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

The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit is a 1996 work of nonfiction by Thomas J. Sugrue, an American scholar specializing in US urbanism, political history, and race relations. The book explores the interrelation of housing, race, employment discrimination, and capital flight in 20th-century Detroit. The author posits that Detroit’s decline started long before the 1967 Detroit race riots, arguing that institutional racism limited opportunities for the city’s Black population for much of the 20th century. The book received several awards, including the 1998 Bancroft Prize in American History. In 2005, Princeton University Press named The Origins of the Urban Crisis one of its 100 most influential books of the 20th century.

This guide refers to the Princeton Classics Edition published in 2014.

Summary

The Origins of the Urban Crisis comprises an Introduction, three parts, and a Conclusion. Sugrue lays out his thesis in the Introduction, locating the origins of Detroit’s urban crisis in the period between 1940 and 1960. Although Detroit prospered during World War II, the city was also home to growing economic hardship that disproportionately impacted the city’s Black population. Inequality grew in the wake of the war due to the mass exodus of manufacturing jobs, which profoundly impacted the city’s labor and housing markets.