Chapter 3:The Unraveling of Detroit
The white flight out of Detroit started in the 1950s. Between 1950–1960 500,000 whites fled Detroit. This exodus was fueled by the growth of suburbia and job migration to the suburbs which allowed them to get away from Detroit where blacks were increasing in numbers. The suburbs allowed whites to be racially segregated.
This graph shows the outmigration of whites from Detroit starting in 1950s and accelerating in the early 1960s. All the while, the black population was increasing, and somewhere around 1974, there were as many blacks as whites in Detroit.
In 1967 “The entire city was in a state of economic and social strife: As the Motor City’s famed automobile industry shed jobs and moved out of the city center, freeways and suburban amenities beckoned middle-class residents away, which further gutted Detroit’s vitality and left behind vacant storefronts, widespread unemployment and impoverished despair.
In the sweltering summer of 1967, Detroit’s predominantly African-American neighborhood of Virginia Park was a simmering cauldron of racial tension. About 60,000 low-income residents were crammed into the neighborhood’s 460 acres, living mostly in small, sub-divided apartments.
The Detroit Police Department, which had only about 50 African American officers at the time, was viewed as a white occupying army. Accusations of racial profiling and police brutality were commonplace among Detroit’s black residents. The only other whites in Virginia Park commuted in from the suburbs to run the businesses on 12th Street, then commuted home to affluent enclaves outside Detroit.” https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/1967-detroit-riots
“After the riots, thousands of small businesses closed permanently or relocated to safer neighborhoods, and the affected district lay in ruins for decades.[27]
Of the 1967 riots, politician Coleman Young, Detroit’s first black mayor, wrote in 1994:
“The heaviest casualty, however, was the city. Detroit’s losses went a hell of a lot deeper than the immediate toll of lives and buildings. The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money. The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the people who fled as fast as they could. The white exodus from Detroit had been prodigiously steady prior to the riot, totally twenty-two thousand in 1966, but afterward, it was frantic. In 1967, with less than half the year remaining after the summer explosion, the outward population migration reached sixty-seven thousand. In 1968 the figure hit eighty-thousand, followed by forty-six thousand in 1969.[25]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Detroit
1.5 million whites left Detroit between 1950 and 2020. It is as if the entire city of Philadelphia decided to pick up and leave. It was the hollowing Detroit. With the whites went the wealth, income and tax base of Detroit, leaving Detroit an impoverished city.
“The departure of middle-class whites left blacks in control of a city suffering from an inadequate tax base, too few jobs, and swollen welfare rolls. According to Chafets, “Among the nation’s major cities, Detroit was at or near the top of unemployment, poverty per capita, and infant mortality throughout the 1980s.
A deeply segregated city is kind of a hopeless problem. It becomes more and more troubled and there are fewer and fewer solutions.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Detroit.
Proof that race was perhaps the major factor in white flight is the Supreme Court ruling on the Miliken vs Bradley case on school desegregation. The Supreme Court reversed the District Court ruling that it was necessary to desegregate schools and suburban school districts in one program. The Supreme Court ruling allowed the suburbs to maintain segregated school districts. This accelerated the white migration to the suburbs.
Had this decision gone the other way Detroit might be a different city today. Instead, Detroit was relegated to becoming a ghetto where the quality of life in many neighborhoods was worse than in third-world countries. Crime, poverty, and hopelessness became a way of life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CBwI3heojM
The next post is A City Abandoned
