Halting White Flight

Abstract

Focusing on the city of Atlanta from the mid-1970s to the 2000s, this article examines the response of middle- and upper-middle-class white families to the court-ordered desegregation of public schools and growing fears over metropolitan busing. While the majority of white families fled the city and its public schools as part of the growing suburbanization across the Sunbelt, a small number of liberal activists remained committed to integrated public education and formed neighborhood-based organizations to stop white flight. By historicizing this activism, we suggest that the grassroots political response to white flight in the 1970s and the circuits of schooling it produced paved the way for the “return” of white middle- and upper-middle-class families to Atlanta’s public schools by the 2000s.