Detroit: A Dream Still Deferred - NYTimes.com

Detroit

 by Thomas J. Sugrue, a professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of “The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.”



AT first glance, the numbers released by the Census Bureau last week showing a precipitous drop in Detroit’s population — 25 percent over the last decade — seem to bear a silver lining: most of those leaving the city are blacks headed to the suburbs, once the refuge of mid-century white flight.
But a closer analysis of the data suggests that the story of housing discrimination that has dominated American urban life since the early 20th century is far from over. In the Detroit metropolitan area, blacks are moving into so-called secondhand suburbs: established communities with deteriorating housing stock that are falling out of favor with younger white homebuyers. If historical trends hold, these suburbs will likely shift from white to black — and soon look much like Detroit itself, with resegregated schools, dwindling tax bases and decaying public services.......A Dream Still Deferred - NYTimes.com

Yazoo Citizens' Council Drove Out The Klan Over Strategy, Not Segregation | TPMMuckraker

Yazoo Citizens' Council Drove Out The Klan Over Strategy, Not Segregation | TPMMuckraker

According to John Dittmer in his book Local People: The Struggle For Civil Rights In Mississippi, affluent, powerful white segregationists wanted to keep the Klan down because they thought its violent tactics would hurttheir fight against civil rights.

Dittmer singled out the Yazoo Citizens' Council by name:

The Yazoo City chapter of the Citizens' Council went on record opposing the Klan, adding that "your Citizens' Council was formed to preserve separation of the races, and believes that it can best serve the county where it is the only organization operating in this field."

They followed other prominent Mississippians who were trying to quash a resurgence of the Klan in the wake of the civil rights movement. Sen. John Stennis (D-MS), Dittmer wrote, condemned the Klan thusly:

Senator John Stennis, while not mentioning the Klan by name, condemned the rash of cross burnings, warning that such actions "can only hurt us in our efforts to defeat the [civil rights] bill because it gives our opponents an additional weapon to use against us."

"The Klan was bad for public relations," Todd Moye, an associate professor of history at the University of North Texas and the author of Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986, tells TPM.

Citizens' Councils "were trying to bring business into the state, and you know the Northerners with capital aren't gonna build factories in the state if they think it's a bunch of yahoos burning crosses," Moye said. "But if these people can maintain the status quo, which was based on Jim Crow segregation -- if they can do that without resorting to those bad publicity stunts -- then that's what they want to do. It's a white supremacist group, there's no question about it."