The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

“The coincidence and mutual reinforcement of race, economics, and politics in […] the period from the 1940s to the 1960s set the stage for the fiscal, social, and economic crises that confront urban America today.”

Most scholars date the start of Detroit’s urban crisis to the 1967 race riots. By contrast, Sugrue argues that the crisis started in the 1940s. Systemic racism in the housing and labor markets, combined with deindustrialization, led to mass joblessness, poverty, urban decay, and the growth of an urban “underclass.”

“Discrimination by race was a central fact of life in the postwar city.”

Racism is a central theme in Sugrue’s book. Systemic racism in labor and housing left Black people particularly vulnerable to Detroit’s changing economic fortunes, creating a racialized class of long-term unemployed individuals.

“If Detroit had an economic golden age, the decade of the 1940s seems as likely a candidate as any.”

Sugrue’s book emphasizes the shift from prosperity to decline. The economic boom spurred by World War II masked Detroit’s underlying problems in labor and housing, to the benefit of workers, including Black people and women. At that time, Black people who flocked to Detroit from the South in search of jobs by and large found them.

“Both blacks and whites suffered from the shortage of housing, but blacks bore a disproportionate share of the burden.”

Sugrue stresses the impact of Detroit’s housing crisis on Black people, without minimizing the suffering of white people. Discriminatory hiring practices kept Black Detroiters in low-paying jobs, hindering their ability to compete with white people in the housing market. Moreover, covenants, racism, and violence prevented Black people from moving to many parts of the city, confining them to underserved urban enclaves.

“The city’s relocation office was understaffed and often unsympathetic to the plight of evicted families.”

Detroit lacked the political will and economic resources to help Black people with low incomes who were displaced by urban-renewal programs. Consequently, displaced residents received little help when the city began building highways and clearing high-density, low-income neighborhoods to improve circulation and housing.

“Housing became a major arena for organized political activity in the 1940s, where Detroiters, black and white, fought a battle that would define Detroit politics for decades to follow.”

Housing reformers, many of them liberal and Black, lobbied for integration and the construction of multi-unit public-housing projects in Detroit. By contrast, white homeowners groups actively prevented the construction of housing projects and the movement of Black people into their neighborhoods. The two factions, which comprised varied individuals and groups, influenced public policy for decades.

“When apartment buildings are poorly maintained, the whole neighborhood is downgraded. When rents are exorbitant, people cannot afford to pay; this leads to a constantly changing community rather than to stable neighborhood relations.”

This quote identifies high turnover rates as key contributors to the “ghettoization” cycle. Renting is less stable than homeownership, which leads to constantly changing tenants and neighborhood instability.

“In Detroit, as elsewhere, local elected officials controlled the implementation of federal policies.”

President Roosevelt’s administration funded the implementation of New Deal social programs, including the construction of public housing. However, it left this implementation to local officials. In Detroit, civic authorities consistently bent under pressure from white homeowners and other specialized groups, dramatically curtailing the efforts of civil-rights and housing-reform advocates.

“The Oakwood project […] encountered enormous grassroots resistance from whites adamant that the government should preserve the racial and architectural homogeneity of their neighborhood.”

Sugrue describes homeowners associations’ efforts to keep neighborhoods white, which he believes was the largest grassroots movement in Detroit’s history. These associations used a variety of tactics to get their way, including diplomacy, covenants, lawsuits, harassment, vandalism, and violence.

“The motor vehicle industry was the single largest employer in mid-twentieth-century Detroit, providing a quarter to a third of all jobs in the city.”

Detroit was home to the Big Three automakers—Ford, GM, and Chrysler—as well as to many independent auto companies. The city was also full of auto-related industries, such as machine-tool manufacturing and metalworking. The primacy of the auto industry, alongside its status as Detroit’s largest employer, made the effects of deindustrialization, decentralization, and automation particularly acute.

“Detroit is in the doldrums.”

The speaker of this quote, a social welfare worker named Mary Jorgensen, was a prescient observer of Detroit in the early 1950s. What Jorgensen noted was the start of long-term economic problems that culminated in 2013, when the city declared bankruptcy.

“Unions have killed a lot of small industries.”

