ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the status of the urban black population in the 1950s and 1960s and discusses causes of the tensions that produced the urban crisis. The Great Migration brought black people to these cities in large numbers, and their population in the seventeen central cities by 1960 was 4.82 million, which amounted to 25.6 percent of the nation's black population. Housing abandonment occurred in many areas as rents and prices fell so low that it became uneconomical to continue to use the housing units. King and Mieszkowski pointed out that it is important to separate the demand and supply factors. The South and the West continued to be very different regions for black workers in 1970. The average of the black female unemployment rates was 7.1 percent, which was close to the figure for the northern urban areas.
