Nothing’s left in the home. The furniture’s loaded into the van. The clothes are stowed away. The suitcases are strapped to the roof.
They’d been patient — withstood all of the local level politics, but the final straw was pulled. And now, with the introduction of cross town busing in Norfolk, the white middle class milieu spilled out of the city.
Some went to Chesapeake to settle near the Elizabeth River. Others sought out new ventures in Suffolk’s tranquil neighborhoods. Most headed east to fill the new, ever-expanding suburbs of Virginia Beach.
This migration of white people is known as “white flight.”
It occurs when white people depart from areas that are becoming racially diverse to more homogenous suburban regions. It happened across the country as federal court cases desegregated schools and other laws and policies forced racial integration.
In Norfolk, it started in the 1960s and happened well into the 1990s. U.S. Census data shows that in those 30 years, the white population in Norfolk decreased 26% from nearly 200,000 to roughly 144,000.
The Black population increased from about 77,000 to 102,000 — a 32% jump.
Daniel Lichter, a policy analysis and management professor at Cornell University, said neighborhoods changed in ways that local white populations didn’t like as legal segregation ended. Many white people became concerned about school integration and housing markets.
“Whites respond to the influx of racial minorities and immigrant populations,” he said. “So where there's an influx of minorities, there tends to at some point become an outflow of whites.”
Lichter chalks it up to a self-segregation based on people’s preferences to live with others who look like them.
“That's not the way it originally starts out. But eventually it reaches a peak where whites start moving out,” he said.
White flight strongly correlates with the expansion of white household wealth and the growth of the white middle class.
White people were lured to the suburbs through housing policies that subsidized the cost of suburban homes specifically for them, said Johnny Finn, an associate sociology professor at Christopher Newport University.
“That wealth is largely derived through the investment in affordable suburban homes, and then the appreciating value of those homes over the subsequent generations,” Finn said.
At the same time, those policies specifically prevented Black and other minority families from doing the same,suppressing opportunities to build and maintain generational wealth.
The phenomenon is not exclusive to Norfolk.
White flight in Hampton Roads synced with the annexation of cities in the region. As white people moved out to the suburbs, city populations would become increasingly Black by proportion.
Cities annexed county land where white people were moving. The land would then be reincorporated into the city to boost the cities’ population numbers.
“And so what the cities then did, they would annex land out into the county to take the county land where white people were moving out into and take that in, incorporate it back into the city. Basically [to] make the city bigger,” Finn said.
Virginia Beach and Chesapeake became the biggest benefactors of this practice.
Virginia Beach absorbed Princess Anne County in the 1960s. U.S Census data shows the white population exploded from 75,000 in 1960 to 316,000 by 1990.
Chesapeake incorporated in 1963 when South Norfolk and Norfolk counties melded together. The white population jumped from 19,000 to 42,000 in the same three-decade span.
Charles Ford, a history professor at Norfolk State University, said cities like Chesapeake and Virginia Beach built themselves as havens for the fleeing population.
“Both cities had to accommodate that to the sprawl and the housing itself,” he said.
Federal Housing Administration policies set up conditions that enabled working class and lower middle class white families to buy into emerging suburban areas.
The FHA claimed neighborhoods in which Black people bought homes would decrease the value of white-owned property. The agency never provided or obtained evidence to support this claim.
These policies also subsidized neighborhood developments while keeping them exclusively white.
Finn said white people weren’t just fleeing something, but being actively pulled toward a homogenous, glamorized suburban life.
“All the working class and lower middle class white people who are essentially stuck in or near slum-like conditions inside the city of Norfolk,they're going to want to move … only a couple of miles away … to these brand new homes that they can afford, because they're subsidized by federal policies, and those neighborhoods are whites only also because of federal policies.”
A 1994 analysis from The Harvard Project on desegregation noted that during the 1970s, Norfolk constructed fewer middle class homes than Virginia Beach and Chesapeake. Norfolk built 226 single-family homes. Virginia Beach more than 2,000 and Chesapeake constructed 850.
Homeownership, especially in the mid-20th century, served as a way for white families to build wealth. Prior to the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which protects people from discrimination when seeking to buy or rent a home, Black families were blocked from homeownership, which also impacted their ability to build wealth..
Once the housing act passed, white families had been able to build wealth for so long that soaring housing prices allowed them to build generational wealth. Prices rose so much that it prevented Black families from easily breaking into home markets with adequate value and appreciation potential.
“There's federal policy, state policies, local policy, and it's been the practices of all these different private actors that all together amount to, on the one hand, a massive investment in white communities and in white wealth through homeownership,” Finn said.
“And I think put, charitably, a massive disinvestment in Black communities and Black wealth.”
It then becomes difficult to integrate lower-income people into neighborhoods that have established home values. New mixed-income housing and changing zoning regulations where lots don’t require as much acreage become difficult to create.
