[Bubba Ho-Tep]

All destroyed by the social experimenters and “urban renewal” instigators, who thought it would be a good idea to move blacks into these cities—displacing the original communities and eventually forcing them to flee for their lives.

You make it sound like blacks had no agency in this. The fact is that blacks moved to places like Newark because they'd left the south for industrial jobs in north. From 1940 to 1970, something like five million blacks left the south.

Where were they supposed to live?

[Clemenza]

Newark (my dad's hometown) was broke during the depression and WWII, which led it to accept more Federal Housing money than any other city in America on a per capita basis, with scores of blocks razed in the central and west wards for public housing during that time, giving it the sobriquet "Brick City." In the 1940s, when the factories were turned over to defense, the blacks moved up en masse, only to lose many of these jobs when the whites came back from the war. They remained in the public housing, however, often dependent on the dole (most city jobs at the time being distributed via an extremely corrupt, mafia-connected and racist Democratic machine).

Another large factor was the one I mentioned earlier, which was the depression of housing values due to the first wave of emigration to suburbia in the 1950s.

[Snickersnee]

The example of Hartford in this regard may be seen in other cities in the Northeast/Rust Belt: the Jewish North End of Hartford was the first in the city to "go black" in the 1940s-1950s, and it was because Jews had no inherent strictures re renting and selling properties to blacks. Other ethnic groups in Hartford, Italians, Poles, Quebeckers, etc., would make life very uncomfortable for anyone who rented or sold to a black family.