How Urban Sprawl and the Legacy of Slavery Undermine Quality of Life

Why Most Middle-Class Families Don’t Raise Children in American Cities

Urban sprawl and slavery’s legacy intertwine in ways that are not typically recognized or discussed. Taken together, they prevent many middle-class Americans—particularly those with children—from living in safe, affordable, vibrant, walkable, human-scale environments. Surveys indicate a majority of people prefer this way of living. Research reveals that these kinds of places—when they’re well-designed, contain a mixture of housing types, are integrated with nature, and well-maintained—are better for us physically, socially, and financially.

My experience living in a city outside the United States has been that there are many benefits to raising a family in a place where you can walk or bike to everything you need and feel safe doing it day or night. Parenting in many urban environments in the U.S., however, can expose children to levels of violence, fear, and tension that are far greater than those found in other Western industrialized nations.

I grew up in suburban Pennsylvania in the 1970s, when the inhabitants of subdivisions with names like Indian Creek and Good Hope Farms were overwhelmingly white. My father would periodically remark that “Central Pennsylvania was a little dull, but pretty, and a good place to raise children.” It didn’t register with me as a child that American cities were in a downward spiral. 

We lived six miles from Harrisburg, the state capital. As a child, I knew the city was where Blacks lived but thought little else about the place. Just 15 minutes away by car, I only went there twice with my parents. As a teen, friends and I occasionally drove into Harrisburg to purchase beer illegally from a particular tavern. Beyond this, the city held little appeal. Driving everywhere seemed perfectly normal, as we had no other frame of reference.

Several adults on my block had grown up in cities or small towns. My parents grew up in Philadelphia and Toledo. The Atwoods, across the street, had grown up in Rochester. Mr. Taylor, next door, was from Allentown.

During the preceding three decades, as Whites like my parents and our neighbors were leaving cities for suburbia, Blacks from the segregated South had been pouring in, participating in the North’s version of racial apartheid that set the stage for the large-scale urban riots of the 1960s. 

The family shown below left Florida in 1940 to begin a new life in New Jersey. They were part of the Great Migration, which saw six million Black Americans migrate to cities like Harrisburg between 1915 and 1970. As a child, I’d incorrectly assumed that Blacks had always been a dominant presence in the city. In reality, five of six million migrants moved to cities north and west in the 30 years before we moved to our subdivision in 1971.

What I had no way of knowing at the time was that it had been the de facto policy of the U.S. government and the financial industry to restrict where Blacks could live. My parents and our neighbors took it for granted they’d get their federally backed mortgages and tax deductions to live out the American Dream in suburban pods.

Black Americans could not make such assumptions even after the federal government outlawed housing discrimination because the new law was poorly enforced. They got funneled to decaying sections of cities that were typically experiencing job losses by the late 1950s.

When growing up, our quiet streets and large backyards represented the epitome of the American Dream, the envy of the rest of the world. The thing was, I didn’t necessarily buy into the dream as a teenager even as I remained safely cocooned and separate from the large swaths of urban (i.e., Black) America that were falling apart.

Years later, by the time my wife Christine and I were ready to start a family, I had already spent a few years living in and visiting cities outside the country. These experiences led me to develop a passion for walking places and a distaste for needing to drive everywhere to meet daily needs.

My father, who grew up in Toledo in the 1920s and 1930s, had a free-range childhood in the city that differed considerably from the suburban world that my friends and I came of age in. In both conversation and letters to me, he described a Toledo that was very much alive, full of people and a source of culture. Below are photographs of the downtown taken when he lived in the city.

The question is why didn’t Christine and I, as middle-class parents, raise our children in Toledo, Philadelphia, or some other American city? It can be done. We spent five years raising two small boys in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. before returning to Halifax, Nova Scotia (where I’d previously done my urban planning degree). And we know others who’ve raised their children in American cities. But it’s not necessarily easy.

