspect of it. He already mentioned how it was positive from an economical and from a civil rights perspective. But from a crime perspective, he's saying that it was a disaster because crime became a national problem afterwards. It laid the foundation for the new urban crime problem, indeed, the biggest crime problem to face Americans since the 1920s. Which he's most likely referring to the European immigrants and organized criminals like the Italian Mafia.
Only a few contemporary observers recognized the inner-city issue. Referring to the Negro migrants now. One was Morton Grodzins, 1917 to 64, longtime professor of political science at the University of Chicago. In 1958, Grodzins published The Metropolitan Area as a racial problem, in which he deplored that nothing was being done to address what is likely to be the nation's most pressing social problem. Namely, that many central cities of the great metropolitan areas of the United States are fast becoming lower-class, largely Negro slums.
Why wasn't it addressed? We talked about it in the last commentary. The three reasons. One, crime was still relatively low at the time. Two, the nation's focus was on its wartime prosperity and also on winning the war. And three, the crime was still contained in the black areas and involving mostly black victims and black perpetrators. So, that's why it was low on the radar. But not on Grodzins' radar. He saw what was coming.
Grodzins not only nailed the demographics, he predicted most of the fallout as well. Continued Negro migration, the comparatively greater rate of natural increase among non-whites, and the exodus of whites to the suburbs, >> Grodzins observed, will dramatically raise the proportion of non-whites in central cities. Of course, the residential racial divide was not solely the product of black in-migration. As fast as African Americans moved to the cities, whites raced to the suburbs. A big part of that is they didn't want to live around people called blacks. That was looked at as a lowering of status to many in the white community. Do we remember the book White Flight, Atlanta and the making of modern conservatism by Dr. Kevin Kruse? In fact, as demographers later demonstrated, white migration out of the cities played a bigger role in enlarging the percentage of urban non-whites than did black migration into the cities. So, he's saying that white flight impacted the population of blacks in the city more than blacks actually moving into the city did. In other words, there were a lot of blacks moving into the city, but they were also tons of whites moving out, which increased the percentage of blacks in the city.
It would be erroneous to explain the vast suburbanization process as solely or even primarily a product of anti-black attitudes, but white racial bias or fear of blacks did play a big part in the blackening of the central cities. You better believe it played a big part. Whites did not want to live in neighborhoods with blacks, or in some cases with a certain number of blacks, which Grodzins presciently identified as the neighborhood tipping point. It was against the code of being an authentic white. That's how their consciousness had been created and conditioned since colonial times. And in addition, many of them just didn't want to deal with the perceived problem that came with living with too many blacks in the neighborhood. So, they got out of there when too many of them moved next door.
Even this attitude wasn't entirely based on race prejudice. As black neighborhoods spiraled downward, whites began to associate African Americans with community disorder. The racial attribute, skin color, is added to the social attributes of lower-class behavior. They linked the black identity with neighborhood decay, crime, indecency, and other lower-class behavior. So, when they saw someone they viewed as black, ideas of lower-class behavior were closely associated with them in the observer's mind. But whether a product of racism or some other motivation, the result was the same. White urbanites tried to maintain their own racially segregated neighborhoods within cities, or they packed up and headed to the suburbs. Point blank, period.
The growing black city population, which had to find housing somewhere, kept pushing outward the boundaries of the largely monoracial black communities. Even the more successful blacks, those who had entered the ranks of the middle class, were confined to all-black or nearly so urban neighborhoods, as it was clear that they would not be welcome in the suburbs. And why were there blacks who entered the ranks trying to move out of the black neighborhoods? For various reasons. Overcrowding, better housing, better locations, and some just wanted to be around whites and not around blacks. But for whatever the reason, most of them were still not welcomed to the white suburbs.
A comment on this matter by the leading suburban developer speaks volumes. If we sell one house to a Negro family, William Levitt explained, then 90 or 95% of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours. As a company, our position is simply this. We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two. No, sir. Consequently, big-city black neighborhoods kept growing in population and area, often with a middle-class black buffer zone in between the poor black and adjacent white sectors.
Grodzins foresaw many of the consequences of the growth of black urban neighborhoods. What did he foresee? Within the cities, the first result is a spreading of slums. As middle-class whites move out of cities, interracial tensions will increase because the remaining whites will be less racially tolerant. Racial separation will create social isolation. As downtown stores cater to more non-white and low-income customers, central city department stores will decline, accompanied by a general deterioration of the downtown area. The slums, in other words, are spreading to the central business districts. Corporate business offices will join the flight from the city. Likewise, retail trade, the white-collar shops, and the service industries will follow population. That is, they, too, will head to the suburbs. The municipal tax base will erode. Blacks will try to use their numbers in the cities to create a political base from which they will seek to advance policies for ends conceived narrowly to the advantage of the Negro community. Whites will resist black efforts to gain political power in the cities. Did most of these occur? You already know they did. So, let's put Grodzins in the ranks of the great prophets.
Now, all he did was look at the current conditions of his time and then follow the logic of what must occur if the trends continued. It's just looking at reality with as minimal amount of bias and distortions that one could possibly have and then trying to figure out what must come next in the future if things continue. If these predictions sound more 1960s and 70s than 1950s, it is because Grodzins's work was ahead of its time. The key point is that lower-class black communities in America's big cities were expanding dramatically in the 1950s, laying the groundwork for a massive black urban crime problem. By 1960, the black farm laborer had virtually disappeared. And African-Americans had become more urban than whites, a striking reversal of the historic pattern. Yes, sir.
So, let that soak in. Let's understand the history and let's face the issue objectively. Because when that's done in this manner, then you get the reality that can set the mind free. All right? So, we're going to stop right here and we're going to pick up with some more in the next commentary. I thank you for your time and attention. My name is Brooklyn Saint Michael and I'll see you in the free world.