Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities
By Jack Cashill
(Post Hill Press, 288 pages, $21.85)

Against any reasonable expectation, America’s once-proud post–World War II suburbanization and middle-class expansion has become a critical flashpoint in our national politics. A generation of left-leaning scholars, major media (think the New York Times’s 1619 project), and antiracist activists have succeeded in establishing that era as one of profound black disfranchisement: As blacks began their second “Great Migration” out of the rural South around 1940, the federal government embarked on a massive suburbanization effort to benefit white people and isolate blacks, an effort that included highway construction, home mortgage insurance, and “redlining,” which effectively excluded blacks from homeownership and left them to pick through the rubble of rapidly deindustrializing urban places.

For the woke Left, this narrative is the gift that keeps on giving: even if the civil rights revolution of the 1960s put an end to legal discrimination, equity in postwar suburban homes denied to blacks has given whites intergenerational wealth, leading to disparities of all kinds today, including a median wealth advantage of $165,000 for white households. A slam-dunk argument, the woke think, for affirmative action and reparations. (READ MORE: Are Americans Tired of Being Called ‘Racist’ Yet?)

There are, of course, missing pieces to this story: an estimated 85 percent of residents in “redlined” areas were white; the black homeownership rate almost doubled from 1940 to 1970, rising from 23 percent to 42 percent of black households.

But what bothers writer and “white flight” holdout Jack Cashill most is the unchallenged assertion that white Euro-ethnics fled the cities out of racial hatred, an idea epitomized by the comments of Michelle Obama in 2019: “As families like ours, upstanding families like ours … as we moved in, White folks moved out.” Whites, she said, were repelled by such things as “the color of our skin” and the “texture of our hair.”

For Cashill, who grew up in the Roseville section of Newark, New Jersey, in the 1950s and ’6os, this amounts to a “racist caricature” of American postwar history that “bears little relation to reality.”

Cashill recalls that he and the families around him felt as powerless as anyone against federal encroachment and few residents seemed driven by racial animus. These folks “knew exactly why they left,” writes Cashill. “It’s just that no one bothered to ask them.”

So Cashill has asked them. He has consulted hundreds of former Newark residents and sifted through newspapers, census data, and relevant literature to help elucidate their reality.

Old Newark

The result is a richly textured portrait of a mid-20th-century American city marked by tight-knit communities of working-class folks striving to make their lives better and grateful for the opportunity to so.

Four predominant ethnic groups in Cashill’s Newark — Italian, Jewish, Irish, and black — each gave a particular flavor to the neighborhoods they populated. Newark also contributed proudly to the postwar cultural tapestry: Novelist Philip Roth, baseball player turned WWII spy Moe Berg, and New York City Mayor Ed Koch were residents, as were Jerome Kern, Fanny Brice, Jerry Lewis, and Dore Schary. Cashill draws heavily on the memoirs of New Jersey poet laureate and black radical Amiri Baraka and Cissy Houston, the mother of pop superstar Whitney Houston. Prominent businesses included Bamberger’s, Ronson Lighter Company, Pathmark, Home Depot, and Alpine Lace. (RELATED: Why the Media Are Mum About White Flight 2.0)

In describing his mostly Irish American neighborhood of Roseville, there are sepia-colored tales of sledding in “Pigtail Alley,” movies, brownstone walkups, stoop ball, leather jackets and ducktails. Another former resident recalls, “Any of us who grew up in Roseville in the 50’s/60’s experienced ‘idyllic’ city and neighborhood life: school, churches, movies, Branch Brook park and our ice rink, The Halloween parade, playgrounds, Orange St. shopping etc. Lucky Us.”

If the St. Rose of Lima church sat at the center of Roseville, the foundation of the city was its families, typically large and whole. By 1950, on Myrtle Avenue where Cashill lived with his parents and two siblings, there were 83 married couples, 79 of them with an employed male “head” of household.

Cashill skillfully weaves the story of his childhood into the broader history of Newark, starting with his great-grandparents John and Ann, who set out from Ireland for America in 1847. Cashill’s parents, who met on a street corner in 1938, eloped and by 1940 took up residence on West Market Street.

In the late summer of 1953, the Cashills rented an apartment at the top of Myrtle Avenue, only to take a Veteran’s Readjustment Act mortgage to buy a $7,000 home halfway down the street one year later. The Cashills were not suburbanites. (RELATED: Retrofitting the Suburbs)

With impressive emotional range, Cashill depicts the vicissitudes of his family’s life, as when we learn of his father’s shocking suicide at home while Jack was watching television. Eschewing the dewy-eyed sentimentality of childhood reminiscences, Cashill gives us family vignettes that are poignant and gripping, as good as any found in great immigrant literature such as Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky or James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan. 