Christine and I each had experiences in American cities which, over time, took a toll. In Philadelphia, years before meeting Christine, a Black man strangled my friend to death shortly after I said goodnight to her. On another occasion, I watched the sky turn black as an entire city block burned after a Philadelphia police helicopter dropped an incendiary device on a fortified bunker on top of a rowhouse. In Washington D.C., four pre-teens attacked our five-year-old son and me with chunks of concrete, sending me to the hospital with a bloodied leg. In a separate incident, the police placed my family under highly visible police protection for four days, after a drug dealer’s mother believed me responsible for a recent raid on her home in which they hauled out weapons and drugs. Suffice it to say, I’m familiar with racial animosity, extreme behavior, and the limits of tolerance in American cities.

Our experiences are hardly universal but concerns over crime and personal safety are on the minds of many Americans, most of whom don’t even live in cities. A recent Gallup poll found that 40% of Americans would be afraid to walk alone at night within a mile of their home. The same survey found that fear of crime is limiting visits to cities and exercising outdoors.

Neither Christine nor I are overly fearful. Christine, for her part, is a blend of compassion and nerves of steel. In D.C., she was wooed by the local drug crew chief and deeply admired an elderly Black neighbor who candidly told us she disliked most Whites. She called Christine “super momma” on account of the way in which she saw Christine regularly interacting with our little boys. But regardless, things add up over time. And we knew urban life outside the country could be very different.

Before living in U.S. cities with children, we’d lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Halifax, Nova Scotia. On a visceral level, we knew what it felt like to walk everywhere and have zero concern for our safety. Once back in the U.S., we naturally fell to making comparisons, and the tension, stress, violence, and other complications of raising children in an urban environment got old.

The idea of fleeing to a more affordable car-choked American suburb felt like going backward after having lived in and spent lots of time in various foreign cities. So we opted to return to Halifax, where two of our three children were born.

All our daily concerns relating to raising children in a city disappeared when we returned to Halifax for reasons having nothing to do with the supposed moral superiority of Canadians. They’d have the same problems had the British been able to grow cotton in Nova Scotia.

In Halifax, we felt safe wherever we went, and public schools in the city were, and still are, as good as any you’d find in the suburbs. There is no such thing as a charter school or a magnet school because public schools are not failing. Some students grow up with affluence. Others are poor. The student body is diverse, with a majority being middle-class and white. None take an exam to get into the school. If you live inside the school’s catchment area, you’re eligible to attend. Some parents opt to put their kids into private school, but their numbers are relatively small.

Note: Since 2016, a bizarre, widely criticized government-led mass immigration program has rapidly inflated housing prices, reshaped cities for the worse, and dramatically changed demographics as large numbers of “heavily recruited” immigrants from China and India now call Halifax home. The cost of housing alone is such that our own children are unlikely to return after completing university.”

I focus on middle-class children because quality of life—as I used the term on these pages—hinges on their presence in a city. Below is a brief clip of the “urban” high school our three children have attended. In the footage, you’ll see Citadel High students leaving the school and walking a short distance downtown to support a teacher’s strike in 2016. Many of the students either walk to school or take public transportation.

When I had reason to visit the school, I’d walk in through the front doors without passing through either a metal detector or security checkpoint. From a safety perspective, it felt much the same to me as the suburban high school I attended. You can find similar “urban” schools in other Canadian cities as there’s nothing exceptional about its circumstances.

It’s different in America. Writing in the Atlantic, Jack Schnieder notes there is “urban school stigma” in the United States. In the 20 largest urban school districts in the country, 80 percent of students are nonwhite, and come from “persistently disadvantaged households.” Students in these schools “absorb negative stereotypes about their own abilities” and are surrounded by adults with “low levels of educational attainment and limited professional prospects.”  

When considering over 200 American cities, there are few in which middle-class children comprise a majority of students attending traditional (i.e., non-charter) public schools. But even the small number of exceptions are qualified for reasons I will discuss in a future article.

