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.
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 AcademicTitles for 1997
Review
"In this important new history of post-World War II Detroit, Sugrue solidly refutes conservative theories about welfare dependency and deepens liberal thinking about the underlying causes of urban poverty."
--Jim McNeil, In These Times
Review
"[A] first-rate account. . . . With insight and elegance, Sugrue describes the street-by-street warfare to maintain housing values against the perceived encroachment of blacks trying desperately to escape the underbuilt and overcrowded slums."
--Choice
Review
"Perhaps by offering a clearer picture of how the urban crisis began, Sugrue brings us a little closer to finding a way to end it."
--Jim McNeill, In These Times
Synopsis
"This superb study offers a richly detailed account of the rise and fall of twentieth-century Detroit.... Must reading for ... everyone concerned about the current urban crisis."--Jacqueline Jones, author of The Dispossessed: America's Underclass from the Civil War to the Present
"Sugrue's incredibly rich, nuanced, multilayered account of the transformation of Detroit provides the historical perspective missing in virtually all accounts of the crisis ravaging today's inner cities."--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [281]-364) and index.
Table of Contents
| List of Illustrations | |
| List of Tables | |
| Acknowledgments | |
| Introduction | 3 |
Pt. 1 | Arsenal | 15 |
1 | "Arsenal of Democracy" | 17 |
2 | "Detroit's Time Bomb": Race and Housing in the 1940s | 33 |
3 | "The Coffin of Peace": The Containment of Public Housing | 57 |
Pt. 2 | Rust | 89 |
4 | "The Meanest and the Dirtiest Jobs": The Structures of Employment Discrimination | 91 |
5 | "The Damning Mark of False Prosperities": The Deindustrialization of Detroit | 125 |
6 | "Forget about Your Inalienable Right to Work": Responses to Industrial Decline and Discrimination | 153 |
Pt. 3 | Fire | 179 |
7 | Class, Status, and Residence: The Changing Geography of Black Detroit | 181 |
8 | "Homeowners' Rights": White Resistance and the Rise of Antiliberalism | 209 |
9 | "United Communities Are Impregnable": Violence and the Color Line | 231 |
| Conclusion. Crisis: Detroit and the Fate of Postindustrial America | 259 |
App. A | Index of Dissimilarity, Blacks and Whites in Major American Cities, 1940-1990 | 273 |
App. B | African American Occupational Structure in Detroit, 1940-1970 | 275 |
| List of Abbreviations in the Notes | 279 |
| Notes | 281 |
| Index | 365 |