The Origin of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. - Review - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1998 by John T. Cumbler

By Thomas J. Sugrue (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996. xvii plus 375pp.).

For those of us involved in the struggle for social and racial justice, Thomas Sugrue has written a fascinating and very depressing book. Sugrue's work demonstrates the deep seated pervasiveness of racial animosity in this country, and how race discrimination and inequality are intimately linked to the problems confronting urban America. His work also suggests how the power of racism not only exacerbates urban problems, but also functions to thwart possible solutions.

Post-war Detroit in many ways exemplified both the possibilities and shortcomings of the golden age of American capitalism. It was a city of homeowners and well-paid industrial workers. Detroit's workers had won the rights of union recognition, collective bargaining, and model benefit packages. Employed autoworkers and those who depended upon the auto industry were able to take advantage of government loans to buy homes and cars and settle into a life of hard work but decent rewards. Sugrue shows us that below this surface of prosperity and comfort Detroit was a troubled city throughout the post-war period. Detroit's troubles were rooted in two areas, and not having successfully come to grips with either area, as the post-war period matured the problems rooted in these two areas festered and finally exploded upon the metropolitan landscape.

One of the central problems, which Detroiters were never able to solve, was the problem of continued racial animosity which expressed itself in discriminatory hiring and in housing segregation. Hiring discrimination forced African-Americans into not only the hardest, dirtiest, and lowest paid jobs, but also left them most susceptible to lay offs and job insecurity. The resulting job inequality was not simply the effect of overt racism by employers, but was a consequence of multiple factors such as patterns of hiring from particular neighborhoods or from informal referrals from those already employed, which favored white hirees, fear of the response of other employees to hiring a minority worker, dependence upon existing job training and apprenticeship programs which reinforced already existing racial hiring practices, and racism or racial stereotypes of employers. Racism also impacted the city's housing patterns. If Detroit was a city of homeowners, it was also a city of neighborhood turfs. And white Detroiters, particularly ethnic Catholics, defended their turf from African-Americans legally and extra-legally. In this, white Detroiters were aided by the Federal Government's discriminatory leading policy (FHA), and the real estate industry whose Board endorsed and attempted to enforce racial discrimination in the selling of homes. Working-class Detroiters saw in their home, and they were reinforced in this belief by politicians and public media, a retreat from the pressures of work, security and an investment in their future, a center for their community, and a symbol of their success in America. White and Black Detroiters shared in this ideal. Unfortunately for Black Detroiters, it was an ideal whose realization was far more difficult for them to achieve than for white Detroiters. Blacks were shut out of the standard home loan packages by FHA policies. It was significantly more difficult for Blacks to finance buying their own homes, forcing them to rely on the more risky land contracts, higher interest loans, or other forms of self-financing, or to look to the rental market. Even if Blacks could get access to the financial resources to buy a home, they then faced an almost insurmountable obstacle of housing discrimination. Realtors would not sell African-Americans homes in any area except those already defined as Black. When Blacks did try and move into white areas, they were met with violence. Arson, intimidation, window breaking, porch, lawn and shrubbery destruction, telephone threats, burning crosses and riots were not the occasional but the standard greetings for Black Detroiters moving into a white area. Sugrue demonstrates that defense of racially exclusive neighborhoods had a central role not only in the patterns of residential segregation in Detroit, but also in the city's politics. Candidates who successfully played upon white anxiety over the integration of neighborhoods, whether that integration was in the form of scattered public housing or Blacks buying into white neighborhoods, won political office and established the discourse of local politics throughout the 1940s and 1950s.

The other major problem which Detroit was never able to solve was the problem of the city's lack of control over its economic destiny. Economic restructuring, brought about as corporations responded to the unionization and militancy of the city's labor force, ultimately undermined the possibility of the city's workers to establish stable long-term security for themselves and their children. As the most recent migrants to the city and the most recently hired into the industrial workforce, if hired at all, the burden of this restructuring was borne by the city's African-American population. In part as a response to labor's militancy and in part as a means of shoring up its control over the production process, the automobile industry began a program of automation and decentralization. Supported by a newly developed national transportation system and tax structure, the automobile industry began to move production facilities out of Detroit, to automate more of what remained, and to internalize usually in plants out of the area what had previously been produced by local independent companies. The results of this restructuring were a significant decline in industrial employment in Detroit, especially for those most recently employed in the industry. All of Detroit's workers faced the spector of unemployment as the industry downsized jobs in the region, and anxiety ran high for most of the city's workers. It was the new African-American migrants or children of existing residents who found the most significantly diminished job opportunities. African-Americans already employed in the plants were also more likely to lose their jobs with restructuring and had far greater difficulty finding new jobs once laid off due to patterns of present and past discrimination.