From the opening lines of a Leonard Pitts syndicated column:
Perhaps you remember white flight.
That is, of course, the term for what happened in the '60s when blacks, newly liberated from legal segregation, began fanning out from the neighborhoods to which they'd once been restricted. Traumatized at the thought of living in proximity to their perceived inferiors, white people put their houses on the market at fire-sale prices and took flight.
That's an interesting way to describe white flight. My in-laws left Detroit in the early 1970s after crime increased in their neighborhood, my future mother-in-law was mugged in her driveway, and a neighborhood girl was raped. Pitts wants to make it look like a racist thing. It wasn't. It was a safety thing.
Pitt is a straw man, of course, but it's still fun to point out ludicrousness.
For a New York Times look at white flight (that looks more like my version that Pitts'), click here.
