DETROIT, Aug. 15 (UPI) -- For the first time, Detroit's urban black population fell 10 percent from 2000 to 2005, showing a trend of moving to the suburbs, the Detroit News reports.
U.S. Census Bureau figures released Tuesday show some 75,000 blacks moved out of the urban core. The report said about 22 percent of blacks lived in Detroit suburbs in 2000, but that has grown to an estimated 32 percent by 2005.
Miriam Parchman, 37, spent most of her life in Detroit before moving to Warren in March with her four children, adding to the black population, which grew by 169 percent from 2000 to 2005 to nearly 10,000, the new statistics show.
"I was just at the point that I was tired (of the city)," Parchman said. She told the newspaper she left a neighborhood infested with drug dealers and a school system where her children sat in rundown classrooms reading bedraggled textbooks.