But my focus here is not on the exceptions but on the rule. And few middle-class families live in American cities and fewer still live in inner-city neighborhoods of the sort we raised our children in because of struggling public schools. Yet these neighborhoods—particularly those with a mixture of housing types—are the places with the greatest potential to provide families with the ability to walk to everything they’d need over a week.

This ability to use your own two feet to navigate a city safely and comfortably was a reality for our children in a city with roughly the same population density as Philadelphia. Watching how our children thrived in an urban environment made me keenly aware of what we in the middle class have lost in America. Again, I realize not everyone wants to live like this, but many do, and people struggle to find safe, affordable, urban communities.

Urban Sprawl and the Legacy of Slavery Intertwine in Ways that Make America Unique

What we build matters. Winston Churchill understood this when he famously said, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” And for the past 80 years, America has been sprawling and producing bad human habitat that fractures us socially and is disastrous for us environmentally. Each year, America loses more than one million acres of productive farmland to urban sprawl, on account of municipalities approving auto-dependent development patterns similar to what appears below.

Our past and how we treat one another also matter. If an individual is unable or unwilling to process and make sense of a difficult past, it can consume him or her. And what applies to the individual applies to society. We can ignore the past, but it matters just the same. In many respects, America’s slaveholding past is closer to the present than we think in ways we might not realize.

For example, on December 12, 1941, Roosevelt’s Attorney General, Francis Biddle, issued an official memo to all his federal prosecuting attorneys referred to as Justice Department Circular 3591. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor five days earlier. My father’s aircraft carrier—the USS Yorktown—would leave four days later from Norfolk, VA, to make its way to the Pacific. The title of Circular 3591 is “Involuntary Servitude, Slavery, and Peonage.” Its essential purpose was to direct justice department lawyers to finally eradicate slavery in the United States. 

By 1941, the U.S. government had known for decades that variants of slavery were still being practiced inside the country, but then consider the context. President Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal government in 1913. And in 1928, 30,000 white-robed members of the Ku Klux Klan paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue—at the height of their popularity—to adoring crowds and breathless coverage in the Washington Post that included lines like:

“Phantom-like hosts of the Ku Klux Klan spread their white robes over the most historic thoroughfare yesterday in one of the greatest demonstrations this city has ever known.”

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Terrence McArdle. “The day 30,000 white supremacists in KKK robes marched in the nation’s capital.” Washington Post August 11, 2018

With the outbreak of war, Roosevelt didn’t want to hand the Japanese and Germans a propaganda victory. How would it look for America to be fighting for freedom and against fascism abroad when at the same time there were blatant cases of oppression at home?

My father was a young combat pilot when the Justice Department issued Circular 3591. During the preceding eight decades that separated the Civil War from World War II, Whites enslaved over 200,000 Black Americans in a brutal system known as convict leasing. Alabama became the last state to outlaw the practice in 1928, but Blacks were still enslaved in smaller numbers right up through the early 1940s. During World War II, the Justice Department opened over 300 separate cases classified as “Involuntary servitude and slavery.”

I mention my father to clarify that these events didn’t happen so long ago. They are a fundamental part of our history and our culture. This continuation of slavery operating in a violent, oppressive racial caste system is part of what drove six million Blacks to northern cities. Those people brought with them tremendous amounts of trauma, living in a land where enslavement was a fact of life for 326 years, between 1619 and 1945.

This 326-year period accounts for 80% of the time American culture has been forming and is what truly makes the United States unique among all Western nations. This dynamic goes to the heart of the divide in American culture and is at the root of the polarization and dysfunction we see in American life, dynamics that shape what is possible in terms of how and where we live. 

Note: The 326-year period implies that the formation of American culture did not start forming on July 4, 1776. My own family arrived in the early 1600s and were part of a society that was becoming culturally distinct for a myriad of reasons that included enslavement.