Lichter, at Cornell, said this equally raises the issue of class and income inequality.
“If communities are opening up mixed-income neighborhoods, white people will respond if they find it's affecting their housing values or it's affecting the composition of the schools,” he said. “Then if you layer and race on top of that, then you've got … a double jeopardy there.”
So what happens to the Black population left behind when a large portion of Norfolk’s white majority scatters to the suburbs like it did in the mid-20th century?
“If you're adding the racial dynamic to it, if it's the white people who are leaving, and it's the non-white folks who are left behind, the resources, the investment, follow the white people, and what's left behind ends up losing all the ongoing public and private investments in the area and the services and the land and commercial businesses,” Finn said.
Virginia Beach surpassed Norfolk in population in the 1980s to become Virginia’s most populous city. It did so in large part to the 1969 percent increase in its white population from 1960 to 1980.
What started as a slow trickle out to the suburbs eventually became a flood. White flight in Hampton Roads erupted from a desire to avoid integrated neighborhoods, schools and crosstown busing. Subsidized land and housing became a convenient tool to justify the moves.
While the white flight in Hampton Roads became referenced in newspapers and local media by the end of the 1970s, it’s Fred Duckworth’s mayoral reign in the 1950s and Norfolk’s Massive Resistance movement that set the table for white flight.
Duckworth’s Demolition
Stood firm above mounds of rubble, Black and white construction workers look on to ensure their work is finished.
Bricks from the chimneys crack and spit out toward them. The roof concaves and the large public housing unit collapses toward its lone, unsupported corner. Dust eclipses their view of where the home once stood, while they walk away, readied for their next task.
Piles of splintered wood and detritus was Norfolk Mayor Fred Duckworth’s vision.
It was called NRHA Project Two. Duckworth framed it as urban renewal that would open the flood gates of economic prosperity.
What it did was systematically target predominantly Black neighborhoods and communities in an effort to drive them out of Norfolk, while locking them into an immovable low class level.
And it worked.
Hap White is a local historian and author of “Black, White & Brown: The Battle for Progress in 1950s Norfolk.” He said a large portion of Norfolk’s Black middle class was forced out.
“When we got into the aggressive redevelopment, we tore down the mixed race neighborhoods, many of them middle class neighborhoods, and the Black leadership of our city …moved to Chesapeake,” White said. “They moved to the edge of Virginia Beach.”
Project Two was the offspring of a different NRHA project from years earlier. Slums devoured parts of Norfolk at the onset of the 1950s. The unsafe, unsanitary conditions posed a danger to Norfolk’s residents.
They were placed in wartime housing units by the Norfolk Housing Authority, or NRHA.Black residents were angered by the community’s strict, segregated housing practices. It put a premium on housing space in the few areas reserved for Black people.
Many Black families had to take in people or double up, with two or more families living in one-bedroom apartments.
“Norfolk had some of the worst slums in the nation,” White said. “It's because we had so many ramshackle wooden houses that were falling apart and absentee landlords and so forth.”
After a biracial committee failed to create new housing in the Brambleton area, the NRHA proposed to bulldoze 120 acres of blighted land, build highways, light industrial business space, new commercial districts and more.
It took five years to complete, but NRHA Project One created 3,000 public housing units — more than necessary for the 1,800 Black families displaced by the project.
The project deepend racial barriers, however, as it isolated Black housing by broad thoroughfares.
“The first stage of a redevelopment project…that was a source of real pride,” White said. “But once we had done that…well, the law changed, and the people changed and the attitudes changed. And suddenly, Black communities were a threat to white (communities) where they hadn't been before.”
Then Duckworth arrived in 1950. By ‘56, he had near unanimous backing of the city’s banking, business and political leaders.
Duckworth aligned his interests with Senator Harry Byrd, guaranteeing that Norfolk would follow racist and segregationist policies.
Byrd represented Virginia as a U.S. senator from 1933 until 1965. He vehemently opposed integration and led a “Massive Resistance” campaign in opposition of Supreme Court cases like Brown v. Board of Education. Duckworth followed Byrd’s lead at a local level.
“[Duckworth] was racist all the way,” White said. “He was not political in that sense.”
With Project One finished, Duckworth shifted his sights to destroy what he saw as the city’s liabilities.
No public or private housing was proposed for Project Two.
The Federal Housing Administration repealed laws that required public or private housing to supplant those destroyed during redevelopments. Norfolk seized this opportunity.
All cities needed to do was label a section of housing “blighted” to legally remove it. There was almost no oversight for cities that called areas ‘blighted.’
Duckworth’s plan wanted more than simply to contain urban blight. It aimed to obliterate any semblance of indistinct mixed or transition neighborhoods.
