In 1976, thousands of low-income African Americans, mostly women and children, began to move out of the public housing developments of Chicago, Illinois, to the mostly white middle class suburbs. These families were part of the Gautreaux program, one of the largest court-ordered desegregation efforts in the United States. This book tells the story…

Large numbers of blacks have been moving into residential zones outside the central city but within what is sometimes called the metropolitan ring. By 1970, 3.5 million blacks, or a million more than in 1960, lived in these areas. Although these areas are outside the city proper, they should not be linked to the images held of typical suburbia.…