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

“Poor people have become increasingly isolated in neighborhoods with large numbers of other poor people.”

This quote addresses a key issue in Sugrue’s book: isolation. Systemic racism in the housing and labor markets not only kept Black people “poor” but also confined them to dilapidated Black enclaves. Black pioneers seeking to cross Detroit’s racial lines met with various forms of resistance from white homeowners.

“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.