Origins of the Urban Crisis

The preliminaries – from the 2014 preface

• Between 2000 and 2010, Detroit lost 25% of its population; those who remained were overwhelmingly working-class, poor, and black.
• Between 2003 and 2013, Detroit shut down 150 public schools.
• Detroit’s unemployment peaked at 24.9% in 2009 and fell to 16.3% in 2013.
• The city’s median household income was $27,862, and 36.2% of the population was beneath the poverty line.
• Detroit, like many cities, depends on property taxes to provide services like public education. But, during this time, the city’s total property value fell 77%.
  • Industry’s long-term flight from the city had particularly negative consequences for the city’s tax base.
  • Cuts in municipal employment threatened Detroit’s precarious black middle class.
• In 2013, the public sector employed 40,000 workers. 
• Detroit has also fallen to suburban indifference or hostility. Regional cooperation advocates argue that the fates of cities and suburbs are intertwined and that metropolitan economic growth depends on improving the central city’s economy and schools.
  • Suburban municipalities have no incentives to share tax revenue with Detroit.
  • The city relied on disastrous financial advice from Wall Street.
    • In 2005, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick approved the largest municipal pension restructuring in the US. An army of financial professionals from the nation’s top investment banks forged a $1.44 billion deal to fund the city’s pension obligations with complex and highly risky derivatives and credit-default swaps.
    • It unraveled. Detroit was the most prominent casualty of the deregulation of financial services and the lax oversight of Wall Street investment practices. 

Arsenal of Democracy

• Mid-20th century Detroit melded human labor and technology, embodying the pinnacle of capitalism.
• Over 40% of the city’s industrial jobs were in nonautomotive plants, such as stove making, brewing, furniture building, chemical companies, aircraft part fabricators, oil refineries, salt mines, and more–it was a total industrial landscape.

• Detroit factory workers forged some of the nation’s most powerful trade unions.
  • The United Auto Workers (UAW) and other unions succeeded in obtaining relatively high wages and benefits for a sizable portion of manufacturing workers.
  • Ford Motor Company was Detroit’s most welcoming employer for blacks, recruiting an elite corps of black male workers through contacts with black ministers.

• Unions and civil rights organizations played a central role in changing the terms on which blacks were hired.
• The Second World War effort drew women into industries to replace men who had joined the military.
  • Black women gained the least from war employment. Most places hired black women only in response to protest and pressure.

• In 1942, at one manufacturing plant, whites walked out on a hate strike when three black women became drill operators.
• Detroit in the 1940s was also rife with social tensions. Detroit’s racial boundaries originated in the Great Migration of blacks between 1916 and 1929.
  • From the 1920s through the 1940s, the majority of Detroit’s black population was confined to a densely populated section of the city’s Lower East Side.
  • White neighborhoods treated the influx of blacks as a threat and began to organize a defense against the newcomers.
  • Wartime racial tensions came to a violent climax in June 1943.
  • 100,000 Detroiters gathered on Belle Isle, Detroit’s largest park, and brawls broke out between young blacks and whites throughout the day. 
  • Some blacks looted white-owned stores, and the next day more than 10,000 angry whites rampaged through predominantly black areas.
  • Detroit police shot 17 blacks and no whites. Over three days, 34 people were killed. 25 of them were black.

Employment

• Employment discrimination was manifest in the underreperesentation of blacks in the city’s better paid and safer jobs.
• Many employers, basing their decisions on racial stereotypes, assumed that black workers would be unproductive.
• The automobile industry was mid-20th century Detroit’s largest employer, providing ¼ to ⅓ of all jobs. It was also the city’s largest employer of black workers.
• Once hired, black workers found themselves placed in the least desirable jobs, disproportionately in unskilled sectors, usually in the most dangerous positions.
• Employers took advantage of black workers’ insecure position in the labor market to place them in those jobs.

Municipal employment

• The most promising area for blacks in postwar Detroit was government employment.
• By 1946, blacks comprised 36% of city employees.
• But they were mostly confined to service departments: sanitation, public works, parks and recreation, and welfare.

