Migration In The United States

Two great internal migrations lie at the center of postwar history in the United States: the movement of rural southern blacks to cities in the North, South, and West, and the movement of whites to the suburbs. Though the roots of these migrations long preceded the postwar period, both population shifts were greatly accelerated by World War II. This relocation of people and resources remapped the racial, economic, and political geography of American cities. Postwar metropolitan growth followed a pattern of

The most significant political, economic, and spatial transformation in the postwar United States was the overdevelopment of the suburbs and the underdevelopment of the cities. Simply put, where you lived determined your access to goods and services and the amount of taxes you would pay for them.

Urban deconcentration or horizontal development (beginning primarily with residential decentralization, but eventually progressing to include commercial and industrial development outside the urban center) progressed as a result of shifting government and private capital away from urban centers to the suburbs, the hardening of racial segregation in residential patterns, the concentration of African Americans and other ethnic minorities in central cities,

American capital, as the commerce and manufacturing that drove

postwar consumerism grew increasingly mobile. The combination and interaction of political, economic, and demographic change turned cities and suburbs into battlegrounds over the most pressing and unresolved issues of twentieth century American history: race and economic power.
What happened in the suburbs was fundamentally intertwined with the processes that shaped what happened in the city, including the concentration of African Americans and other ethnic minorities in central cities, the hardening of racial segregation in residential patterns, and the huge shift of government and private resources away from the city and towards the suburbs.

Suburban ascendancy radically altered the geography of America’s political economy, decentralizing wealth and power away from their traditional location in urban hubs and concentrating the poor in the central city. At the same time, the suburbanization redrew racial and ethnic

boundaries.
Suburbs also played a distinct role in the redrawing of racial and ethnic boundaries and in the rise of social movements ranging from the New Right to the Black Panthers. In the process, suburbanization has transformed the articulation of race, class, and gender—traditional categories for understanding the American experience—reshuffling them into newer, more complex arrangements.
Both internal migrations were accelerated as a result of the Great Depression and accompanying New Deal legislation, and again saw even faster development as a result of World War II. In 1950 a quarter of all Americans lived in suburbs. A decade later that number accounted for fully one-third of the United State’s population, and by 1970 it had become a solid majority. This concentration of voters has effectively led suburbanite concerns to dominate national politics.
Crabgrass Frontier represents the classic synthesis of suburbanization in America, which subsequent historians have taken as a starting point. Kenneth T. Jackson defined suburbanization from an urban perspective as urban deconcentration, rather than as a development separated from the city. He traced the evolution of American suburbs from their earliest manifestations in the first half of the nineteenth century to their present form. Crabgrass Frontier described the ways in which technological changes, public policies, popular culture, and individual desires combined to transform patterns of metropolitan development in America through the processes of urban deconcentration.