60 pages • 2 hours read
Thomas J. SugrueThe Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Race, Class, and Detroit’s Housing Crisis
Among Sugrue’s major theses is the argument that race and class intersected in mid-20th-century Detroit, fueling a housing crisis that profoundly impacted the city. Two forces drove the Black housing shortage: the construction industry and real-estate practices. Detroit’s construction sector could not keep up with the demand for housing, particularly during the war, which deprived the industry of workers and materials. The war’s end marked an uptick in residential construction, but demand still outweighed supply, forcing Detroiters into crowded, substandard housing. Black residents felt the problem most acutely. Systemic racism in the labor market led to high unemployment rates in Black communities. Those who found work were largely relegated to low-paying, insecure, unskilled jobs. Consequently, Black people were unable to compete with white people in Detroit’s tight housing market. What connects all these trends is racism—expressed both explicitly and implicitly by white residents, stoked by politicians and industry leaders looking to divide and conquer an exploited working class, and enforced by lenders and real estate agents looking to maximize profits.
Sugrue explains in detail how real-estate practices confined most Black people to low-income urban enclaves. Many white neighborhoods enacted racial covenants to preserve their racial homogeneity. Other types of covenants, such as banning boarders and home division, were equally effective at keeping Black people out of white areas. Blockbusting real-estate agents met with resistance from white individuals and neighborhood associations when they sold homes to Black buyers. Concerned about crime, declining property values, and quality of life, white people also lobbied politicians to keep covenants intact. These practices evolved over time, as the Supreme Court outlawed racial covenants and other explicit forms of housing and employment discrimination. Lenders responded by using more facially race-neutral forms of discrimination, like denying housing to the formerly incarcerated. Again, race remained at the center of these efforts, ultimately hastening Detroit’s decline.
Many objectors to integration were overtly racist. In 1944, for instance, Father Henry P. Fadanelli, pastor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church, protested the construction of 300 single-family houses for Black people in the white neighborhood of Oakland, voicing his objections in a stern letter to city hall: “One can love both dogs and cats, but no sane person would throw a number of both into the same cage and pretend that they will get along […]” (79). Resistance to Black and integrated public-housing projects also contributed to Detroit’s housing crisis. Housing-reform advocates clashed with pro-homeownership groups, who pressured politicians to direct public funds to single-family homeowners, at the expense of multi-unit housing projects. Due to their low incomes, growing numbers of Black Detroiters were forced to squeeze into substandard units while spending more on housing than white people (54). Wealthier Black Detroiters responded by moving into white areas; the white residents, in turn, responded with harassment, vandalism, violence, and flight to the suburbs.
Thus, the decline of Detroit was not preordained, nor was it solely the result of race-neutral economic trends. Instead, racism—on both individual and institutional levels—played a major role in the urban crisis Sugrue chronicles.
Deindustrialization and Detroit’s Working Class
Although racist politics and attitudes played a huge role in Detroit’s decline, Sugrue also points to broader economic trends that contributed to the city’s crisis. The deindustrialization of America’s Rust Belt started in the mid-1940s, in the wake of World War II. The process included closing, downsizing, and relocating plants and entire industries. Advances in communication and transportation spurred deindustrialization by allowing factories to move out of cities to low-wage, nonurban areas, primarily in the South and West. These locations were also attractive to industry because of broad anti-union sentiment in the American South. (Day, Meagan. “Welcome to Operation Dixie, the most ambitious unionization attempt in the U.S.” Medium, 2018).
Importantly, these economic trends were not merely the result of a market left to its own devices. Federal policies fueled this exodus. For example, the government financed the construction of new expressways that facilitated the movement of goods over long distances, enabling capital mobility. In Detroit, the auto industry, the city’s primary employer, stood at the forefront of deindustrialization. Two out of Detroit’s Big Three car manufacturers, Ford and GM, built nonurban plants. The loss of jobs severely impacted the city by lowering wages and weakening labor unions. In 1950, about 56% of US auto jobs were in Michigan. By 1960, that figure dropped to 40% (128). Auto-related industries, such as machine-tool and -parts manufacturers, left Detroit alongside the automakers.
