[2/3]  And by a few I really mean a lot, New York, Detroit, Chicago, and every city in the midwest and northeast were whiter than LA in 1940. Not by a huge margin always but still whiter.

[3/3]  And if you mean before or after 1940 there were plenty of large cities that were whiter than Los Angeles at those times too.            

Huh. Fuck. That’s one of the things I thought I remembered from Prof. Blumin’s lectures but I don’t have the notes at hand and your pushback’s making me question things.

I do think he was talking about the prewar, pre-Second Great Migration boom, but my “Golden Age” and the implication that an inhabitant would live to 1992 in throws that and you say even then.

I’m wondering if I mangled the line (maybe it was “most Anglophone, most native-born”, to distinguish from the Italian/Irish/Jewish/Polish/Czech white ethnics back east) or just fucked it up completely and am flat wrong. In any case, don’t have confidence in it anymore, I’ll withdraw it. Thx.