Quote:
Originally Posted by Pedestrian
There were few blacks until WW II (a few did come at the end of the Civil War). During the war, since the military was hostile to blacks, they filled up the war production industries and plenty came west to work at Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard, turning Bayview Hunter's Point into one of San Francisco's 2 predominantly black neighborhoods. The other, the Western Addition, was bulldozed in a major way in the 1960s in the name of "urban renewal". That area previously had been a sort of west coast Harlem with an active jazz music scene but the residents were, like the rest of the city, mostly renters. In Bayview many owned their homes and, like everyone else, they have sold out as those homes became more valuable. The current black population still mostly lives in those 2 neighborhoods but many live in public housing that was built in both. Some in Bayview are still homeowners and didn't join their fellows in moving to the suburbs or Oakland. Our current Mayor proudly makes it a campaign issue that she was raised in the Western Addition "projects".
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There weren't really a lot of black people anywhere outside of the south before WW2. But SF's black and Asian populations were roughly similar as recently as the 1970s (both groups were slightly larger than Hispanic at the time). It might be the only major U.S. city to see its black population fall so dramatically in the post-war era.
Put another way, San Francisco never really experienced white flight, although the city did experience population decline. Between 1980 and 2010 the city's white population declined by only 23k and the black population by almost 40k.