But there was also a dark side to the Great Migration that became increasingly visible in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The inner cities of urban America became black ghettos after middle-class blacks and whites escaped to the suburbs, leaving a black underclass trapped within racially segregated spaces whose borders were defined by restrictive white covenants and redlining realtors. The result was Jim Crow with a northern accent, a new kind of structural racism immune to conventional civil rights legislation, and a de facto brand of segregation that produced a class division
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