Thomas J. Sugrue: Revisits Detroit
Thomas J. Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis should have been to the ’90s what Michael Harrington’s The Other America was to the ’60s — a book that galvanized the nation to see a problem and act. If it fell short of that mark, it hardly went unnoticed.
Subtitled Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, the University of Pennsylvania historian’s 1996 book has been lauded as a milestone in contemporary American history. It resists oversimplification, but its key points are clear: The flight of jobs that began immediately after World War II was key to the fate of cities like Detroit, as were the racial barriers in employment and housing faced by their black citizens. Sugrue spoke recently to Metro Times by phone on the occasion of a new edition of Origins from Princeton University Press.
Metro Times: Your new preface begins with a visit to your father’s childhood home around Chalfonte and Santa Rosa, south of Fenkell on the West Side.
Thomas Sugrue: My grandparents’ house was still there, but there is a lot of abandonment and a lot of vacancy in that neighborhood, and — being the good social scientist that I like to be — I went back to the 2000 census and began doing some research to see what had changed in the period when my father grew up there in the 1940s and early 1950s.
I found that it was a neighborhood that in many ways was Detroit in microcosm; it was a neighborhood that had been all-white that became overwhelmingly African-American in a very short period of time in the early 1960s. It’s a neighborhood whose white residents had fiercely resisted black movement into their neighborhoods prior to the 1960s, and it’s a neighborhood that experienced white flight, disinvestment, the combined effects of land contracts and unscrupulous real estate dealings and absentee landlords that led to a deterioration of properties. It’s a neighborhood that saw its commercial district pretty much gutted from the 1960s to the present, and it was a neighborhood that had once been home to blue-collar Detroit workers, and still has some blue-collar workers, but had, in 2000, a sizable segment of the population that was unemployed and underemployed, again representing larger trends that had transformed the city.
MT: What was your gut reaction?
Sugrue: There is a sadness that I can’t help but feel when I visit neighborhoods like that. I saw some beautifully manicured lawns, some nice gardens; some kids were shooting hoops at a basketball net that they had set up on a telephone pole. So there were signs of life and vitality. But it was also a place where vacant lots and crumbling houses and a very eviscerated shopping district kind of overwhelmed the signs of hope and opportunity.
MT: Going back to the old neighborhood — and despairing — is a common experience for Detroiters of a certain age.
Sugrue: One of the reasons why I wrote Origins of the Urban Crisis was because of my conversations with folks who had grown up in Detroit who would offer easy conventional wisdom about why the city had changed. Almost all of it came down to when they moved in — they meaning African-Americans — everything went downhill. They didn’t keep up their properties. They didn’t have the same values or commitment to home ownership. They didn’t work as hard. They didn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps. So when I visited that neighborhood, and when I began writing my book, part of my task was really to try to come up with a deeper, certainly better researched, and, I think, more compelling explanation than what still passes as conventional wisdom.
When I look at the abandoned houses and the vacant lots and the deterioration in that neighborhood, my first reaction — having written my book, and I hope my readers’ first reaction — is to see the combined impact of persistent residential segregation, discrimination in the workplace and the massive economic disinvestment that has plagued Detroit and other metropolitan areas. Those go a lot further in explaining the landscape of Detroit than arguments about the individual motivations of homeowners or people’s values and attitudes.
MT: Detroiters repeat that we’re the most segregated big metropolitan area almost like a mantra, but your book has broad relevance because Detroit is so typical of Rust Belt cities.
Sugrue: Almost all of the old industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest are highly segregated by race. Detroit happens to be extreme, but the variation between Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee and so forth is pretty small. All of them have a very long way to go before there is any degree of racial integration or racial diversity. Detroit’s is very much a story that can be retold — with variations in timing, with some variations in local detail — for Philadelphia or Cleveland or St. Louis or Oakland. The overall pattern is one that’s depressingly familiar.
MT: One of the discoveries of your Detroit research was the extent of the white homeowners movement.
Sugrue: A little-known aspect of the history of the city and of most other Northern and Midwestern cities was the deeply entrenched resistance by whites to African-Americans moving into their neighborhoods. It was resistance that played out politically in terms of whites supporting conservative politicians like Detroit’s Mayor Cobo in the 1950s, but it’s also a movement that played out in protests and violence. I found more than 200 incidents of whites protesting, picketing, breaking windows, committing arson and attacking African-Americans who were the first or second or third to move into what were formerly white neighborhoods. These organized acts of protest and resistance played a crucial role in shaping the racial divide in Detroit and the metro area at large.
