White Flight Literature Review

“In the end, the ultimate success of white flight was the way in which it led whites away from responsibility for the problems they had done much to create.”
In White Flight, author Kevin Kruse studies white Atlantans’ movement away from the inner city to the suburbs. According to Kruse, this movement began as white flight and morphed into what he calls “suburban secession.” Kruse makes a convincing argument that white flight occurred as African-Americans were pressed by a shortage of housing in traditional black neighborhoods, and encouraged by the rising tide of the civil rights movement, to seek residence in traditionally white city neighborhoods. White residents at first resisted these movements and then retrenched in suburbs that made

it easier to maintain the separate racial environment they sought. Kruse presents an even broader argument that white flight is more than physical relocation, it is a political revolution that has impacted the rise of modern conservative politics.
Faced with integration efforts posed by the government, the working-class whites did not like the idea of sharing public spaces such as schools, parks, buses, and even neighborhoods with African Americans.

The whites first turned to organized violence and intimidation, but soon learned that resistance proved ineffective and instead began to couch their resistance in terms of protecting the integrity of communities and emphasizing their individual rights to live amongst people of their choosing. Meanwhile, those that could afford to rushed out of integrating neighborhoods. In doing so, these efforts often proved successful at maintaining de facto segregation despite official integration efforts. They emphasized a conservative ideology that used "freedom of association,” the right to associate (and not associate) with people of their choosing. When this line of reasoning proved ineffectual at stopping the tide of integration, those middle-class whites simply abandoned spaces, which dovetailed with their ideological claims of relinquishing any moral or financial responsibility for addressing public inner-city problems. his is known as white flight. In simpler terms, whites literally fled their homes and towns because African American’s were moving in. But, white flight wasn’t only a racial divide, it was a class divide as

well.
The upper-class whites supported integration and voted for it to be put in place. They supported integration because they were not affected by it. They had previously observed the integration of public spaces from a distance, safely retreated to their private schools and country clubs, and even allied themselves with black leaders and liberal politicians in a moderate coalition to promote business growth. However, they were forced into the fray in the 1960’s with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the forced integration of their businesses. They struggled against organized sit-in protests and government injunctions to desegregate their restaurants and department stores, and it was during this time that the conservative beliefs of individual rights, property rights, and privatization turned into a coherent ideology.