Suburbanization

The movement of people away from rural and urban areas and to the suburbs. The pace of suburbanization in the United States has increased significantly since the late twentieth century, but the trend toward suburbanization began early in the nation's history. As far back as 1800, suburban areas were growing faster than cities, with the suburban population doubling in almost every decade up to the Civil War.

While most American cities had reached their population peaks by 1950, the suburbs grew even more rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century, in part because of an exodus from the cities. Between 1900 and 1950, the number of Americans living in suburban areas doubled. The suburban population doubled again by 2000, and by that year, the suburbs contained 52 percent of the total population of the United States.

The large influx of African Americans into cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is cited as one of the reasons for the rapid growth of the suburbs starting in the mid-twentieth century. African Americans began to leave the South after the Civil War, seeking better opportunities in the North, the Midwest, and the West. By the 1890s, the so-called Great Migration was firmly under way, as blacks settled in northern cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and New Haven, Connecticut. During the period of World War I alone, about half a million blacks migrated out of the South. The population shift begun during the Great Migration continued over the next several decades, bringing millions more African Americans to northern cities.

Urban blacks typically lived in separate neighborhoods from white residents, who were largely opposed to integration. By the 1950s, many urban whites were reacting to the influx of African Americans by fleeing the inner cities for the suburbs. Once there, they took [Page 799]steps to ensure that blacks would have difficulty following them. Suburbs in the South were segregated by Jim Crow laws, those in the North by discriminatory real estate and lending practices, such as redlining. Quite often, white banks refused to loan black families money for mortgages, and white real estate agents would not inform black customers of homes for sale in white suburbs.

So-called white flight drained significant economic and social resources from inner cities across the nation. Affluent white suburbs were able to collect more tax revenue from their residents and provide them with better schools and more effective police, fire, and other services. As the wealthier residents left for the suburbs, cities had less money to devote to maintaining the quality of urban life. A handful of wealthier blacks did manage to move into suburbs, but those who did often encountered hostility from their white neighbors.

The Supreme Court helped to open the suburbs to African Americans with its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The Court ruled that the “separate but equal” system of Jim Crow in the South was unconstitutional, undercutting the legal basis of racial segregation. While blacks still encountered resistance and discriminatory practices such as redlining, they could no longer legally be prevented from moving into white suburbs. Nevertheless, blacks continued to leave the South into the 1960s.

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