If Black residents weren’t driven out, then the projects would, at minimum, establish harsh, physical color lines. If color lines previously failed to create two segregated neighborhood school communities, then Duckworth’s plan would ensure it.
Norfolk was the first city in the country to attempt urban renewal on any large scale
NRHA Project Two was announced in December 1956. It simultaneously targeted three areas for redevelopment — Atlantic City, Lambert’s Point and Broad Creek Village. All of them were predominantly Black or mixed neighborhoods.
The announcement of Atlantic City’s demolition caught its residents by surprise.
Atlantic City was the only predominantly white area in Norfolk where Black families comprised more than 10% of the population.
Black people moved there after Project One with no resistance.
A quarter of the homes were single-family and freestanding. Another quarter were duplexes. More than 70% had adequate plumbing and facilities.
“[There] was a pocket of Black [residents] that lived around the bow, the oyster shucking, Ballard seafood oyster area,” White said. “There were a lot of duplexes and triplexes. All of that area had been brought up to code. So it was not a slum, or it was not blighted.”
Despite the number of homes worth keeping, the NRHA pressed ahead with its demolition plans. City leaders claimed to need a thoroughfare to connect the downtown area with Hampton Boulevard.
The demolition lines purposefully darted around specific commercial buildings, and industrial buildings and specific residences to avoid demolition.
Under redevelopment, a city could legally acquire private property, clear it, and then resell it to new and different private owners. .
Residents begged to keep their homes, but the project persisted.
White says housing wasn’t created for Black residents and they didn’t have enough financing to move out on their own. The NRHA strong-armed people into selling properties way below market value.
The project desiccated Atlantic City. Duckworth and the city knew that they wanted to clear Atlantic City, but other than road infrastructure, they had little clue how to utilize the new land.
This didn’t negatively impact the city since purchasing, clearing and redeveloping land didn’t require any more money than it would’ve recost to spend on necessary public facilities.
It took just nine months for Atlantic City to be demolished. The cleared land wouldn’t be occupied for 20 more years.
The Old Dominion project targeted 40 acres of dilapidated housing in the Lambert’s Point neighborhood .
The redevelopment reestablished color lines in the community. The working class became separated from the wealthy white population nearby.
“I think far more nefarious was putting interstate highways through and using public facilities, using [Old Dominion University], as a barrier between Lambert's Point and Larchmont,” White said.
Broad Creek Village was another integrated zone targeted in Duckworth’s project..
The 468-acre public housing project was less than 15 years old. Originally owned by the Navy, they sold the title to the city with the intention of it becoming public housing. The NRHA opposed that notion.
Broad Creek residents disliked the NRHA takeover. The agency neglected routine maintenance and intentionally let the homes deteriorate.
The area eventually turned into a slum, with deserted buildings and trash-lined streets.
Duckworth planned to turn it into a prodigious industrial park.
As bulldozers plowed through Atlantic City, Lambert’s Point and Broad Creek, Norfolk announced a fourth redevelopment venture: the Downtown project.
It sacked more than 200 acres of the oldest part of the city. More than 400 commercial buildings fell. Close to 500 residences were destroyed without any new housing for the displaced residents.
Across all four projects, Duckworth’s redevelopment machine impacted 800 acres of land. 4000 residences and 500 commercial buildings. Twenty-thousand people were forced out of their homes and neighborhoods.
By the end of the 1950s, Duckworth successfully created and strengthened segregated neighborhoods through his redevelopments.
Johnny Finn, an associate sociology professor at Christopher Newport University, said this protects the economic value of low density residential areas that are mostly populated by white people.
“You put the zoning ordinances into effect that have the impact of preventing almost all non-white families from having the economic ability to buy into those neighborhoods,” Finn said. “And that's how it ends up perpetuating lines of racial segregation.”
Mayor Duckworth replaced de jure segregation — segregation mandated by law — with de facto segregation — separation resulting from one’s choice of residence in a predominantly Black or white neighborhood.
With a large percentage of the city’s low and middle income housing stock gone, Black residents had no sustainable place to stay.
“These kinds of projects then created an even more pronounced housing crisis, especially amongst Black populations that had to go somewhere,” Finn said.
Predominantly white neighborhoods — like Lambert’s Point — started to see concentrations of Black families moving nearby due in part to the housing market crisis artificially created by the redevelopment projects.
“They couldn't go to the suburbs,” Finn said. “So they pushed into other white neighborhoods, that then the overt and direct racial animus of white people in that era meant that they would then move out to the suburbs as well, because they could, because they were allowed to.”
The redevelopment projects set the stage for the civil rights battles in the 1960s, actively festering racial disharmony and creating the opening for whites to look beyond Norfolk and move outward into nascent pockets of Hampton Roads.
Tune in next week for part two on the legacy of white flight in Hampton Roads.