As black neighborhoods became overpopulated, blight and crime rose. The largest wave of the Great Migration, spanning from 1940 to 1970, involved an exodus of several million blacks out of the South, which further concentrated the population of the ghetto.34 Harlem, which had been in full bloom in the 1920s, had by the 1950s become dilapidated and rat-infested—so bad was the rat problem that specific coalitions were formed to address the problem, and it was a repeated topic of conversation in Congress.35 Asthma, disease, drug addiction, and tuberculous were rampant. By 1952, nearly fifteen
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