ABSTRACT
After the Second World War, federal urban renewal and public housing schemes continued the tradition of insensitivity to race by discounting the significance of place to black and brown identity. The postwar period saw the beginnings of a massive migration of African Americans to the urban northeast and midwest from sharecropping and hopelessness in the rural south. As happened after the First World War, employment exclusion and other forms of discrimination continued to be serious problems for blacks despite their recent demonstrations of patriotism through military service. Federal urban renewal, public housing and highway construction programs exacerbated these difficulties by devastating black communities. In what really was slum clearance and coerced relocation, local real estate interests, planners and politicians conspired to destroy many central-city black communities, giving residents the dubious option of distant new public housing estates.
