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

Though the book is largely analytical, Sugrue defines the eponymous “urban crisis” in a broad, almost narrative sense: Irreducible to any one societal or economic factor, the crisis is understood as Detroit’s transition from a prosperous beacon of democracy to a home of racial conflict, economic dysfunction, and steeply underserved communities.

Detroit in the 1940s was a fast-growing boomtown with some of the highest-paid blue-collar workers in the country. In the second half of the 20th century, however, the city lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs and almost one million residents, resulting in urban blight. Detroit’s fate mirrors that of cities across the country, especially in the Rust Belt, the former industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest. The loss of manufacturing jobs and the concurrent growth of the low-wage service sector increased poverty and unemployment, particularly for Black people. It also isolated those with low incomes in racially and spatially segregated urban enclaves, leading many to stop participating in the labor market.

Sugrue traces the origins of Detroit’s urban crisis to the period from the 1940s to the 1960s, which is much earlier than many other scholars do. However, his thesis holds significance beyond mere chronologies. A fuller historical and academic context is key: Because Sugrue identifies Northern racial conflict as early as World War II, his text challenges contemporary sociological narratives, which usually maintained that 1960s civil-rights activism initiated Detroit’s late-20th-century racial hostilities. Such narratives imply that Black people and their civil-rights allies instigated Detroit’s racial discord; in contrast, Sugrue diagnoses the problem as something predating even the war and rooted largely in economic structures and material forces. This diagnosis further contrasts with contemporary sociologically informed scholarship, which often assumed such urban crises arise from a people’s ignoble or misguided culture.

Sugrue’s rejection of the thesis pinning the start of Detroit’s decline to 1960s racial discord is supported by modern scholarship. In an article for Bridge Michigan, Wayne State law professor John E. Mogk writes that an exodus of jobs which began in the 1950s, followed by flawed local and federal government policies, is to blame for Detroit’s decline. Mogk writes, “Conventional wisdom says the 1967 riots were the primary cause of Detroit’s decline. Deeper study shows this to be untrue.” (Mogk, John E. “Bad government caused Detroit’s decline. Don’t blame the riot.” Bridge Michigan. 1 September 2017).

Among the text’s most salient characteristics is this focus on material forces, as well as the concomitant skepticism about culturalist accounts of the crisis. These characteristics are evident already in the Introduction, which notes how inequality grew in the wake of economic restructuring and racial strife in postwar America, playing out in labor and housing markets across Detroit. The US was an economic and global powerhouse after World War II, but this affluence and might masked regional disparities. Old industrial cities declined as manufacturing jobs in the textile, automotive, and military industries began relocating to suburban and rural areas. The federal government supported these changes by building highways that spurred the growth of nonurban areas. Policymakers largely ignored economic inequality, while Communist-baiting and McCarthyism silenced unions and other critics of capitalism. It became increasingly common to blame unemployment and poverty on the behaviors and ostensible deficiencies of those with low incomes. Further, there was widespread optimism that the private sector could absorb surplus labor.

The loss of manufacturing jobs coincided with the migration of millions of Black people lured to Northern cities by the promise of opportunities. As economic inequalities grew, Black people increasingly found themselves isolated in low-income, racially segregated urban enclaves. White flight to the suburbs further stigmatized residents of lower-income districts, and the latter population’s demands for opportunity in labor and housing placed them at odds with white people of similarly low incomes. The media fueled racial conflict by portraying Black people as intellectually inferior, promiscuous, lazy, and dependent. Race also had a spatial dimension, with dilapidated Black neighborhoods reinforcing negative racial stereotypes. Government policies, such as welfare and Social Security, further fueled the idea of Black deficiency, while public-housing policies concentrated Black people in blighted areas. Racial transformation and deindustrialization converged in the postwar era, laying the groundwork for Detroit’s decline. Sugrue argues that this decline was not inevitable; rather, it was the result of economic and political decisions made by varied individuals and groups.

In the years since Sugrue published The Origins of the Urban Crisis, Detroit’s population decline has intensified. In 2000, Detroit’s population was 951,270—down from its 1950 peak of 1.8 million. The population then dropped to 713,777 in 2010, and by 2020 the population was down to 639,111. (Kozlowski, Kim. “Detroit’s 70-year population decline continues; Duggan says city was undercounted.” Detroit News. 12 August 2021).

While Sugrue outlines many variables in Detroit’s urban crisis, the text proposes no specific solutions; he is not an activist or policymaker but a historian. More recent analyses acknowledge that traditional approaches to revitalization may fail in Detroit. Researchers at the economic think tank Economy League look to innovative solutions in the realm of land use to reverse Detroit’s decline, writing, “The traditional growth model does not work for cities like Detroit that have structural problems of supply and demand when it comes to retaining human capital and sustained business activity.” (Bajwa, Haseeb & Mike Shields. “Detroit: Past and Future of a Shrinking City.” Economy League. 27 July 2022). If Sugrue’s thesis holds, then the city’s restoration would require greater measures to address the inequities and workplace discrimination originating from the postwar years. His scholarship forges a perspective that might lay the groundwork for change; if scholars, activists, and politicians have a more comprehensive and realistic idea of this and other urban crises, their solutions would likely be more viable. Sugrue’s objective is an informed historical perspective with indirectly transformative potential.