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

Though the book is largely analytical, Sugrue defines the eponymous “urban crisis” in a broad, almost narrative sense: Irreducible to any one societal or economic factor, the crisis is understood as Detroit’s transition from a prosperous beacon of democracy to a home of racial conflict, economic dysfunction, and steeply underserved communities.

Detroit in the 1940s was a fast-growing boomtown with some of the highest-paid blue-collar workers in the country. In the second half of the 20th century, however, the city lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs and almost one million residents, resulting in urban blight. Detroit’s fate mirrors that of cities across the country, especially in the Rust Belt, the former industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest. The loss of manufacturing jobs and the concurrent growth of the low-wage service sector increased poverty and unemployment, particularly for Black people. It also isolated those with low incomes in racially and spatially segregated urban enclaves, leading many to stop participating in the labor market.

Sugrue traces the origins of Detroit’s urban crisis to the period from the 1940s to the 1960s, which is much earlier than many other scholars do. However, his thesis holds significance beyond mere chronologies.