"The viewpoint that will (rightly) get you shunned is the one that says "black people" were a factor"Do you shun that viewpoint because it is false and slanderous? Or do you believe that it is true, but that it must not be talked about, because the wrong people might exploit the history for undesirable ends?
It seems to me stunning that anyone can dispute the statement that "black people played a role in the decay of Detroit". It's every bit as true as saying, "White people played a role in the 1906 Atlanta riots" or "Mongols played a role in the sacking of Baghdad in 1258" or "Irish played a major role in the degeneracy of New York's five points in the 1850's". Obviously, this is not to say that all central-asians are responsible for sacking Baghdad or that all blacks are responsible for the destruction of Detroit. But it is true that both of the events had an ethnic component to them, and if you want to understand what happened, you need to understand how different groups of people played a part.
I've spent quite a bit of time over the years trying to piece together what happened to leave so many American areas in ruins. Detroit is the worst, but large swaths of cities like Saint Louis, Baltimore, New Haven, NY, Cleveland, Buffalo, Philadelphia, etc, show the same patterns of blight, abandonment, decay, crime, drug abuse, and gang violence.
The quickest summary I can produce is:
a) The U.S. has always had a crime problem. A good deal of this crime problem has stemmed from the fact that the police and justice system have always been much less effective at bringing criminals to justice than have the European systems. This was the case in the early 1900's and it's still the case today. Read this book if you want more details: http://books.google.com/books?id=NGBLAAAAMAAJ&dq=raymond...
b) In the U.S. in the early 1900's, the south had the most ineffective policing system. Judges were horribly corrupt and murderers could often buy a non-guilty plea for as low as $50. And in the south, the black communities had the least justice. Police and the courts did not care when black people killed black people. Not suprisingly, crime was a huge problem among the black population. If you look at murder rates by city in the 1910's, its always the cities with large black populations that had the highest rates, and if you look at crime by race, you see the same effect.
c) During the 1910's through the 1960's, black people migrated north in large numbers. The migration was due to push factors (escaping Jim Crow, loss of jobs due to mechanization in the cotton fields) and pull factors (the two world wars creating lots of manufacturing jobs).
d) American law enforcement was always lax, but in the 1950's and 1960's it became even more so. A series of court rulings made it more difficult to arrest and convict. Liberal leaning mayors and progressive activists helped curb the age-old practice of police dealing "street justice". During that time period, the average expected punishment for a given act of burglary declined by 75%.
e) The civil rights movement quickly branched out into the "black power" movement. Parts of the black power movement blamed whites in general for all the ills of the world, and gave justifications for violence. Young men always have supressed desire to riot and rampage, to exert their own sense of power and dominance. Many black young men latched on to the ideas of the black power movement as a rationalization for violence against all whites (even those who had zero responsibility for slavery or discrimination).
f) As part of urban renewal push, city planners razed entire blocks and neighborhoods. The government erected housing projects, populated largely by blacks, in replacement. Most of the housing projects had little or no police or security precense. Complex bureaucratic rules made it impossible to evict misbehaving neighbors. Without any government law and order, gang rule took over and anarchy ensued.
g) So altogether, you have a population that historically has had quite high crime rates moving in to Detroit. The policing at the time is becoming much more lax. The housing projects knock down existing blocks and place these new, high crime residents right in the middle of more middle class residents. These high crime residents often bear a special grudge towards white people. As a result, these middle class residents are exposed to a level of violence and social degeneracy that is schocking. Muggings and assults become a frequent occurrence. Naturally, they flee.
h) The biggest tipping point was the 1967 riots, during which (almost entirely black) mobs torched buildings, looted stores, and killed residents. They killed people like Sheren George "a married mother of two. Shot while in the car driven by her husband (Ross), as they tried flee from a mob of black youths beating a white man." and Krikor Messerlian, "A 68 year-old Armenian immigrant, beaten to death by a group of black youths, one wielding a baseball bat." The police stood back most of the first day of the riots, but by the third day the military was called in and started using live rounds. They killed a bunch of rioters and some innocent people. After the riots, the rate of exodus from Detroit rose from 20,000 a year to 80,000 a year.
(comment got too long for HN to handle, breaking into a second comment)