White backlash developed nationally, not as a southern import to the North.

Evidence

In examining these issues inside the urban environment, this study adopts an approach used by urban historians in recent years to explore postwar race relations in northern cities, particularly Chicago and Detroit. Like those histories, this work discovers an interconnected web of racial, social, and economic conflicts inside Atlanta’s city limits that suggests that the “urban crisis” was a phenomenon that stretched far beyond the industrial Northeast. In the struggles over race and residence, for instance, Atlanta closely resembles those cities. The familiar language of homeowners’ rights and community protection resurfaces in white neighborhoods here, as does the pattern of violence visited upon all those who challenged them. The common themes shared by the homeowners’ movements of the urban North and the segregationist resistance of the urban South suggest that the white backlash that surfaced in later years was not, as many assumed at the time, a southern product imported to the North. Instead, white flight was a phenomenon that developed in cities throughout the nation, with the commonalities and cross-regional connections only becoming clear in retrospect. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 37

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the common narrative that segregationist backlash was uniquely Southern and later diffused northward; connects to the reader’s work on ideology being reinvented rather than geographically contained. — connects to: White racism in the North matched southern white supremacy in ferocity. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 259; Southern and non-Southern whites changed racial attitudes at equal rates — Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington, Why Did the Democrats Lose the South?…, 319; Statewide racist policy in the North made Whites complicit in southern violence — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 967 (+4 more)
• QUESTION: If white flight was national in development, what explains its powerful association with the South in popular memory?

Broader Connections

• White racism in the North matched southern white supremacy in ferocity. #corroborates (0.88) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 259
• Southern and non-Southern whites changed racial attitudes at equal rates #corroborates (0.80) — Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington, Why Did the Democrats Lose the South?…, 319
• Atlanta whites resisted desegregation less violently than northern whites did #expands (0.80) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 38
• Black uplift worsened rather than eased Northern racial animosity #corroborates (0.78) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 411
• Northern racism wounds differently but leaves the same damage as Southern racism. #qualifies (0.76) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1181
• Statewide racist policy in the North made Whites complicit in southern violence #qualifies (0.74) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 967
• White backlash reframed black demands as the cause of racism. #expands (0.73) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 261