Retail sales

• Blacks remained grossly underrepresented in sales jobs. Employers believed that black sales clerks would alienate white shoppers.
• A 1963 survey found that only 326 of 7,436 jobs in Detroit-area shopping malls were held by blacks. Only 20 of them were salespeople; the remainder worked as porters, janitors, cleaners, shoe shiners, and stockroom laborers.

The building trades

• In construction, more than most other occupations, contractors and unions relied on personal references to hire apprentices.
• Nepotism guaranteed that members of particular ethnic groups and extended families enjoyed unusually high access.

Casual labor and the “underclass”

• Many underemployed black men hung out on street corners on the city’s northern boundary, hoping to be picked for labor jobs by passing contractors.
• This crystallized an image of black male shiftlessness that came to represent the black underclass.

The Deindustrialization of Detroit

• The 1950s was the beginning of a steady decline in manufacturing employment that affected Detroit and almost all other major midwestern  and northeastern industrial cities.
  • Between 1947 and 1963, Detroit lost 134,000 manufacturing jobs, while the number of working-aged men and women increased.
  • Laid-off workers were also consumers, and their loss of buying power rippled throughout Detroit’s economy.
  • Decentralization was an effective way for employers to control labor costs and weaken trade unions.
  • General Motors, the first firm to deconcentrate production on a wide scale, built new plants in rural areas in order to reduce wages and undermine unions in manufacturing cities like Detroit, Pontiac, and Flint.
  • Between 1948 and 1967, Detroit lost 130,000 manufacturing jobs. The number of manufacturing jobs fell by almost half in the 1950s.
  • This loss removed a rung of the ladder of economic opportunity for the poorest workers, especially those with little education.

• The combination of discrimination and deindustrialization eliminated many entry-level job opportunities for young black men. 
• The process of industrial decline also imperiled Detroit’s fiscal base. As jobs left the city, so did white workers and their tax dollars.

Automation

• The most important force that restricted Detroit’s economy was new automated processes in the automobile, auto parts, and machine tool industries. 
• Automation offered two major benefits to manufacturers: it promised to increase output and to reduce labor costs.
• The effects of automation on job opportunities in communities like Detroit were a well-guarded corporate secret.
• Responding to labor union criticism, employers downplayed the possibility of significant job loss. Ford cut 4,185 jobs in the first year of restructuring.

Race and Housing

• In the 1940s, Detroit’s black residents were entrapped in the city’s worst housing options. Leaky roofs, people crammed into living in one room, damp houses, and people faced eviction for having children—conditions were substandard.
• Detroit’s black population doubled between 1940 and 1950, but the pool of available housing grew painfully slowly.
• Overpriced rental housing forced them to spend a higher percentage of income on housing than whites, and to double or triple up with other families.

The housing shortage

• Few black residents had access to high quality housing. 
• Despite a demand for 10,000 units of housing for blacks, only 1,895 units of public housing and 200 units of private housing were built for them between 1941 and 1944.
• Of 545,000 housing units available in Detroit in 1947, only 47,000 were available to blacks.
• A partnership between the federal government, local bankers, and real estate brokers directly led to private-sector discrimination.
  • Federal housing policy officially sanctioned discriminatory real estate sales and bank lending practices.
  • The success of racial covenants (e.g., a stipulation in a deed that restricts ownership to whites only) depended on neighborhood cohesiveness.
  • When an area was restricted to “Caucasians only,” it was impossible for contractors to get financial backing to construct homes for nonwhites.
  • White-owned banks were also unwilling to make safe loans in areas that attracted well-to-do blacks.

Urban redevelopment

• Detroit’s highway planners ensured that highway construction would only minimally disrupt middle-class residential areas, but they viewed inner-city highway construction as a handy device for razing slums.
• 1940s highway construction devastated Detroit’s most densely populated sections.
• Officials announced highway projects years before actual construction. Homeowners and shopkeepers were trapped, unable to sell property that would soon be condemned, unable to move without the money from a sale.
• Families did not receive any assistance for relocation.

Low-rent housing

• There was a dearth of low-rent apartments and public housing in the city.
• In the tight housing market, landlords took advantage of their power to screen out any risky tenants. Blacks, especially those with large families, suffered the greatest hardships.
• It wasn’t unusual for blacks to pay 20% to 40% more for rent than whites in equivalent apartments. 

