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White flight was born in the fifties, because blacks were able to purchase homes in suburbs. The home I was born in is smack dab in the middle of what is now south central Los Angeles.
The reality is that today there is more disparity between the haves and have nots, with no color boundary whatsoever. Some people in here claim that we've progressed, (and in a few areas this will always be true) yet, the middle class is contracting while poverty is increasing. African Americans have been hit especially hard. They have the highest unemployment rate of any demographic and are 12% more likely to be in poverty then back in 1990.
Having a bungload of electronics and "stuff" seems to be what defines progress for the latest generations. If this is progress, we sure are doing a crappy job of improving ourselves. But hey, everyone has a 50" led, a PS3, and an iPhone... so life is ...good?
I think the reality may have been more complex or more a case of two(or more) different worlds.
I don't have any number for povery in the 50ies but here
From the look of it poverty has decreased from the 50ies esp. amoung African Americans. I suspect that the poverty is being driven because many are still share croppers at this time. Intresting enough it is lower today.
However another factor is the minuim wage. In 1955 it was $1.00, adjusting for inflation that would be $8.55 today. In the 50ies the min. wage was about 50% of what an average earner makes, today it is $7.25 and 31%. If the minimum wage was like it was in the 50ies it would be about $10.00 an hour!
I guess if you had some work other than sharecropping and no other factors that can cause povery(sick relatives, children, unmarried mother) things were good(My family is African American and large number were coming to northern cities between the 30ies and mid 60ies for industrial jobs). However if you had something causing you to be poor times were probably worse than today.
Something to keep in mind -
After WW2 women were encouraged to give up their wartime jobs and return to the home and be wives and mothers. Why? Because veterans were coming home and expecting to return to their old jobs and their familiar ways of life. It's what they felt they had been fighting for.
This deal of women staying home with the kids wasn't a 50's thing. It was the way things were before the war. It was the ideal and expected way of life for most people.
Before the war, if a man had a working wife, it often did mean that he couldn't support the family on his own wages, and even if she worked just because she liked it, the neighbors would still assume it was because she had to.
Also, if you had grown up during the Depression, and then you fought WW2 on the front, or endured the war at home, the 50's were glorious. OK, we'll modify that statement, the 50's were glorious for mainstream America.
In perusing ladies magazines from the late 40's through the 50's you can get an interesting vision of what life was like, and what people were looking forward to. Things that they had only dreamed about, or never even envisioned having for themselves - machines that washed your clothes, dried them, and even washed your dishes, television, picnics in your own backyard, with BBQ grills, toys for your kids that your parents could never afford to give you. There were good jobs to be had, exciting foods to eat, like pizza, and frozen foods. Canned and frozen foods were a boon to women. It meant a certain amount of freedom from the stove and daily cooking chores.
Whether or not a woman chose to use the new labor saving foods was her own choice. This is to cover those comments of --- "well, my mom never used that nasty stuff, she cooked everything from scratch". My mom never used them either. I got my first taste of a Swanson TV dinner in 1962 when she was in the hospital having my baby brother. I thought it was great.
Before the 50's most people didn't own their own homes, they rented. The beginning of wide scale home ownership was a result of the GI Bill. So was college. In 1947, less than 5% of Americans had attended college. Today over half have at least been to college. The idea of sending your kids to college started in the 50's.
The working class family vacation was another 50's innovation.
All these things mean so little to later generations, but at the time - wow!
Did our parents (or grandparents) have a lower standard of living, because now some equate having 3 or 4 bathrooms and at least 2 cars, whole house air conditioning, etc as standard? They felt they were living high. They were certainly living better than their parents did, and I don't have the impression that they were looking down their noses at them.
There was good - there was bad, just as there is today. There were those who had, and those who didn't, just like today.
I don't think later decades were better, they were just different. Some things we may like, some we may not. My 2 older kids were born in '75 & '81, and they did have a taste of what life was like for me in the 50's & early 60's. My youngest was born in '93, and he wishes he could have known what running free with a bunch of kids was like.
You're not helping your cause. 50 happens to be in my rear view mirror, and I am old enough to have seen de facto segregation in towns in your part of the country (geez, isn't that shocking!). Why don't you explain to us how not having the right to vote and having limited choices in where you can live, work, and go to school lead to a better quality of life?
First of all "having the right to vote" is just a bone that was thrown to the black people to "shut them up". Of all the elections that have ensued during the past 50+ years, how many of them have directly impacted black people in a positive way?
Secondly, African Americans have paid a dear price for their integration. Instead of being able to live and grow and learn at their own pace, they are now thrown in with white people and expected to live under white standards and if they do not they are relegated to a life as second class citizen because they do not "measure up" to expectations of the white man who has given him "all these opportunities".
By forcing the black and white cultures to integrate, it has caused deep seated resentment and hatred that did not exist in the 1950s at all. The Black people have been duped into believing that they are free and have received equal right, but nothing could be further from the truth.
For people that live through the Great Depression and WWII (1929-1945), the 50s must have seemed like the world had changed for the better.
I think you are so right about this Retroit, my parents did live through the GD as well as WWII and I think when they married and then had us children life seemed so great for them. They migrated from the south to Chicago for work, they found work and they earned a livable income. Enough so that they bought their home with $100 down, had five children and lived the American Dream and we were living it right along with them.
Everything is about perspective and we lived in a simpler time...staying up late on a summer evening catching lightning bugs and putting them in our jars while our parents sat on the porches with various neighbors talking about this or that. Playing in our backyards or that of our neighbors all day long without having to worry about the kids being hurt (stranger danger) or in a precarious situation. Going swimming at the local pool in the summer and Mom and dad barbecuing hot dogs or hamburgers on the grill once in a while for dinner was a big deal because Mom cooked every single day. Yes, those were idyllic times indeed!
