When the civil rights movement integrated public elementary and secondary schools, the flight of the white middle class to the suburbs accelerated both residential and educational segregation and set in motion the social forces that contributed to the city's population loss after 1960. Although the shift in population from city to suburb did not retard the growth of the metropolitan area overall, between 1950 and 2000, New Orleans fell from sixteenth to thirty-fifth place among metropolitan statistical areas in population. The port, oil, and tourist enterprises in New Orleans lacked the generative power of the technology industries that boomed elsewhere in the United States in the late twentieth century. As a result, the city was unable to attract new residents or to keep many of its current residents.

From 1967 to 1977, manufacturing jobs in New Orleans declined in every year except one. By 1977, only 11 percent of the labor force was employed in manufacturing, a situation that placed the city among the lowest in industrial employment in the nation. The decline in manufacturing in the 1970s paralleled a decline in jobs in the oil and gas industry in the 1980s. In 1982, the oil and gas industry employed approximately 28,000 people in the metropolitan area. By the late 1980s, the city was losing business to other ports, the result of a depressed oil market during the decade, In 2001, only 13,000 people worked in the oil and gas sector in New Orleans.”

Sources:

Constructing New Orleans, Constructing Race: A Population History of New Orleans; Elizabeth Fussell; 2007.

Urban Communication: Production, Text, Context; Timothy A. Gibson, Mark Douglas Lowes; 2007.