Growing up, I believed slavery was something that happened only to Blacks and that it had little to do with me. I was ignorant of the existence of our racial caste system, in which many forms of oppression thrived. Today, I view this racial caste system as a multifaceted disease that affects all Americans in terms of how we feel about places, what we fear, and what we hate. 

Whereas slavery has degraded the person, urban sprawl has degraded both the person and the place. The two are inexorably linked. Just as the United States is the only Western nation in which variants of slavery have been practiced inside its present-day borders for over three centuries, it is also the only Western nation in which a sizable percentage of the middle class does not raise families in most cities. The vast majority live in auto-dependent suburbs, which is typically considered the only viable option.  

The More Things Change, The More They Remain the Same

I’ve recently walked the streets of impoverished neighborhoods in Rochester, Detroit, Toledo, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., and Erie. In most of these cities, you can also find new mixed-use projects drawing the middle class back into cities. As suggested by the new mixed-use development in Pittsburgh, PA shown below, there’s no doubt that cities are more desirable than they were forty years ago. These changes provide reason to hope. But I couldn’t help but think that the more things change, the more things remain the same.

An analysis completed by the Washington Post revealed that between 2010 and 2020, census tracts surrounding the core of many American cities experienced a net gain of Whites. A total of 317,771 Whites moved to the 25 cities in which this gain exceeded 4000 people. But context is important. A majority of people went to just a handful of cities, and long-term Black and Hispanic residents were being displaced.

Most of these new middle and upper-middle-class arrivals are childless and are unlikely to raise families in the new mixed-use buildings. Many plan to stay for only a few years.[i] When thinking about the overall impact of these changes on society, note that this net gain in Whites represents an infinitesimal 0.15% of the U.S. population.

I acknowledge the positive changes in many sections of American cities, but I don’t consider these cities to be in the middle of a transformation in terms of raising middle-class children in urban spaces. A poorly understood, unresolved racial past continues to degrade countless lives in the present day. Our cities continue to serve as receptacles of trauma for reasons that are not wiped away with the gentrification of selected neighborhoods in a subset of American cities.

Many in the middle class are less enamored with the drive-everywhere culture that previous generations embraced. Violence and poorly performing public schools in American cities limit options for these people, especially those planning to raise children. Across the country, some parents stick it out and navigate exam schools, charter schools, or private schools. Most, however, leave for the suburbs rather than consider homes in neighborhoods where public schools are in crisis.[ii]

Even the cities where White gains are most visible remain burdened by significant levels of violence. Denver, for example, experienced the third-largest gain in whites, yet had 87 shooting victims in 94 days during the summer of 2023. Washington D.C., which ranked second in White gains, closed out the year with 274 homicides.

Americans Move to Europe to Improve Their Quality of Life

Technological advances have revolutionized the workplace in the sense that millions now work in and with geographically distributed teams. Many can now choose where they want to live. For an increasing number of Americans, that means moving to Europe.

This past year, the European Union’s statistical office, Eurostat, released figures showing that the EU granted a record number of 76,221 American residents permits to “high-quality life opportunities.” Everyone’s circumstances are different, but reasons given for leaving the U.S. typically include quality of life, a part of which is leading a walkable lifestyle in a place where you don’t fear for your safety.

Growing up in Halifax allowed our children to understand that it’s possible to live in an urban environment without heightened concerns for personal safety. They’ve never lived in a suburb and find them alienating. One son now lives in Hamburg, and he finds it a very desirable place to live. Another son is in Montreal. Our daughter, who is in her last year of high school, has her eyes on Montreal as well.

Below are a few photos of our son’s neighborhood in Montreal. Like Halifax, this neighborhood never lost its viability as a safe, middle-class environment simply because Quebec doesn’t share our tragic racial history. Virtually every neighborhood in Montreal is safe and, importantly, there are no charter schools or magnet schools because the public school are not in crisis.

