Free Republic

A special city committee is poised to recommend putting a dome over Soldier Field to keep the Chicago Bears from bolting to Arlington Heights, according to a published report Mayor Lori Lightfoot would only say was “premature” to publicly discuss. Lightfoot’s special committee, the Museum Campus Working Group, is prepared to release a report that suggests a dome could keep the Bears in Chicago, according to Greg Hinz of Crain’s. Capping the lakefront stadium could cost up to $1.5 billion, Crain’s reported, citing sources. A draft of the report, which could be released Thursday, says the dome “almost certainly” will...

Dozens of demonstrators showed up Monday at the home of a South Jersey man who was caught on video belligerently hurling racial slurs at one of his neighbors. Edward Cagney Mathews, 45, attempted to address the crowd of around 100 people who gathered outside his Mount Laurel home before being forced back inside by police. He was eventually escorted to a waiting SUV, and protesters threw water bottles at the vehicle as it drove away. Mount Laurel police said they responded to a report shortly before 8 p.m. Friday from a resident who said she and her family were being...

... How differently would white flight have unfolded absent the crime wave that began in the 1960s? According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the national homicide rate doubled between 1960 and 1980, from 5.1 murders per 100,000 Americans to 10.2, its highest level. Chicago, always a rough city, already had a homicide rate of 10.5 per 100,000 residents in 1960, but it exploded to 28.7 in 1980 and 30.7 in 1990. The riots of the 1960s saw lawlessness engulf entire neighborhoods. Chicago’s most serious disturbance was in April 1968, after Martin Luther King’s murder. Some of the looting...

Helen Hudson will tell you what the 15th Ward was like when she was a girl. In the 1950s and early ’60s, the Syracuse neighborhood was home to thousands of predominantly black residents who had settled in the growing upstate New York city during and after the Great Migration. Those who remember it, like Hudson, describe it as thriving, self-sufficient community they were proud to call home. “Oh my god, the things we had,” she said recently, her voice softening with the distinct twang of nostalgia. “We had two bowling alleys. We had meat markets.” Charlie Pierce-El will tell you...

Shantavia Jackson signed her three sons up for football to keep them out of trouble. As a single mother who works the night shift at a Home Depot warehouse 50 minutes away from her house, Jackson relies on the sport to shield the boys from gang activity in her rural Georgia county. They began in a local league five years ago when they were still little, their helmets like bobbleheads on their shoulders. Now 11, 12, and 14, they play in games across the region. Jackson says she passed up a daytime shift at Home Depot so that she can...

Caucasian St. Louisans are to white flight as Kenyan runners are to the Boston Marathon. Volumes have been written about the ability of white St. Louisans to empty out a region, or as a former colleague from Fox 2 once said, “Yeah, a black family moved in seven blocks away and my parents ended up in Ellisville.” An entire library wing could be devoted to white flight in the Gateway City. From James Neal Primm’s 1998 Lion of the Valley to Colin Gordon’s 2009 Mapping Decline to 20 years of the Where We Stand reports from the East-West Gateway Council...

Fifty years ago this weekend, a deadly urban riot began in Detroit. It started around 3:30 a.m., when police arrested 85 patrons of a blind pig -- an illegal after-hours bar -- in the midst of an all-black neighborhood that had been all-white 15 or 20 years before. The statistics are horrifying. Rioting went on for six nights, with some 2,500 stores looted and burnt, some 400 families displaced and property damage was estimated around $300 million in 2017 dollars. Forty-three people, many of them innocent bystanders, were killed. More than 1,000 people were wounded. The reality was even more...

Omowale was speaking in an interview set to air Sunday night on this reporter’s talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and News Talk 990 AM in Philadelphia. Omowale used the interview to claim five states as belonging to the “Black Nation”: Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia. The revolutionary stated: “We just need to start migrating back to those states and taking control of the economics in those states. If black people move in, most definitely white people will move out. So it’s not a hard process for us to...

Legal segregation in the US may have ended more than 50 years ago. But in many parts of the country, Americans of different races aren't neighbours - they don't go to the same schools, they don't shop at the same stores, and they don't always have access to the same services. In 2016 the issue of race will remain high on the agenda in the United States. The police killings of unarmed black men and women over the past few years reignited a debate over race relations in America, and the reverberations will be felt in the upcoming presidential election...

Democrats have been worried about the African-American vote in Louisiana for months. But what really doomed Sen. Mary Landrieu's reelection bid was the near-monolithic white vote against her. Landrieu's loss Saturday to Republican Sen.-elect Bill Cassidy followed a November all-party primary in which the incumbent got a lower share of the white vote (18 percent) than all other Democratic Senate candidates in the country but one, according to exit polling. There was no exit poll Saturday night due to a lack of media interest in the runoff, perhaps because even Landrieu's campaign acknowledged that she would need at least 30...

