ABSTRACT
As King urged protest in the South of the early 1960s, thousands of African Americans chose instead to flee. The Chicago Daily News referred to the city’s West Side ghetto as “the part of Mississippi that got away” (Connolly 1989: 60-61). Between 1940 and 1960 the black population living outside the states of the old Confederacy exploded from 4 million to 9 million people, making the 1960s the decade in which African Americans became predominantly non-Southern urbanites. King always knew that racial injustice affected both North and South. An April 1965 visit to Boston saw him denounce the residential segregation that produced black slums and de facto segregated and unequal education. An abiding memory of his days as a Boston University student, he told reporters, was the ordeal of trying to find somewhere to live. He had inquired wherever he saw “Rooms to Rent” signs, but once landlords discovered he “was a Negro,” “suddenly [the rooms] had just been rented” (Garrow 1988: 423).
