"‘White flight’ began a lot earlier than we think"

""When white homeowners think about how their choices shape the racial composition of neighborhoods, they say 'I would never support discrimination in mortgage lending, I'd never support anything like redlining or restrictive covenants, I would never participate in something like that,'" Shertzer says. "But the choices of white homeowners to move to neighborhoods that are almost exclusively white — this is a quantitatively important mechanism that keeps cities segregated."

The choices whites make today, though, are now also influenced by a century of segregation and the ways it has conflated race with poverty, crime and school quality. That makes this challenge a lot harder to resolve than if we had tried a century ago."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/17/white-flight-began-a-lot-earlier-than-we-think/