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. Once isolated in high-density, low-income enclaves, Black people began pushing into white neighborhoods; racial strife ensued, sparked largely by white resistance to the newcomers. These shifting racial demographics, alongside deindustrialization, laid the foundation for Detroit’s decline. Sugrue argues that this decline was not inevitable but the product of decisions made by various individuals and groups: the federal government, policymakers, the media, and more.

Part 1, “Arsenal,” describes the conditions that led to Detroit’s urban crisis. A thriving center of labor and manufacturing, 1940s Detroit epitomized American economic might and the primacy of global capitalism, yet housing shortages and systemic racism in the housing and labor sectors marginalized the city’s rapidly growing Black population. Racial covenants—clauses in property deeds prohibiting non-white people from buying or occupying land—along with white neighborhood associations and real-estate and banking practices, confined most Black people to overcrowded, racially segregated enclaves where the housing stock was old and dilapidated. Unlike other American cities, which capitalized on federal programs to house those surviving on low income, Detroit eschewed public-housing projects in favor of single-family homes. White homeowners, real-estate professionals, and lending institutions drove the city’s housing policies, keeping Detroit segregated and in dire need of affordable housing.

Part 2, “Rust,” addresses Detroit’s decline in the postindustrial era, focusing on the plight of Black unskilled workers. Systemic racism plagued Detroit’s labor sector before and after World War II, with some industries excluding Black workers entirely. Although Black workers found employment in some sectors, notably in the auto industry, most were relegated to low-paying, unskilled positions that lacked job security. Decentralization and automation devastated Detroit’s manufacturing sector in the postwar years, when companies relocated to nonurban areas to lower their labor costs and tax burdens. Mass layoffs followed plant closures, with particularly dire ramifications for the Black working class. Trade unions, civil-rights groups, and governments responded to the crisis by adapting to automation, through lawsuits, and with job-training programs, but these efforts failed to address the structural underpinnings of workplace discrimination and job loss. McCarthyism silenced critics of industry by painting labor activists as un-American Communists.

Part 3, “Fire,” focuses on Detroit’s changing racial topography and conflicts. Alongside civil-rights organizations, Black people started challenging racial covenants in court in the late 1940s. A US Supreme Court ruling deeming racial covenants unenforceable emboldened Black people to move into white areas. White flight to the suburbs and efforts to insulate their neighborhoods from Black people with low incomes, however, kept Detroit segregated along racial and class lines. Open-housing policies designed to prevent discrimination in the housing market resulted in political backlash and the rise of populism as of the 1950s. Populists blamed Black people and liberals for the city’s socioeconomic woes. White homeowners formed neighborhood associations in response to these perceived threats, creating one of the biggest grassroots movements in the city’s history. The groups used threats, harassment, vandalism, and violence to keep Black people out of their neighborhoods. These tactics were not random or irrational but politically-driven responses to socioeconomic change that resulted in two Detroits—one white, the other Black.

The book concludes with a discussion of the 1967 race riots, an event often identified as the start of Detroit’s urban crisis. Sugrue contests this narrative, suggesting instead that Detroit’s socioeconomic problems are rooted in postwar deindustrialization. The city continued to decline through the 20th century, and its rehabilitation requires sustained, multipronged efforts to address the job loss, housing inequity, and workplace discrimination that began in the postwar years.

Although the text is a fastidious analysis, it is also a story. As Sugrue marks out the city’s metamorphosis from a wartime boomtown to a site of urban poverty and postindustrial decline, he furnishes this nonfiction narrative with a vibrant array of primary sources, including memoirs, pamphlets, newspapers, correspondences, survey data, census reports, and more.