Just my take on the 50's and for me they were the best of times.
First of all "having the right to vote" is just a bone that was thrown to the black people to "shut them up". Of all the elections that have ensued during the past 50+ years, how many of them have directly impacted black people in a positive way?
Secondly, African Americans have paid a dear price for their integration. Instead of being able to live and grow and learn at their own pace, they are now thrown in with white people and expected to live under white standards and if they do not they are relegated to a life as second class citizen because they do not "measure up" to expectations of the white man who has given him "all these opportunities".
By forcing the black and white cultures to integrate, it has caused deep seated resentment and hatred that did not exist in the 1950s at all. The Black people have been duped into believing that they are free and have received equal right, but nothing could be further from the truth.
20yrsinBranson
Really? Last time I checked, being able to vote is a very important right, a right I may add, people were willing to die for. And Blacks were relegated to 2nd class status throughout the history of this nation. All of this is just an excuse to uphold the 50s as some "great era". How would the 50s be good for Blacks considering how they were treated under the law? Blacks were restricted in what they could do in comparison to Whites.
As for expectations, how are "White expectations" different from "Black expectations" in your eyes?
This segregation, that you think is "so good", it was all done by force. Blacks, by law, were forced into segregated lives. It was kind of like a quasi-dictatorship. The segregation was by force.
Last edited by green_mariner; 02-01-2013 at 07:32 PM..
Yes, African Americans have a higher income today then they did in the 1950s. But the point still stands that the quality of life of many blacks is not improved. More Blacks in the middle class today, is kind of meaningless. Todays middle class is the working class of the 1950s.
I'm also not convinced that life for African Americans in the 1950s was as much gloom and doom as some here might think. Segregation except for housing did not exist in most of the country outside of the south. The civil rights movement was well under way in most parts of the country in the 1950s. African Americans could vote in most places. More and more job opportunities were opening up to African Americans. The quality of life was probably improving faster for African Americans in the 1950s, then for other Americans.
As for housing discrimination, I'm not sure how really important that was. If African Americans could get a reasonable decent job and buy a house (in a Black community), they were probably somewhat satisfied. Yes, I'm sure that none of them were happy that they couldn't choose to buy where they wanted. But the fact that they could at least participate in the American dream, have a job, and afford to buy a house, was probably good enough for most.
The cost of living has gone up, so it is hard on everyone, Blacks too as well as Whites. One thing stands. No matter what decade it was, Blacks have done worse economically than anyone else.
Even with the 50s prosperity and "American dream", Blacks were treated worse than Whites. Blacks, by and large, had poorer paying jobs, faced job discrimination, were limited in where they could buy houses. Blacks did not have as much freedom in the 1950s. Don't give me this "Blacks had it good in the 50s" stuff. I know better.
To be Black in the 1950s, you had to "know your place". You were limited in where you could buy a home, no matter how much money you made. Whites could buy where they wanted to, but Blacks could only buy where people said they could buy houses. Blacks were subjected to limitations based on their race, and that is something I cannot live with. If you lived in the South, you couldn't vote, you were forced to segregated schools because it was the law, everything you could do was dictated on what was allowed based on your race. In 1955, Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi for making a pass at a White woman, and the persons who did it got away with it.
Any time period before the late 1960s was a time of limitations for Blacks because what Blacks could do was based on limitations, that were often made the law. If you were Black, you lived under a quasi-dictatorship. If you can't vote, you're told where you can buy a house based on your race, told you can only sit in a certain part of the theater because of your race, you can't got to the local library because of your race, you might as well be living in a dictatorship.
We didn't know any black people and any hatred or prejudice there was then was about Catholics vs Protestants vs Jews. The Catholics told us (Protestants) that we would go to Hell. The Jewish kids told us that they didn't kill Jesus. I didn't know or care what they were talking about.
I was a kid in the '50s. Was baptized Catholic, went to church/communion every Sunday, but attended public school. Was shocked to find out from a Jewish schoolmate that Jesus was also Jewish...I thought he was Catholic.
20yearsinBranson does have a point.
Most families were intact(black families). I thinlk the unemployment rate was about the same.
Some civil rights activists have said the Civil Rights Act was mainly for southern blacks,because northern blacks could basically do anything that you said;buy a home anywhere,vote,attend integrated schools.
I'm not really sure how attending an integrated school is so much better for blacks.
What happened was that the middle and upper class blacks left the poorer ones behind after the Civil Right's Act.
20yearsinBranson does have a point.
Most families were intact(black families). I thinlk the unemployment rate was about the same.
Some civil rights activists have said the Civil Rights Act was mainly for southern blacks,because northern blacks could basically do anything that you said;buy a home anywhere,vote,attend integrated schools.
I'm not really sure how attending an integrated school is so much better for blacks.
What happened was that the middle and upper class blacks left the poorer ones behind after the Civil Right's Act.
Actually, in northern cities, there were even color lines in the housing. Technically, segregated schools was not the law in the North. However, there were restrictive covenants in many places, which kept Blacks from buying houses in many places. Dr. King found this out when he went up to Chicago. He found out he couldn't rent an apartment in Gage Park because he was Black. He rented an apartment on the West Side of Chicago and founded out Black tenants were being ripped off. A White resident could get a nice clean 5 room apartment in Gage Park and pay less than a Black tenant did for a run down, rat-infested apartment where Dr. King was staying at. Dr. King marched through Cicero, he was met with violence from residents who didn't want Blacks living there.
The Civil Rights movement started in the South, but Dr. King found out Blacks in the north needed help too.
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