The only reason suburbs even became a thing in this country was because white people with FHA loans wanted nice houses close to their jobs and the amenities of cities but didn’t want their tax money going to fund black kids schools,
Hang on, that doesn’t track with history as I know it currently.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is where the whole garbage “separate but equal” logic came from including on school funding where everyone but whites got poor resources for schools.
Suburbs were created as a result of soldiers returning from WWII which would have been starting in 1945 with a the majority in 1946 after VJ day with the Japanese surrendering.
It would be another 8 years before Brown v Board of Education (1954) shot down “separate but equal” for schools allowing integration, and even then it wouldn’t have meant instant emptying of inner cities for suburbs until the early 60s or so.
So suburbs already were a thing and not caused by white people not wanting to fund black schools. Yes, exit to suburbs accelerated because of that, but suburbs weren’t created because of it.
Prior to Brown, many of today’s suburban municipalities were just neighborhoods of the cities they were near, neighborhoods that were almost entirely populated by white people due to racist administration of FHA loans, racist zoning laws, and racist real estate business practices. Post Brown is when a lot of them started to be spun off into independent municipal governments by state legislatures with their own mayors and city councils and school districts.
So, rereading it now, I feel like I should correct my initial comment here - it wasn’t the white people with FHA loans who started this process of creating segregated communities, it was the ones who administered those loans and who were writing the laws incorporating them as independent government entities.
Hang on, that doesn’t track with history as I know it currently.
So suburbs already were a thing and not caused by white people not wanting to fund black schools. Yes, exit to suburbs accelerated because of that, but suburbs weren’t created because of it.
Prior to Brown, many of today’s suburban municipalities were just neighborhoods of the cities they were near, neighborhoods that were almost entirely populated by white people due to racist administration of FHA loans, racist zoning laws, and racist real estate business practices. Post Brown is when a lot of them started to be spun off into independent municipal governments by state legislatures with their own mayors and city councils and school districts.
So, rereading it now, I feel like I should correct my initial comment here - it wasn’t the white people with FHA loans who started this process of creating segregated communities, it was the ones who administered those loans and who were writing the laws incorporating them as independent government entities.