In the 1950s, many major cities of the United States faced a problem. African Americans were moving out of the South in greater and greater numbers, trying to escape economic frustration and the heavy hand of Jim Crow. But time and again, in the supposedly liberal cities they were moving to, white people wanted nothing to do with them. In some cases, that meant the newcomers faced intimidation and violence. In other cases, it meant that the minute black families moved into a neighborhood, white families just moved out. The term everyone used was white flight.
