Quote:
Originally Posted by eschaton
As I said before, I believe that fundamentally, white flight encompassed two different eras.
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I'm not sure I totally buy this. There was 1945-1960-era white flight, but usually within the city proper. In fact there was earlier white flight.
For example, the Detroit Jewish community was centered around 12th Street before WW2, and then vacated to Dexter Davison area by the 1940's, as the black community grew. They were out of Dexter Davison by the late 1950's, again replaced by the black community. The community was then in NW Detroit, around the Bagley neighborhood, until about 1970. The community was then centered in suburban Oak Park/Southfield, until about 1990. Now in West Bloomfield. In every move, the black community follows a few years later. West Bloomfield will probably be plurality black within a few years; the schools are already there.
Of course the push-pull factors are complex. It wasn't like Jews were fleeing in terror or something; they were replaced by upper middle class blacks in all these phases, and many of the legacy Jewish neighborhoods are among the more desirable in Detroit proper. But the suburban trends of the last 40 years aren't that different than the earlier city-proper trends; just a bit more gradual.
And I do think there was a degree of racial anxiety. The Jewish community is extremely education-oriented, and the best high schools in Detroit follow the community's migration path. It was Northern High in the 1940's, Central High in the 1950's, Mumford High in the 1960's, and then suburban high schools. Each was tied to a particular era of outstanding Jewish scholarship, followed by a period of anxiety following middle class black growth, and then mass flight.