Conventional wisdom in America has long said that it’s preferable to raise children in the suburbs. Our experience as parents has been the opposite in that city life provides a myriad of benefits not offered by suburbia. I wish for a future in which every middle-income American parent has the choice to raise their children as we have. But the barriers to achieving such a vision are significant. Our move to Canada helped me to obtain the perspective I needed to makesense of an unresolved racial past, my own American experiences, and the impact of a suburban lifestyle tailormade for a nation deeply shaped by white supremacy.

Stepping outside the country, I realized something was different. Quality of life indicators in the United States lags other Western nations. In my lifetime, obesity and opioid overdoses have reached epidemic proportions. Shootings are the leading cause of death for children. Life expectancy in America is lower than in all Western European nations. Urban sprawl and the vestiges of our racial caste system, directly and indirectly, shape these and other pathologies. And increasing numbers of people with options are voting with their feet.

White America Received Unheeded Warnings Long Ago About Its Future

In the past few years, Americans have created YouTube channels that document the difficulty of finding alternatives to suburbia. A separate category of videos produced by Black Americans draws attention to and celebrates ghetto life. Today, you can find “hood” videos for virtually any city in the country. Then there are those videos produced by Americans who have left the United States explaining why they departed and what they’ve learned by way of contrast. Although every individual story is unique, underlying issues trace back to how urban sprawl and the legacy of slavery degrade quality of life. Taken together, these stories raise a fundamental question; As a nation, where did we go wrong, and what we do to improve circumstances for future generations?

It’s a question that a Black sociologist named W.E.B. Dubois definitively answered in his 1899 book titled, A Philadelphia Negro. Its publication served as a stark warning to White America six decades before my birth. It told of what was to come if our racial animus remained unexamined and unchecked. And it has everything to do with why Christine and I raised our children outside the United States.

Dubois was brought to Philadelphia by White elites at the University of Pennsylvania who believed the city was, as he says, “going to the dogs because of the crime and venality of its Negro citizens.” His task was to study Black Philadelphians and determine the source of the problems. He lived in and conducted his research in the city’s Seventh Ward at the same time my mother’s grandparents lived in an adjacent neighborhood called the Devil’s Pocket. At the time, the Seventh Ward was one-third Black, in a city that was 95% white.

Dubois’s research revealed that Black poverty and crime were a symptom rather than a cause. He lived amongst the formerly enslaved and their children and watched in real time as Whites excluded Blacks from mainstream socio-economic life. In 1899, my great-grandfather, John Boland, was a young Philadelphia policeman walking the same city blocks as Dubois.

Dubois thought it all well and good to object to “a race so poor and ignorant and inefficient as the mass of the Negroes,” but if you’re the very group responsible for producing the ignorance in the first place through slavery, and you insist on shutting out Blacks out of mainstream American life, then you’re pushing people into “pauperism and vice,” and need to hold yourself “largely accountable for the deplorable results.”

Dubois saw firsthand that the formerly enslaved and their children were struggling in a nation where white supremacy reigned supreme. He was imploring White Americans to change “primarily for their sakes,” mindful that what was taking place was a “battle for humanity and human culture.” And with these words, Dubois predicted the demise of quality of life in America.

The disdain, prejudice, exclusion, hatred, and violence meted out by Whites did not affect every Black American equally, but Dubois noted that large numbers of those stuck at the bottom were in the process of giving up by 1899.

In the subsequent decades leading up to my birth in 1963, America’s most respected authorities on Black life expanded on Dubois’ work, describing longstanding pathologies in Black life that in our time are routinely and incorrectly blamed on the modern welfare state. 

To understand what drove Black men in the South to kill each other in large numbers in the 1930s, read John Dollard’s Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937). To understand why familial ties between Black men and women were strained both before and after our civil war, or to understand why Black men abandoned families in relatively large numbers in the 1930s, read Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States (1939).

Read Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy to find concerns spelled out in 1944 regarding how agricultural mechanization would seal the fate of millions of low-skilled Black workers who would inevitably follow other migrants north to increasingly overcrowded cities where dire poverty, economic insecurity, and high levels of crime were the norm.

