Study your history in a little more detail, and you'll find that whites helped cause the change by fleeing at the sight of anyone who looked different.
In the once-nice neighborhoods, the first blacks who moved in were typically the doctor, lawyer or businessman, not a whole lot different than their white neighbors. But many whites did not hang around long enough to see what kind of neighbors they would be. They sold in a panic instead, in many cases to investors who put renters where owner occupants used to be.
The feared loss of property values then became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the finishing touches came from the misguided social programs that started in the sixties and pretty much destroyed the black family.
Oh, I don't doubt it. A black friend of my dad's years ago told him that we were lucky, because we could move anywhere and no one would care. But he was always stuck living in transitional areas--he wouldn't live in the ghetto, but the white folks didn't want his family in the burbs because of the perceived drop in property values. Massively unfair if you ask me--and I'm not excusing white folks' attitudes here, I'm just trying to explain it for people who aren't familiar with Northeastern urban race relations.
And yes, the social policies of the cities had much to do with encouraging this nonsense. I love to hear the libs complaining about suburban sprawl. Sprawl exists precisely because their idiocy turned entire city neighborhoods into toilets.
You couldn’t be more wrong.
The first integrated neighborhoods were MIDDLE CLASS.
Specifically, those neighborhoods created when southern minorities moved to the north for industrial (automotive) jobs and, for the first time, joined the ranks of the middle class.
Higher-educated and salaried minorities remained in better areas of their own communities, and didn’t integrate to the suburbs until after the destruction of the inner-cities.
I was back “home” in the Detroit area this weekend and received a refresher course in what happened to Detroit in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
My family used to live in Detroit. Mother, Father, Grandmother and us kids.
Overnight, we saw our neighborhood turn into a SLUM.
One group stayed out on the streets all day AND NIGHT, while another group locked themselves up in their homes.
Property stopped being maintained and housing values plummeted. Then came the riots. We all left by 1972 and moved across the state and to the suburbs.
There’s no better example of what can happen than Detroit, and it isn’t the fault of the people that were forced to leave.