I just wonder if you could clarify this statement for my education. Did they do this through federal housing subsidies or what? I'm still trying to figure out how Detroit was destroyed. My parents grew up in Detroit and lived there until the riots in the late 60's, walked around freely downtown as children, etc. Their stories about life there in the 40's and 50's are literally incredible when you think about how it is there now. My teenage students laughed at me when I told them Detroit used to be a nice city. They really thought I was kidding.
E. Michael Jones has written about the process of how the old ethnic neighborhoods in the inner cities were destroyed. It is a VERY touchy subject, and although he used to be a friend I confess that I broke with him over what I thought was an antisemitic streak in some of his later writings.
Nevertheless, his book on the destruction of the cities, “The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing,” which is the top one listed here, is well worth reading:
http://www.culturewars.com/books.htm
Basically, the process began with FDR, who moved large numbers of black workers into Chicago and the other northern cities during the Second World War, to work in the defense plants. Stalin was doing similar things, moving populations around to break up cultures and fragment opposition to his policies, and I think FDR took a leaf from his book.
It continued with the “urban planning” initiatives put forward by Democrats in federal, state, and local governments, after the war. And it became entangled with Martin Luther King’s movement, which started out with desegregation in the South but in its last years included MLK’s visits to such places as Chicago.
Federal judges decreed school bussing measures in the northern cities, forcing white parents to flee to the suburbs. And the Quakers seem to have played a role disproportionate to their numbers.
Some of it was well-intentioned, no doubt. But some of it seems to have involved the Country Club establishment, which was then WASP, and its desire to deal with what was seen as a political threat from Catholics, who were growing in numbers and morally conservative, and opposed to the kind of “sexual liberation” the establishment was working for.