Detroit illustrates a pattern that played out across the country. Although many white residents stayed and attempted to keep their downtown neighborhoods racially homogenous, many others decided to relocate to the suburbs. This phenomenon would become known as white flight—“a massive migration of whites to the suburbs”—and it certainly had many “nonracial” causes as well. White residents might have moved away from a neighborhood for issues related to “crime, schools, services, and property values.”49 But the presence of other factors in white flight does not preclude race from being an
...more
