From Main Street to Mall to Internet 839In 2007 a storm approaches the mostly abandoned main street of Robert Lee, county seat of Coke County, Texas.
1960s. Civil rights leaders targeted such facilities
because they sought equal access to public spaces
downtown, where community life was transacted.
There people worked, bought clothing and cars, got
their hair cut and cavities filled, paid taxes and filed
for driver’s licenses, ate meals and brokered deals,
watched movies and attended ball games, and
engaged in countless other activities. Thirty years
later, however, many downtown business districts
had been all but abandoned.
Some blamed the civil rights movement itself.
Inner-city protests and the desegregation of city
schools, they said, caused many whites to flee to the
suburbs. Others cited the rise in crime in the late
1960s. But “white flight” commenced in the late
1940s, long before the civil rights movement and
busing disputes, before the race riots and crack infes-
tations. (See the map of St. Louis on p. 840.)
Postwar federal policies played a major role in the
demographic upheaval that transformed the cities
and gave rise to the suburbs. The G. I. Bill of 1946
offered veterans cheap home mortgages. Real estate
developers bought huge tracts of land and built inex-
pensive houses designed especially for returning vet-
erans. Postwar lending policies of the Federal
Housing Authority also contributed to the rise of the
suburbs, chiefly by rejecting loans in older residential
urban areas. Eisenhower’s decision to pump money
into highway construction (rather than subways and
railway infrastructure) also contributed to the growth
of suburbs.
Retailers followed consumers, renting space in
strip malls along the busy roadways that reached
out to the suburbs. Then came the shopping malls.
In 1946 there were only eight shopping malls in
the nation; by 1972, over 13,000. Mall managers
anchored their complexes with national retailers
such as Sears and JCPenney. Because such compa-
nies bought in large quantities, their stores out-
priced locally owned competitors on Main Street.