Synopses & Reviews
Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit over the last fifty years has become the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of racial and economic inequality in modern America, Thomas Sugrue explains how Detroit and many other once prosperous industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s. Probing beneath the veneer of 1950s prosperity and social consensus, Sugrue traces the rise of a new ghetto, solidified by changes in the urban economy and labor market and by racial and class segregation.
In this provocative revision of postwar American history, Sugrue finds cities already fiercely divided by race and devastated by the exodus of industries. He focuses on urban neighborhoods, where white working-class homeowners mobilized to prevent integration as blacks tried to move out of the crumbling and overcrowded inner city. Weaving together the history of workplaces, unions, civil rights groups, political organizations, and real estate agencies, Sugrue finds the roots of today's urban poverty in a hidden history of racial violence, discrimination, and deindustrialization that reshaped the American urban landscape after World War II.
In a new preface, Sugrue discusses the ongoing legacies of the postwar transformation of urban America and engages recent scholars who have joined in the reassessment of postwar urban, political, social, and African American history.
Review
Praise for Princeton's previous edition:"[Sugrue's] disciplined historical engagement with a complex, often inglorious, past offers a compelling model for understanding how race and the Rust Belt converged to create the current impasse."
--America
Review
Praise for Princeton's previous edition: "A splendid book that does no less than transform our understanding of United States history after 1940."
--Labor History
Review
Praise for Princeton's previous edition:"[Sugrue's] disciplined historical engagement with a complex, often inglorious, past offers a compelling model for understanding how race and the Rust Belt converged to create the current impasse. America
Review
Praise for Princeton's previous edition: "A splendid book that does no less than transform our understanding of United States history after 1940. Labor History
Review
Winner of the 1998 Bancroft Prize in American History
Winner of the 1997 Philip Taft Prize in Labor History
Winner of the 1996 President's Book Award, Social Science History Association
Winner of the 1997 Best Book in North American Urban History Award, Urban History Association
One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1997
Synopsis
Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit over the last fifty years has become the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of racial and economic inequality in modern America, Thomas Sugrue explains how Detroit and many other once prosperous industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s. Probing beneath the veneer of 1950s prosperity and social consensus, Sugrue traces the rise of a new ghetto, solidified by changes in the urban economy and labor market and by racial and class segregation.
In this provocative revision of postwar American history, Sugrue finds cities already fiercely divided by race and devastated by the exodus of industries. He focuses on urban neighborhoods, where white working-class homeowners mobilized to prevent integration as blacks tried to move out of the crumbling and overcrowded inner city. Weaving together the history of workplaces, unions, civil rights groups, political organizations, and real estate agencies, Sugrue finds the roots of today's urban poverty in a hidden history of racial violence, discrimination, and deindustrialization that reshaped the American urban landscape after World War II.
In a new preface, Sugrue discusses the ongoing legacies of the postwar transformation of urban America and engages recent scholars who have joined in the reassessment of postwar urban, political, social, and African American history.
Synopsis
Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit over the last fifty years has become the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of racial and economic inequality in modern America, Thomas Sugrue explains how Detroit and many other once prosperous industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s. Probing beneath the veneer of 1950s prosperity and social consensus, Sugrue traces the rise of a new ghetto, solidified by changes in the urban economy and labor market and by racial and class segregation.
In this provocative revision of postwar American history, Sugrue finds cities already fiercely divided by race and devastated by the exodus of industries. He focuses on urban neighborhoods, where white working-class homeowners mobilized to prevent integration as blacks tried to move out of the crumbling and overcrowded inner city. Weaving together the history of workplaces, unions, civil rights groups, political organizations, and real estate agencies, Sugrue finds the roots of today's urban poverty in a hidden history of racial violence, discrimination, and deindustrialization that reshaped the American urban landscape after World War II.
In a new preface, Sugrue discusses the ongoing legacies of the postwar transformation of urban America and engages recent scholars who have joined in the reassessment of postwar urban, political, social, and African American history.
About the Author
Thomas J. Sugrue is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
List of Tables xiii
Preface to the Princeton Classic Edition xv
Acknowledgments xxxiii
Introduction 3
PART ONE: ARSENAL 15
Chapter 1: "Arsenal of Democracy" 17
Chapter 2: "Detroit's Time Bomb": Race and Housing in the 1940s 33
Chapter 3: "The Coffin of Peace": The Containment of Public Housing 57
PART TWO: RUST 89
Chapter 4: "The Meanest and the Dirtiest Jobs": The Structures of Employment Discrimination 91
Chapter 5: "The Damning Mark of False Prosperities": The Deindustrialization of Detroit 125
Chapter 6: "Forget about Your Inalienable Right to Work": Responses to Industrial Decline and Discrimination 153
PART THREE: FIRE 179
Chapter 7: Class, Status, and Residence: The Changing Geography of Black Detroit 181
Chapter 8: "Homeowners'Rights": White Resistance and the Rise of Antiliberalism 209
Chapter 9: "United Communities Are Impregnable": Violence and the Color Line 231
Conclusion: Crisis: Detroit and the Fate of Postindustrial America 259
Appendixes:
A. Index of Dissimilarity, Blacks and Whites in Major 273 American Cities, 1940-1990
B. African American Occupational Structure in Detroit, 275 1940-1970
List of Abbreviations in the Notes 279
Notes 281
Index 365