Public housing generally

• In 1945, thousands of veterans pressured Detroit’s housing market, which already could not even absorb the thousands of defense workers who had ventured to the city during the war.
• 41% of white applicants and 24% of black applicants made it onto the public housing waiting list. Whites were moved off the waiting list more quickly.
• From the 1930s through the 1950s, the federal government, city officials, and housing reformers looked for an alternative to Detroit’s private market to solve the housing crisis.
• Government-subsidized developments would be built throughout the city.
• City planners, labor organizations, and many inner-city residents, especially blacks, focused on the New Deal’s public housing agenda. They viewed the provision of decent low-income housing as a fundamental government responsibility.
• On the other side were real estate brokers, housing developers, and homeowners, both black and white, who all hoped to benefit from New Deal subsidies for private housing.

Biracial housing in the 1940s

• The fate of public housing construction in white areas rested with opponents of racial integration, who argued that public housing fostered the indiscriminate mixing of races.
• Suburban governments refused to allow the construction of public housing within their jurisdictions.
• Real estate developers and business groups opposed government-built projects as socialism that threatened to erode the values of private enterprise.
  • In 1941, the Detroit Housing Commission and the federal government planned to build a 200-unit Sojourner Truth housing project near an already existing area of blacks.
  • But nearby white residents, joined in an alliance by middle-class black residents in another neighborhood, resisted.
  • Public housing, they believed, jeopardized their ability to improve their homes and finance new construction.
  • Federal officials and the DHC bowed to white pressure and designated Sojourner Truth a project for white occupancy.

• Less than two weeks later, they promised the project to black war workers.
  • Then, more than 1,000 blacks and whites filled the streets and fighting erupted. At least 40 people were injured and many arrested.
  • The DHC then mandated the continuation of racial segregation in public housing projects.
  • This incident emphasized that the success of public housing depended on the support of the communities in which it was to be built.
• Many whites believed that the project was a violation of white “rights” to peace and happiness, and that white people were being discriminated against.
• After the Sojourner Truth incident and the Detroit Riot of 1943, white community groups learned to use the violence as a political tool to gain leverage in housing debates.

The Changing Geography of Black Detroit

• The NAACP litigated dozens of restrictive covenant cases, hoping to undermine Jim Crow throughout the US. Judges around the nation regularly upheld such covenants as necessary and proper to protect the rights of property owners.
• SCOTUS eventually ruled that the state could not enforce restrictive covenants.
• The rapidly growing black bourgeoisie pushed the boundaries of black and white neighborhoods. In 1953, Detroit boasted the largest number of independently owned black businesses of any US city.
• The challenge to real estate discrimination burst in 1960, when people discovered that realtors in suburban Grosse Pointe used a point system that ranked buyers by race, nationality, profession, and “degree of swarthiness.”
  • Blacks and Asians were completely excluded from Grosse Pointe, while Poles and Jews needed higher rankings than other white families to be approved.
  • Ultimately, Detroit’s black population was distributed in concentric circles by economic status, the center containing the poorest, and each succeeding ring holding a progressively wealthier population.

• Better-off blacks, like their white counterparts, often tried to regulate their neighbors’ behavior to ensure exclusiveness.
• In the 1950s, Boston-Edison became a high status black community, and its residents enforced restrictive covenants that enforced single-family occupancy and prohibited boarding houses.

Homeowners’ Rights: White Resistance and the Rise of Antiliberalism

• Homeowners’ rights was a malleable concept. Some whites argued that they had acquired property and earned their rights through hard work and responsible citizenship. Homeowners’ rights were a reward for sacrifice and duty.

Some defined it as an extension of their constitutional right to freedom of assembly: They had a right to choose their associates, and that right would be infringed if their neighborhoods were racially mixed.