More recently, Pulitzer-Prize finalist Elliot Currie has written a book titled,  A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America. It’s through Currie that I learned of the existence of research completed by Dollard, Frazier, and others. Currie does a masterful job of bringing attention to violence within the Black community, putting it into context, and laying out ideas to address the devastating violence he chronicles.

I found that Currie’s work helped me to make sense of my own experiences in America. We’re dealing with a continuum that began with people chained to the inner deck of a ship, packed like spoons, with no room for movement. There are historic reasons why quality of life suffers in America. Our problems have tangible origins.

A Racial History That Affects Us All

Given America’s current trajectory, it seems unlikely the country can do the work necessary to address an unresolved racial past. I sincerely wish to be proven wrong even as we’re more socially fractured than ever.

Similarly, there’s no evidence that municipal governments in America are on the verge of rejecting urban sprawl and embracing walkable, human-scale development. Again, I wish to be proven wrong, but over the past three decades, only a handful of exceptions have emerged, such as Gaithersburg, MD, Dublin, OH, and Tigard, OR. After more than 30 years of people criticizing suburbia, searches for new homes on Realor.com in almost any municipality of your choosing still return suburban-style single-family houses with the obligatory attached two-car garage.

Urban sprawl and the legacy of slavery don’t just intertwine to diminish the quality of our lives and keep middle-class families out of cities. These dynamics also shape elements of culture that aren’t universally embraced outside America’s borders. For example, many Europeans stereotype Americans in ways that aren’t flattering. Fat Stupid. Arrogant. Incurious; Violent; Drive everywhere; Obsessed with guns. These words and others form the vocabulary of anti-Americanism in countries that are our allies. Much of the criticism relates to an auto-dependent, physically, and psychologically isolating lifestyle.

Side note: Although these stereotypes contain elements of truth, they paint an incomplete picture of a complex, dynamic country. A fair-minded detractor might also note (with irony) that it was America that secured freedom in European countries after 1945. Many understand America’s central role in preserving freedom and democracy as evidenced by the Ukraine War. The U.S. is more than its worst stereotypes and the free world would prefer to see an America that thrives both socially and economically. If America’s darker instincts ultimately prevail, we’re all in trouble.

Today, the country is undergoing rapid demographic change as Hispanics, Chinese, Indians, Middle Easterners, and other non-Europeans account for larger percentages of the population. And with increasing numbers of people coming from mixed-race backgrounds, it makes less sense to think of America in terms of Black and White. What these demographic changes don’t do, however, is erase deeply rooted pathologies born of a caustic racial caste system.  

Having recently walked the streets of formerly redlined (Black) sections of several American cities, I know full well that the pathologies Dubois saw unfolding are as entrenched as they’ve ever been in cities today. Urban life in America—and indeed American culture—will never be what it should be without healing deep, longstanding wounds inflicted by systemic forces.

Pathologies rooted in violence aren’t difficult to find in American cities. Recently, I had amicable interactions in Detroit with two men afflicted by mental illness in parts of city that are on the rebound. The man looking into the camera is named Bryce. He had initially approached me from behind with a knife his hand while eating a bag of potato chips. I was unfamiliar with the brand of chip (i.e., Better Made), which served as a conversation starter. The rest these men’s story is highly relevant, but for another time.

This idea that the health of the Black community is, more broadly, central to the success of the American experiment is not mine alone. In 1944, the aforementioned Gunnar Myrdal—a Swedish economist and Nobel Prize recipient—wrote that if America could “show the world a progressive trend by which the Negro became finally integrated into modern democracy, all mankind would be given faith again.” Knowing the cost of doing nothing he says, “America is free to choose whether the Negro shall remain her liability or become her opportunity.” We chose the former, to our detriment.[iii]

Two decades later, in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a major speech to the nation that likely gave Myrdal reason to hope. Emphasizing the centrality of cities to American civic life, Johnston quoted Aristotle, who says, “Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life.”^[iv]   It’s difficult to imagine and Ameican president speaking about a collective good in the way that it was still possible to do in May, 1964.

