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Concept
Blockbusting
Summary
Blockbusting is a business practice in the United States in which real estate agents and building developers convinced white residents in a particular area to sell their property at below-market prices. This was achieved by fearmongering the homeowners, telling them that racial minorities would soon be moving into their neighborhoods. The blockbusters would then sell those same houses at inflated prices to black families seeking upward mobility. Blockbusting became prominent after post-World War II bans on explicitly segregationist real estate practices. By the 1980s it had mostly disappeared in the United States after changes to the law and real estate market.
From 1900–1970, around 6 million African Americans from the rural Southern United States moved to industrial and urban cities in the Northern and Western United States during the Great Migration in an effort to avoid the Jim Crow laws, violence, bigotry, and limited opportunities of the South. Resettlement to these cities peaked during World War I and World War II as slowing immigration from Europe created a labor shortage in northern and western cities. To fill war industries and shipyards, these cities recruited tens of thousands of blacks and whites including those from the South. Resistance to this loss of cheap labor in the South meant that northern recruiters had to act in secret or face fines or imprisonment. Southern authorities tried to prevent black flight by arresting migrants at railroad stations and arresting them on the grounds of vagrancy. Racial and class antagonisms heightened across the urban United States as a result of this influx of black residents, and in part owing to the overcrowding of cities. The Great Migration highlighted racial divisions of the North that black Americans so desperately tried to flee from in the South: police killings of unarmed African American men and inequalities and biases in employment, housing, health care, and education. As black soldiers returned home in the aftermath of World War I and World War II, they struggled to find adequate housing and jobs in the cities that they had left.
Official source
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