The words of this Detroit-based industrialist capture a common sentiment among Republicans, namely that unions kill jobs. Unions lobby for higher wages and benefits, causing prices to rise. Small firms cannot compete with large companies that can better absorb higher labor costs, leading to the closing of small businesses.

“Detroit, the World War II ‘arsenal of democracy,’ had become […] a ‘ghost arsenal.’”

This quote uses evocative imagery to describe Detroit during and after the war. In the booming war years, Detroit was dotted with factories converted to build war machines for overseas use against enemies of democracy. Postwar decentralization turned Detroit into a ghost town of empty factories.

“The flight of manufacturing jobs in the 1950s raised fundamental political questions about rights, responsibilities, power, and inequality that were unresolved in mid-twentieth-century America.”

This passage underscores key political debates of the mid-20th century. Labor and civil-rights activists stressed workers’ rights and corporate responsibility in their efforts to stem job loss. Through collective bargaining and political organization, they sought to curb the vast power imbalance that existed between workers and industrialists.

“The centerpiece of Detroit’s reindustrialization policy was ‘industrial renewal.’”

Sugrue argues that failed policies worsened Detroit’s urban crisis. Instead of intervening to regulate decentralization, city officials tried to lure businesses back to Detroit with tax breaks and cleared lands. These reindustrialization efforts were predicated on two false premises: First, civic authorities believed that the lack of space caused industrial flight; and second, they assumed that the city’s existing factories were too small or unusable in the time of automation.

“The ghetto crept outward block by block.”

This quote by a Detroit official describes an important mid-20th-century phenomenon: transitioning neighborhoods. Affluent Black people were the first to move into transitional areas, followed by the working class. The latter struggled with high home prices and above-market interest rates. Many took on boarders, shared homes with other families, and skimped on building maintenance, resulting in the spread of urban blight.

“Detroit’s black elite found status and distance from the majority of the city’s black population.”

Class divisions grew in Detroit’s Black neighborhoods in the postwar years. Although many Black people remained in low-income downtown enclaves, wealthier professionals moved to adjacent neighborhoods. Like white areas, many of these transitioning neighborhoods had covenants barring boarders and multi-unit buildings, which successfully excluded people with low incomes.

“Many of Detroit’s working- and middle-class whites banded together in exclusive neighborhood organizations, in what became one of the largest grassroots movements in the city’s history.”

Sugrue characterizes neighborhood associations as a powerful grassroots movement that lobbied to stop open-housing policies using varied means, including racial covenants, lawsuits, protests, threats, and violence. The movement was not only multigenerational but heavily reliant on women.

“Wherever blacks lived, whites believed, neighborhoods inevitably deteriorated.”

Racism and racial biases pervaded neighborhood associations. White people feared that Black people would bring crime and delinquency to their neighborhoods. They also assumed that Black people would neglect their properties and turn white neighborhoods into “slums.”

“Self-interested real estate agents and panicky white homeowners fearful of black encroachment collaborated closely to fight integration.”

Detroit’s real-estate agents profited handsomely from racial discord. Some agents collaborated with homeowners to keep neighborhoods white. Limiting the areas Black people could move to increased competition and raised rents in Black enclaves. Some agents played both sides by helping Black people buy homes in white neighborhoods and then selling the houses of panicked white homeowners fleeing to the suburbs.

“Residents of postwar Detroit carried with them a cognitive map that helped them negotiate the complex urban landscape.”

Racial incidents encoded difference into urban space. Detroiters distinguished Black from white areas. Blockbusting real-estate agents and Black pioneers breached Detroit’s racial lines, resulting in white flight and racial violence.

“Race in the postwar city was not just a cultural construction. Instead, whiteness, and by implication blackness, assumed a material dimension, imposed onto the geography of the city.”

Detroit was divided along racial lines. White people underscored these divisions materially by staging protests and placing signs along the boundaries of their neighborhoods.

“Each section had ‘captains’ and ‘supervisors’ who would lead residents to ‘retard and diminish this influx, and prevent our white families from exodus.’”

Neighborhood associations were quasi-militias organized along military lines. Their goal was to defend white neighborhoods from Black “invaders” by any means, including violence.