MT: You called it one of the largest grassroots movements in the city’s history
Sugrue: Its history is one that is largely forgotten. I had to piece it together using a wide range of different sources: the African-American press, the records of city agencies, the records of civil rights organizations. ...
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Subtitled Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, the University of Pennsylvania historian’s 1996 book has been lauded as a milestone in contemporary American history. It resists oversimplification, but its key points are clear: The flight of jobs that began immediately after World War II was key to the fate of cities like Detroit, as were the racial barriers in employment and housing faced by their black citizens. Sugrue spoke recently to Metro Times by phone on the occasion of a new edition of Origins from Princeton University Press.
Metro Times: Your new preface begins with a visit to your father’s childhood home around Chalfonte and Santa Rosa, south of Fenkell on the West Side.
Thomas Sugrue: My grandparents’ house was still there, but there is a lot of abandonment and a lot of vacancy in that neighborhood, and — being the good social scientist that I like to be — I went back to the 2000 census and began doing some research to see what had changed in the period when my father grew up there in the 1940s and early 1950s.
I found that it was a neighborhood that in many ways was Detroit in microcosm; it was a neighborhood that had been all-white that became overwhelmingly African-American in a very short period of time in the early 1960s. It’s a neighborhood whose white residents had fiercely resisted black movement into their neighborhoods prior to the 1960s, and it’s a neighborhood that experienced white flight, disinvestment, the combined effects of land contracts and unscrupulous real estate dealings and absentee landlords that led to a deterioration of properties. It’s a neighborhood that saw its commercial district pretty much gutted from the 1960s to the present, and it was a neighborhood that had once been home to blue-collar Detroit workers, and still has some blue-collar workers, but had, in 2000, a sizable segment of the population that was unemployed and underemployed, again representing larger trends that had transformed the city.
MT: What was your gut reaction?
Sugrue: There is a sadness that I can’t help but feel when I visit neighborhoods like that. I saw some beautifully manicured lawns, some nice gardens; some kids were shooting hoops at a basketball net that they had set up on a telephone pole. So there were signs of life and vitality. But it was also a place where vacant lots and crumbling houses and a very eviscerated shopping district kind of overwhelmed the signs of hope and opportunity.
MT: Going back to the old neighborhood — and despairing — is a common experience for Detroiters of a certain age.
Sugrue: One of the reasons why I wrote Origins of the Urban Crisis was because of my conversations with folks who had grown up in Detroit who would offer easy conventional wisdom about why the city had changed. Almost all of it came down to when they moved in — they meaning African-Americans — everything went downhill. They didn’t keep up their properties. They didn’t have the same values or commitment to home ownership. They didn’t work as hard. They didn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps. So when I visited that neighborhood, and when I began writing my book, part of my task was really to try to come up with a deeper, certainly better researched, and, I think, more compelling explanation than what still passes as conventional wisdom.
When I look at the abandoned houses and the vacant lots and the deterioration in that neighborhood, my first reaction — having written my book, and I hope my readers’ first reaction — is to see the combined impact of persistent residential segregation, discrimination in the workplace and the massive economic disinvestment that has plagued Detroit and other metropolitan areas. Those go a lot further in explaining the landscape of Detroit than arguments about the individual motivations of homeowners or people’s values and attitudes.
MT: Detroiters repeat that we’re the most segregated big metropolitan area almost like a mantra, but your book has broad relevance because Detroit is so typical of Rust Belt cities.
Sugrue: Almost all of the old industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest are highly segregated by race. Detroit happens to be extreme, but the variation between Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee and so forth is pretty small. All of them have a very long way to go before there is any degree of racial integration or racial diversity. Detroit’s is very much a story that can be retold — with variations in timing, with some variations in local detail — for Philadelphia or Cleveland or St. Louis or Oakland. The overall pattern is one that’s depressingly familiar.
MT: One of the discoveries of your Detroit research was the extent of the white homeowners movement.
Sugrue: A little-known aspect of the history of the city and of most other Northern and Midwestern cities was the deeply entrenched resistance by whites to African-Americans moving into their neighborhoods. It was resistance that played out politically in terms of whites supporting conservative politicians like Detroit’s Mayor Cobo in the 1950s, but it’s also a movement that played out in protests and violence. I found more than 200 incidents of whites protesting, picketing, breaking windows, committing arson and attacking African-Americans who were the first or second or third to move into what were formerly white neighborhoods. These organized acts of protest and resistance played a crucial role in shaping the racial divide in Detroit and the metro area at large.
MT: You called it one of the largest grassroots movements in the city’s history
Sugrue: Its history is one that is largely forgotten. I had to piece it together using a wide range of different sources: the African-American press, the records of city agencies, the records of civil rights organizations. ...