Census: Fewer black children in biggest US cities
By DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press
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The same pattern has repeated from coast to coast. Los Angeles saw a 31.8 percent decline in its population of black children, far surpassing the 6.9 percent drop in black adults. The number of black children in Atlanta fell by 27 percent. It was down 31 percent in Chicago and 37.6 percent in Detroit. Oakland, Calif. saw a drop of 42.3 percent, an exodus that fell only 6 percentage points below the decline in flood-ravaged New Orleans.
Overall, the census found nearly a half-million fewer black children living in the 25 largest U.S. cities than there were a decade earlier. By comparison, the number of black adults living in big cities has hardly budged.
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That migration has been evident in places like Henry County, Georgia, an area of suburban Atlanta that has seen its black population more than triple in the past decade. Blacks now make up 37 percent of the county of nearly 204,000 people.
The trend has also been showing up in a less visible way in countless mostly white suburbs like Livonia, Mich., outside of Detroit. Just a decade ago, there were 951 black people living in the entire city, out of a population of around 100,000. Now there are 3,309. The same trend has repeated in white suburbs across the country.
"Face it: In a lot of suburbs, there was a distinct effort to keep blacks out," said David Bositis, a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and former Census Bureau demographer.
Those barriers have now been falling, he said, opening the door for blacks to follow in the footsteps of white families who had their own diaspora to the suburbs after World War II.
"More African Americans are going to college. There were big income gains during the Clinton administration," Bositis said. "Now they are moving to the suburbs where they ha
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On a national level, the number of black children has inched down by only 2.3 percent, compared to a much larger 9.8 percent drop for white children.
Fewer children in a city isn't necessarily a sign of abandonment. After all, one of the hallmarks of poverty is an overabundance of children, packed into overcrowded apartments and schools, with a paucity of adult oversight.
"There is nothing inherently bad," about a city having fewer children, Bositis said.
"On one level, it is a big plus for the cities. People without children are much cheaper than people with children. Especially young people. They are making very little in way of demands on city services."
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