• Most whites believed that civil rights for blacks were won only at the expense of white rights. “Let us not get so concerned with minority group welfare,” wrote one white Detroiter, “that we forget all about the rights of the majority.”
• Detroit’s whites thought black newcomers threatened their stability, status, and political power. So, many of Detroit’s whites formed neighborhood organizations in one of Detroit’s largest grassroots movements.
• Between 1943 and 1965, Detroit whites founded at least 192 neighborhood organizations (civic associations, protective associations, improvement associations, homeowners’ associations, etc.).
  • They “defended” neighborhoods, homes, family, women, and children against the perceived forces of social disorder. They emphasized the ideology of self-help and individual achievement that lay at the heart of American homeownership.
  • Many thought Jim Crow South was a model for successful race relations.
  • White neighborhoods became battlegrounds where residents struggled to preserve segregated housing.
  • Whites deployed their families to defend their turf when a black family moved in.
  • For men, in the context of fears of black sexuality, it was a battle for the preservation of white womanhood and innocent childhood.
  • Acts of violence committed by youths almost always followed emergency community meetings or street demonstrations.
  • A teacher at the all-white Van Dyke School in northeast Detroit asked 6th grade students to write essays on “Why I like or don’t like Negroes.” 
  • Parents didn’t view their children’s violent acts as lawless behavior. Instead, they tolerated and sanctioned it.

Violence and the Color Line

• In March 1955, the Wilsons, a black family, chose a house in a predominantly white neighborhood. They didn’t know that they breached an invisible racial boundary.
• Their white neighbors broke in, turned on all the faucets, blocked the kitchen sink, flooded the basement, and splattered black paint on the walls. Their house was often attacked.
• At one point, a small crowd gathered outside their house and soon more than 400 picketing and chanting whites surrounded them.
• The Wilsons had police protection, but many attacks occurred while police officers sat in the car nearby.
• White Detroiters instigated over 200 incidents against blacks moving into white neighborhoods, including harassment, mass demonstrations, picketing, effigy burning, window breaking, arson, vandalism, and physical attacks.

• In the arena of housing, violence in Detroit was the outgrowth of one of the largest grassroots movements in the city’s history.
• The result of profound economic insecurities among working- and middle-class whites were, above all, desperate acts of self-determination in response to social and economic changes over which they had little control.

The Riot of 1967

• On July 23, 1967, the police decided to bust a “blind pig,” an illegal after hours saloon in one of Detroit’s largest black neighborhoods.
• Arrests for illegal drinking were common, but usually the police dispersed the crowd and only arrested the owners. That night, they arrested all 85 people.
• In the middle of the night, nearly 200 people gathered to watch the proceedings, jeering and throwing things at the police.
• By 8 am, a crowd of over 3,000 had gathered. The riot raged out of control until it was suppressed by nearly 17,000 law enforcement officers, National Guardsmen, and federal troops.
• After five days of violence, 43 people were dead, 30 of them killed by law enforcement. Rioters looted and burned 2,509 buildings.
• The vast majority of participants in the 1967 Detroit uprising were black; 1943 had involved black and white participants in roughly equal proportions.
• The riot of 1943 came at a time of increasing black and white competition for jobs and housing; by 1967, discrimination and deindustrialization ensured that blacks had lost.

• The combination of persistent discrimination in hiring, technological change, decentralized manufacturing, and urban economic decline had dramatic effects on black employment prospects, and resulted in a declining tax base.
• Whites grew bitter at the failure of their efforts to contain the black population.

The most enduring legacy of the racial struggles in Detroit has been the marginalization of the city in local, state, and national politics.

Officials in Lansing and Washington, beholden to a well-organized and defensive white suburban constituency, have reduced funding for urban education, antipoverty, and development programs.

It’s a commonplace observation that Detroit’s urban crisis began with the Riot of 1967 and worsened from there. What has become of Detroit, however, has been happening for far longer than that.

• The effect of employers leaving industrial centers with high labor costs for regions where they could exploit cheap, nonunion labor
• How the War on Drugs negatively impacted Detroit’s population and tax dollars
• Why certain actions, such as well-intentioned government assistance under Mayor Jermone Cavangh, made only sputtering progress in the face of deindustrialization and discrimination
• The challenge of public education in Detroit, how it came about, and why it persists
• Responses to industrial decline and discrimination: the Detroit Urban League, NAACP, UAW, and the Fair Employment Practices Law
• Story after story of whites and blacks and their perceptions of each other in postwar Detroit