Acknowledging the growing pathologies in the American city Johnson noted, “It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today.” Continuing, he expressed the following concerns that anticipated my difficulty finding home in America three decades later.

The catalog of ills is long: there is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated.

Worst of all, expansion is eroding the precious and time-honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference.

Our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today, the frontier of imagination and innovation is inside those cities and not beyond their borders.

Lyndon Johnson

By 1968, the Johnson administration had largely abandoned the ideals embraced four years earlier. Three poisons were overwhelming the body politic namely, the arrival of the far right on the national stage (i.e., Barry Goldwater in 1964), massive defense spending and social upheaval relating to the Vietnam War, and urban violence that afflicted cities across the country during the last six years of the Great Migration (i.e., 1964-1970).

That same year, in 1968, a presidential commission released the “Kerner Report” which identified the root causes of widespread racial violence in American cities. Just as Johnson’s 1964 speech implicitly made the case for raising a family in an American city, the Kerner Report explained why Christine and I would later find it difficult to do.

The report looks at civil disturbances that broke out in 128 cities in the summer of 1967. Below are selected photos from one of those cities, Detroit, Michigan.

Note: I’d like to thank Elizabeth Clemens and the staff at Wayne State University’s Walter P. Reuther Library in Detroit for their permission to use the images below. Photos (and text) below are part of a broader collection maintained by the Library.

Page one of the report bluntly states, “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

The Kerner report was what Myrdal might have hoped to see in the 1940s, namely comprehensive recommendations backed by penetrating analysis. The government, however,  never acted on the recommendations. Federal money that might have been directed toward addressing an unresolved racial past—as Myrdal and others advocated for—was consumed by the Vietnam War.

Dubois, Myrdal’s team of 74 scholars, and the Kerner Commission all made similar points over seven decades, namely that Black dysfunction was principally a function of systemic racism and exclusion from mainstream society. With the Civil Rights Movement, circumstances for millions changed only by degrees in the sense that most Blacks and Whites live a world apart both physically and culturally.

I don’t wish to invalidate the experience of any middle-class Americans currently making a life in cities, nor am I indifferent to the efforts of those working to improve cities. But evidence of an unresolved past marring cities is just a click away. Previously, I mentioned YouTube channels that document the current state of urban communities. Channels by CharlieBo313 and HoodTime are good starting points. What they reveal is consistent with my experience living in and around urban neighborhoods that are in crisis in a uniquely American sort of way.   

It was Dubois who framed our situation most accurately and starkly. His warning to Whites was to either change, or the whole of civic life would suffer. And that’s what we see in today’s America, a country where violence, fear, low levels of education, addiction, and hopelessness are prominent attributes of American life.

His warnings are perhaps less relevant for those living in gated communities or otherwise isolated circumstances. But if the hum of humanity, walking, beauty, and culture appeal, then it’s difficult not to conclude that we’ve lost something important. The broad middle class should have the option to live in safe, vibrant cities. Aristotle was right about cities.

Ideally, there’s a future for America that allows our grandchildren and their children to have what Christine and I struggled to find. It’s a future that is admittedly improbable but not inconceivable. I hope that the power of self-interest and American ingenuity will prevail.

Self-Interest as an Agent of Change

Any change would be rooted in self-interest of the sort that Dubois was pleading with Americans to recognize in 1899. The question is, have circumstances reached a point where it’s possible to have a meaningful discussion about what self-interest entails considering what urban sprawl and the legacy of slavery have cost us?

Regarding urban sprawl, acting on self-interest would require local governments to recognize the tangible benefits of rejecting auto-dependency and building human-scale communities. As previously mentioned, there are a handful of municipalities that serve as exceptions to the rule of perpetual urban sprawl. Change would depend on electing local politicians to office who have both the will and ability to identify and adopt best practices, such as those described here at Good Human Habitat.  