Automation was among the leading causes of deindustrialization and decentralization. New automated processes dramatically reduced labor costs by increasing efficiency and eliminating jobs. At Ford’s Cleveland plant, for instance, it took 117 workers to produce 154 engine blocks every hour before automation; after automation, the same output required just 41 workers (30). Automation improved working conditions in plants by reducing hours and increasing safety. However, it also stripped workers of control over production and, more importantly, eliminated jobs. In 1945, the Ford River Rouge plant employed 85,000 workers, many of them Black; by 1960, the figure dropped to 30,000 (132).
With deindustrialization came economic hardship, especially for the working class. Between 1948 and 1967, Detroit lost about 130,000 manufacturing jobs (143). The loss of these jobs stripped all workers of economic opportunities, but underresourced, unskilled Black people were hit especially hard. Racial discrimination magnified the impact of deindustrialization, as indicated by 1960 census data:
Across the city, 15.9 percent of blacks, but only 5.8 percent of whites were out of work. In the motor vehicle industry, the black-white gap was even greater. 19.7 percent of black auto workers were unemployed, compared to only 5.8 percent of whites (144).
Deindustrialization created a racialized class of “long-term unemployed,” most of whom were older and unskilled, or youths lacking the education and experience for even entry-level jobs. Working-class white workers also suffered from deindustrialization. Many white workers believed that Democrats largely ignored their needs, focusing instead on civil rights and racially marginalized groups. As a result, alienated white workers abandoned the Democratic Party and turned their anger against affirmative action and other government programs helping Black people—even when the same programs helped white workers as well.
Through his discussion of deindustrialization, Sugrue emphasizes that Detroit’s urban crisis came as a result of numerous factors—economic, political, and social. He thus paints Detroit as a case study whose story is reflected in the trajectories of other Rust Belt cities that fell victim to deindustrialization, including Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. (Hartley, Daniel A. “Urban Decline in Rust-belt Cities.” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Economic Commentary. June 2013).
Racial Tensions and Detroit’s Changing Social Geography
According to Sugrue, the racial factors contributing to Detroit’s urban crisis were the result of migration patterns into, out of, and within the city. Racial tensions grew in postwar Detroit in large part because of shifting social geographies. Most Black Detroiters lived in low-income urban enclaves, where housing options were limited and generally undesirable. Buildings were old, decrepit, and overcrowded. In the 1940s and 1950s, a growing number of Black residents rejected traditionally Black neighborhoods in favor of white areas. Between 1950 and 1960, the number of Black people in overcrowded homes fell from 25.3 to 17.5% (183). This shift coincided with the growth of the Black middle class. In 1953, Detroit had more independently owned Black businesses than any other city in the country (189). Some Black people even ventured into sectors traditionally dominated by white people, such as car dealerships and electronics stores.
The movement of Black people into white neighborhoods strained race relations across the city. White homeowners formed quasi-military associations to keep Black people out of their neighborhoods. Members used covenants, lawsuits, diplomacy, and threats to dissuade Black people from purchasing homes in white areas. When these measures failed, they resorted to harassment and violence, as in the case of the Northeast Side:
When the first black families tried to cross the invisible line along Dequindre, white neighbors set their houses afire and broke their windows. Throughout the 1950s, every black family that tried to move across Dequindre […] was rebuffed by angry white crowds and vandals (238).
Similar incidents occurred in other so-called “defended” areas. From 1956 to 1965, white residents of the Wyoming Corridor attacked Black pioneers and their real-estate agents. In 1955, for example, Henry Love, a Black autoworker, moved his family to Chalfonte Street, only to be met by 1000 white residents pelting his house with stones. These residents drove the Loves out of the neighborhood. Henry told Urban League investigators that “he could not stomach this hostility” and that he “was not interested in being a pioneer” (240). This neighborhood association, like many others, successfully defended against open housing. Those that failed to hold racial lines saw residents retreat to the suburbs. Cities across the country experienced similar patterns of white flight and racial violence in transitional neighborhoods. In Detroit, race relations were so tense that the city twice erupted in riots.
Alongside race, class played a major role in these migrations. For example, when Black residents moved into relatively upper-class white neighborhoods, the white residents there had the means to relocate to the suburbs—which untold numbers did in a phenomenon not unique to Detroit known as “white flight.” In working-class neighborhoods, white residents who could not afford to move relied on legal and illegal means—some of them violent—to prevent Black homeowners from moving into their neighborhood. In both cases, the city staunchly resisted integration, thereby contributing to Detroit’s decline. Thus, Sugrue shows that race and class worked hand-in-hand in causing shifts in Detroit’s racial topography.
