A catastrophic flood emptied New Orleans of much of its black youth. Powerful social forces may be doing a similar thing to places like Harlem and Chicago's South Side.
Over the past decade, the inner-city neighborhoods that have served for generations as citadels of African-American life and culture have been steadily draining of black children.
Last year's census found that the number of black, non-Hispanic children living in New York City had fallen by 22.4 percent in 10 years. In raw numbers, that meant 127,058 fewer black kids living in the city of Jay Z and Spike Lee, even as the number of black adults grew slightly.
The same pattern has repeated from coast to coast. Los Angeles saw a 31.8 percent decline in its population of black children, far surpassing the 6.9 percent drop in black adults. The number of black children in Atlanta fell by 27 percent. It was down 31 percent in Chicago and 37.6 percent in Detroit. Oakland, Calif. saw a drop of 42.3 percent, an exodus that fell only 6 percentage points below the decline in flood-ravaged New Orleans.
Overall, the census found nearly a half-million fewer black children living in the 25 largest U.S. cities than there were a decade earlier. By comparison, the number of black adults living in big cities has hardly budged.
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"Face it: In a lot of suburbs, there was a distinct effort to keep blacks out," said David Bositis, a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and former Census Bureau demographer.
Those barriers have now been falling, he said, opening the door for blacks to follow in the footsteps of white families who had their own diaspora to the suburbs after World War II.
"More African Americans are going to college. There were big income gains during the Clinton administration," Bositis said. "Now they are moving to the suburbs where they have better schools ... They don't want their children in inner-city schools."
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