In this retrospective review of demographic aspects of race and the metropolis, presented as a basis from which to speculate about the 1970's, the period of mass migration of blacks out of the rural South is seen as drawing to a close. The U.S. black population is more urban and more metropolitan than the white population. The development of black majorities in a few large cities is the harbinger of the same occurrence in perhaps another eight cities in the 1970's. During the 1960's the nation's 243 metropolitan areas displayed an enormous diversity of patterns and rates of white and black in- and out-migration to and from central cities and suburbs. In the 1970's the essential similarities between blacks and whites in housing demands and residential location preferences may become more evident. Whether or not there is significant diminution of racial residential segregation, black suburbanization is likely to become a dominant migration stream. Too narrow a focus on racial aspects of the metropolitan scene may obscure broad social, economic, and demographic dynamics. Population redistribution of the 1970's and 1980's seems likely to develop in new ways that are inadequately captured by our traditional terminology of rural, urban, central city, suburb, and metropolis. (Author/JM)