The Federal Bulldozer

It turns out that the predominantly white communities of Newark came under the same governmental injunctions that the antiracists claim were reserved for black communities. The American Housing Act of 1949, which brought “urban renewal,” wreaked havoc on Newark, with local politicians and businessmen often sacrificing their own communities for the money and power it could bring them: “It did not matter the ethnic group they needed to steamroll.”

The construction of “Columbus Homes,” a government housing project in Newark’s first ward, a predominantly Italian section known as “Little Italy,” is emblematic. Incentivized with millions in federal money, planners and local officials declared part of Little Italy a “slum” in 1953 and razed 444 buildings, most of them three-story walkups to be replaced by eight 13-story towers.

Uprooted first-ward families felt profound grief, “as if mourning a loved one who had passed away too soon” one former resident attested. Racism wasn’t really a factor for those who left, Cashill says. “Eminent domain did the job.”

Another government edict targeted Cashill’s beloved Roseville: the construction of the “East-West Highway” (later dubbed I-280). Backed with 90 percent federal aid in March 1959, the New Jersey Dept. of Transportation signed a “death warrant” for Roseville, splitting the community in two, taking Cashill’s family home and hastening Roseville’s decline. “In Roseville, the authorities would socially engineer us out of our homes … simply because we were in the way.” No systemic racism necessary.

Crime and Schools

After debunking the idea that the federal government worked exclusively for the advantage of all whites, Cashill takes on an even more insidious politically correct piety: that all demographic groups contribute equal amounts of socially valuable traits.

For Cashill, the values, behavior, and attitudes of inhabitants are more important in determining a community’s fate than government policies. In a penetrating sequence, Cashill examines how different ethnic groups perceived and responded to threats.

The Jewish community, for example, thrived in the city’s public schools and depended on them. Weequahic High School — immortalized in the novels of Philip Roth — emerged as one of the top-performing public schools in the nation in the 1950s. But by 1959, blacks grew to 35 percent of Newark’s population, Weequahic was integrated with less-prepared students, and academic rigor suffered, leaving Jews at an impasse. (READ MORE: My Discovery of Philip Roth)

“For all their contributions to American culture and their commitment to education,” Cashill explains, Jews failed to do one thing that the Irish and the Italians did — create their own schools.” So the Jews left first, going from 83 percent of Weequahic High School in 1958 to less than 3 percent by 1970.

By contrast, the Italians stayed longer and fought. The quality of public schools meant less to them, and predominantly Italian Barringer High School was still 49 percent white in 1970. “I admired Italians,” a Newark refugee told Cashill. “They kept their culture. They didn’t take shit.”

But even the Italians weren’t prepared for what proved to be the decisive exit trigger: the spectacular rise in violent crime, coming mostly from young blacks. By the late 1950s, Cashill had been mugged twice. Columbus Homes, which started off an ethnically mixed project for working families, soon deteriorated into a dangerous cauldron of welfare dependency and drug addiction.

According to Police Director John Redden, “Newark reported a higher crime rate from 1960 through 1972 than any other city over a quarter million population.” Homicides went from 24 in 1950 to 148 in 1972.

When Cashill asked one lifelong friend why he and his widowed mother finally left their block in the early 1970s, he answered, “It became untenable…. When your mother gets mugged for the second time, that’s untenable. When your home gets broken into for the second time, that’s untenable.”

The “rolling riot” of crime set the stage for the actual riot of July 1967, the first of its magnitude in the Northeast and one of hundreds throughout the country in the late 1960s. People were leaving before the riot but “they left in droves after the riots.”

Cashill stands almost alone in the literature on white flight in prioritizing criminal violence as the primary factor in the Newark exodus. Yes, “pull” factors such as larger homes and spacious backyards in “instant suburbs” were attractive to many. But middle-class blacks in Newark and other cities also left to escape crime. “Our home no longer resembled the safe haven we had envisioned for our children,” wrote Cissy Houston in her memoir, Remembering Whitney.

Like most who have studied the subject, Cashill is perplexed that crime and victimization rates exploded among blacks in the 1960s. The only difference Cashill could discern between 1950 and 1960 was the decline of in-tact families. When the city was 17 percent black in 1950 and crime was low, 16.8 percent of non-white households nationally were headed by a single mother. By 1960, 34 percent of black children were being raised that way, a shocking enough number at the time to prompt U.S. Labor Department official Daniel Patrick Moynihan to write his seminal The Negro Family: A Case for National Action.

The existence of a causal link between fatherlessness and crime are still matters of considerable dispute, and Cashill’s book is not an empirical study. But given the powerful testimony in this book, Cashill’s thesis that the “most overlooked variable in assessing community strength was the percentage of families headed by a married father,” is impossible to ignore. In the wake of this captivating and bittersweet tale, anyone who discusses white flight — or racial inequality — without consideration of group differences in marriage and criminal offense rates can no longer be taken seriously.