Authors: Thomas J. Sugrue, Katznelson I. R. A. (Editor), Theda Skocpol (Editor), Martin Shefter (Editor), Ira Katznelson
ISBN-13: 9780691121864, ISBN-10: 0691121869
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Date Published: August 2005
Edition: 1st Edition
Thomas J. Sugrue is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
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.
[Sugrue's] disciplined historical engagement with a complex, often in glorious, past offers a compelling model for understanding how race and the Rust Belt converged to create the current impasse. -- America Magazine
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 |
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 |
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 |