Working as an urban planner, I learned that improvements in quality of life are rooted in political leadership. Even the best-intentioned municipal staff are impotent without it. Change, therefore, depends upon municipal elections being far more quality-of-life-centric and results-driven than they are today. The question is whether the next eighty years look much the same as the previous eighty.

Regarding the legacy of slavery, acting on self-interest would involve taking responsibility for understanding a racial past that affects us all. Again, if you don’t understand a pathological past and deal with it, you stay stuck in it, unable to heal.

This past is synonymous with a form of cultural continuity in America that works directly against quality of life because it’s produced social dysfunction. Before our civil war, daily life in the South featured the widespread use of Black women as breeders, whippings, mutilation, and murder as a means of correction, the routine splitting of families, the favored practice of rape amongst white slaveholding men, the outlawing of education, and the inability to move freely without identification papers.

After the war, daily life was punctuated by paramilitary campaigns that eliminated nascent civil liberties, widespread lynching in the form of macabre mutilation for the live entertainment of thousands of white spectators, lynching postcards as keepsakes, the criminalization of Black life, the re-enslavement of people in brutal conditions to serve the needs of business cycles and corporate interests such as U.S. Steel.

Again, there is a history in America that we are not taught, but it’s affected all of us in terms of how we feel about places, what we fear, and what we hate. If you are not familiar with James Allen’s work titled Without Sanctuary, I encourage you to visit the site and watch his five-minute video, which reinforces the point I’m making here regarding cultural continuity. The video is best viewed directly at Without Sanctuary but is also availble on YouTube below. I consider his words to be among the most important ever to be spoken by an American citizen.

Considering the facts—and mindful of the omissions and mythmaking in my high school American history textbook—Black Americans experienced significant levels of intergenerational trauma. Of the six million Black Americans who migrated to cities north and west during the Great Migration (1915 through 1970), many could move beyond their trauma, thrive, and lead productive lives. Others, however, could not. So, when I say that the Great Migration turned American cities into receptacles of trauma, I’m speaking in literal terms.

There is tremendous benefit in taking collective responsibility for understanding a sordid past in the way Germany has come to terms with Nazism. In her 2013 essay titled “Dare we compare American slavery to the Holocaust,” moral philosopher Susan Neiman—who lost family in the holocaust—poignantly writes, “Nazism should not be used to end discussions about evil but to begin them and American crimes deserve a hard look as any other.”

There are uniquely positive aspects of America’s history, culture, and values that deserve to be discussed and celebrated. But again, any meaningful improvement in quality of life depends on understanding the source of societal dysfunction, violence, and fear in America. This requires a candid, accurate account of the past.

I’m named in honor of a family member who was a central figure in slavery’s expansion between 1830 and 1854. My learning of the malignant and consequential nature of his public life did not bring me personal shame, nor did it lead me to hate America. Knowledge of his role in our past allowed me to make better sense of the present. Once you understand a problem, you can begin to solve it. My experience has been that the more I’ve learned about our unresolved past, the more I’ve come to understand how deeply American I am in a positive sense. I hope others in America come to feel the same. 

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[i] Tara Bahrampour, Marissa J. Lang and Ted Mellnik. “White people have flocked back to city centers — and transformed them”. Washington Post Feb 6, 2023.

[ii] Hyojung Lee. “Are millennials leaving cities? Yes, but young adults are not.” Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. May 12, 2021.

[iii] Countless studies over the year document Black-White gap in intergenerational poverty. See the National Alliance to End Homelessness piece titled “Homelessness and Black History: Poverty and Income.”   See also the Brookings Institution’s research paper titled “Long shadows: The Black-white gap in multigenerational poverty”

^[iv] This captures the feeling I had as a college graduate returning from Europe over 30 years ago.

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