The City plans to attack economic segregation in its affordable housing plan — placing the poor in middle-class neighborhoods and the more affluent in high-poverty spots. Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Vicki Been said the plan to build 80,000 new affordable apartments and preserve 120,000 units would create a more diverse city. “We really have to make economic diversity a cornerstone of that plan,” she said at a City Council budget hearing Wednesday. “That means that in some neighborhoods that have mostly middle or upper-income housing, that we would need to put affordable housing at the very lowest income,” she...

I wouldn't wax rhapsodic about the half centennial of the Jones Falls Expressway ("City's six-lane Main Street at 50," Dec. 16). It was the evacuation route for white flight at a time when the strictures of Jim Crow were in retreat under the Warren Court. How else to explain that the planned "transit line" down the center of the road was never built? Coupled with the dismantling of commuter rail and streetcars around the same time, the JFX could guarantee in and out privileges to white suburbanites but left urban blacks without cars with no way out. The irony is...

Energy: It won't matter which light bulbs we use as the administration's implementation of cross-state pollution rules shuts down coal plants across the country. Where will the jobs be when the lights go out? It's called the Cross-State Pollution Rule, announced last month, and its implementation over the next 18 months will likely result in the loss of a fifth of the nation's electricity-generating capacity. The result will be likely power shortages, skyrocketing rates and inevitable brownouts and rolling blackouts. Based on Bush-era EPA proposals that the federal courts threw out in 2008, this latest example of legislation is designed...

Whites are abandoning Massachusetts cities at a rapid clip, continuing well-worn paths to the suburbs or out of state, according to new demographic data from the US census. ...The migration of whites out of communities has also left many public school districts in cities made up overwhelmingly of minority students. In Lawrence, just 6 percent of this year’s public school students are white. In Chelsea just 8 percent are, according to state Department of Education figures. ...The trend was strongest in lower-income communities plagued by violent crime and struggling schools. Yet wealthier communities like Beverly, Gloucester, Melrose, and Salem also...

California's white population has declined since 2000 at an unprecedented rate, hastening the day when Hispanics will be the state's largest population group, according to newly released state figures. There were half a million fewer whites in California in 2008 than in 2000, a period when the state's overall population grew by 4 million to 38.1 million, according to a study released Thursday by the state Department of Finance. By 2008, whites made up 40 percent of Californians, down from 47 percent at the turn of the century. In 2000, Hispanics comprised 32 percent of the population; that number grew...

Memphis mayor to confront gun violence November 29, 2009 12:08 EST MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) -- New Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. will embark soon on a communitywide plan to address gun violence in the city. Wharton, who's been in office a month, said it boils down to a health care problem. He plans to tap a steering committee composed of officials from hospitals, churches and law enforcement. He also focused on the problem as county mayor before being elected city mayor. Wharton told The Memphis Daily News he has not decided about the future of Police Director Larry Godwin....

Decades of white flight transformed America's cities. That era is drawing to a close. In Washington, a historically black church is trying to attract white members to survive. Atlanta's next mayoral race is expected to feature the first competitive white candidate since the 1980s. San Francisco has lost so many African-Americans that Mayor Gavin Newsom created an "African-American Out-Migration Task Force and Advisory Committee" to help retain black residents. "The city is experiencing growth, yet we're losing African-American families disproportionately," Mr. Newsom says. When that happens, "we lose part of our soul." For much of the 20th century, the proportion...

'White flight' increasing, race chief says By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor Last Updated: 1:41am GMT 15/01/2008 The flight of the white middle classes from the inner cities is accelerating, the Government's race relations chief has said. Trevor Phillips said so-called ''white flight" - an American phenomenon now increasingly seen here - was deepening racial segregation. Mr Phillips has warned in the past of the growing polarisation of the country along ethnic lines. But his use of the emotive term ''white flight" will fuel the controversy triggered by the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester. He said last...

The Robinsons, Dorchester: “I went to primarily white schools growing up,” Cathy Richmond Robinson says. “I think, ‘I did it, my kids can do it.’ Definitely by middle school, we’ll be moving out one way or another.” ( Stephen Michener is a man with a plan. He hands it to me as we sit on the couch in his second-floor Jamaica Plain condo – a slim white binder with the words Boston Metro Evac handwritten with a Sharpie on the spine. Following that, in parentheses, is written simply: (Plan B). "We started putting this together two years ago," he says....

UK Citizens Abandoning the UK in Greater Numbers July 25, 2007 - Press Dispensary - Increasing numbers of people are taking the decision to move overseas as a result of the UK’s current immigration policy, according to www.globalvisas.com, a specialist immigration consultancy that provides immigration advice and visa services. As numbers of immigrants to the UK from the new European Union Accession states continue to grow, more and more people in the UK are choosing to take their experience and skills overseas. The consultancy caters for immigrants to the UK as well as British people who wish to emigrate to...