Over the past decade, the inner-city neighborhoods that have served for generations as citadels of African-American life and culture have been steadily draining of black children

The 2010 census found that the number of black, non-Hispanic children living in New York City had fallen by 22.4% in 10 years. In raw numbers, that meant 127,058 fewer black kids living in the city even as the number of black adults grew slightly. The same pattern has repeated from coast to coast. Los Angeles saw a 31.8% decline in its population of black children, far surpassing the 6.9% drop in black adults. The number of black children in Atlanta fell by 27%. It was down 31% in Chicago and 37.6% in Detroit. Oakland, Calif. saw a drop of 42.3%, an exodus that fell only 6 percentage points below the decline in flood-ravaged New Orleans. Overall, the census found nearly a half-million fewer black children living in the 25 largest U.S. cities than there were a decade earlier. By comparison, the number of black adults living in big cities has hardly budged. Even cities that saw a large rise in their overall black population saw their numbers of black children fall, or grow at a much slower rate. In Phoenix, the number of black adult residents grew by 44.8% over the past decade, but added fewer than 4,000 black children, for a growth rate of 18.6%. Houston added 21,324 black adults, but had 23,219 fewer black children. On a national level, the number of black children has inched down by only 2.3%, compared to a much larger 9.8% drop for white children.