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

Sugrue is an American scholar specializing in 20th-century American urbanism, political history, and race relations. He received his doctorate in American history from Harvard University in 1992. As of 2022, he is Julius Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University as well as Director of the NYU Cities Collaborative, an initiative that convenes scholars from around the world to discuss pressing urban issues. Before his appointment at NYU, Sugrue held an endowed faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the New York Institute for the Humanities, and the Royal Historical Society (“Thomas J. Sugrue,” New York University, 2022).

Originally published in 1996, The Origins of the Urban Crisis is Sugrue’s first book and among his most acclaimed. The book received the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History (1998), the Urban History Association Prize for Best Book in North American Labor History (1997), the Social Science History Association President’s Book Award for emerging scholars (1996), and the Philip Taft Labor History Award (1996). Princeton University Press named The Origins of the Urban Crisis one of its 100 most influential books of the 20th century, issuing it as a Princeton Classic in 2005. Sugrue revisited many of the book’s themes in later publications, including The New Suburban History (2005); Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008); Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (2010); and These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present, with Glenda Gilmore (2015).

Sugrue’s influence extends beyond academia. A commentator on American race relations, he published articles in newspapers with worldwide readerships during the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, urging readers not to make false equivalencies between BLM and the 1968 protests that broke out after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (Sugrue, Thomas. “Stop Comparing Today’s Protests to 1968.” The Washington Post, 2020).

Sugrue’s interest in race, urbanism, and politics hearkens back to his graduate-school years, where he studied topics of contemporary relevance, namely racial violence, housing shortages, and urban blight. His approach in The Origins of the Urban Crisis, which stresses the long historical processes that shaped Detroit, reflects his views about history:

I don’t see a bright line between past and present […] It’s a fallacy to see the present as somehow uprooted from history. The opportunities and constraints that we experience in the here and now are the result of historical processes (Sugrue, Thomas. “Public Thinker: Thomas J. Sugrue on History’s Hard Lessons.” Interview by Destin Jenkins. Public Books, 2019).

This approach informs Sugrue’s academic publications, newspaper articles, advocacy work as an expert witness in civil-rights cases, and lectures at universities, community organizations, and religious congregations. Sugrue’s public engagement is rooted in the rigorous academic work displayed in The Origins of the Urban Crisis. One of his strengths as a scholar is his ability to modulate his voice to engage varied audiences, from academics to politicians to juries.