In the decades following World War II, cities across the United States
saw an influx of African American families into otherwise homogeneously
white areas. This racial transformation of urban neighborhoods led many
whites to migrate to the suburbs, producing the phenomenon commonly
known as white flight. In Block by Block, Amanda I. Seligman draws on
the surprisingly understudied West Side communities of Chicago to shed
new light on this story of postwar urban America.
Seligman's study reveals that the responses of white West Siders to
racial changes occurring in their neighborhoods were both multifaceted
and extensive. She shows that, despite rehabilitation efforts,
deterioration in these areas began long before the color of their
inhabitants changed from white to black. And ultimately, the riots that
erupted on Chicago's West Side and across the country in the mid-1960s
stemmed not only from the tribulations specific to blacks in urban
centers but also from the legacy of accumulated neglect after decades of
white occupancy. Seligman's careful and evenhanded account will be
essential to understanding that the flight of whites to the suburbs was
the eventual result of a series of responses to transformations in
Chicago's physical and social landscape, occurring one block at a
time.