Sociology of community Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit - Essay Example

In the years after World War II, the Arsenal of Democracy became the crucible of racial animosity and the poster child for urban decay. Detroit -- atonce like and unlike other Rust Belt American cities -- provides a compelling case study for how economics and politics can fuel sociological phenomena on the macro- and microcosmic levels. In his book The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, native Detroiter Thomas J. Sugrue outlines three major forces that conspired to turn a once-vibrant and economically relevant city into an empty husk of widespread and racially based poverty and joblessness. This paper will examine how housing segregation, workplace discrimination and deindustrialization combined over a period of slightly more than twenty five years to fuel one of the most destructive acts of civil disturbance in the country's history and contribute to the city's slow, painful decline. Naturally, the origins of this "urban crisis" can be traced back before World War II. But race riots in 1943 and 1967 provide a convenient frame for the phenomena Sugrue attributes to Detroit's decline. The people of Detroit, black and white, who became the major players in this modern tragedy largely came to the city in the Great Migration between 1916 and 1929, with a later influx during and just after WWII. Oddly enough, the racial conflicts the author describes were not carried to the city by migrants from the South eager to install Jim Crow laws in the North; instead, as Sugrue argues, "The racial politics were thoroughly homegrown" (212). Attached as they were to the personal factors of job availability and home ownership, the city's destructive racial politics can also be laid at the door of the American Dream -- and to other American Dreamers who could not or would not be persuaded to share. However, Sugrue is careful to point out that federal, state and local policies and politics, including measures meant to enforce equality, helped in no small measure to further divide black and white Detroiters by race, class and employment status. Signs of trouble in Detroit were visible long before the riots of the late '60s, or the election of Mayor Coleman Young, or the gas crisis and the resulting American automotive industry crisis of the 1970s. Even as Detroit boomed from the industrial mobilization of WWII and the auto-driven economic expansion afterward, pervasive discrimination in the workplace and the housing market along strict racial lines thwarted sustained economic prosperity for the thousands of African Americans. Detroit and other major Northern cities went, as Sugrue describes, "from magnets of opportunity to reservations for the poor" (4) for reasons largely misunderstood or ignored, even by historians and social observers, who often seem to blame the victims or the federal aid programs of the Great Society and the War on Poverty. Instead, Sugrue also argues, it was New Deal policies and how they were applied by state and local politicians that helped ignite not black militancy, but a pervasive and radical "whiteness" that resisted equality for blacks in the workplace and the housing market as their God- and state-given right. Detroit, though examined as a case study applicable to other cities as well, is atypical in many ways that may have served to make bad situations worse. It was heavily reliant on the automotive and related industries, and lacked a significant presence of other racial minorities (13). Its ethnic communities, largely different European groups, quickly merged into a cohesive, blue-collar, home-owning "white American" culture by the 1920s, one bolstered frequently through independent union shops and churches that bucked larger social trends toward equality and civil rights. Even during the Depression years, Detroit's industrial economy chugged on, immortally captured in the epic murals of painter Diego Rivera. When WWII demanded a quick industrial mobilization, Detroit was ready physically; despite the association with the automobile, more than 40 percent of the city's industrial jobs were in non-automotive factories, many of which pre-dated Henry Ford's grand schemes (18). However, the sudden need for jobs saw the city's unemployment numbers fall from 135,000 in 1940 to just 4,000 three years later (19). Between 1940 and 1950, Detroit's black population surged from 149,000 to more than 300,000, from about 9 percent of the total population to more than 16 percent (23). Employment for black Detroiters shifted from service sector jobs, such as domestics, hospitality and maintenance jobs, to industrial jobs. Prior to WWII, only Ford Motor Co. employed a notable number of blacks, but the sudden labor shortage of the war years brought blacks into a number of auto plants -- though the extent of integration would vary widely from plant to plant. During this same time, the plants would also hire women, mostly white women, to replace the men who had gone off to war. This unpredictability of employment was accompanied by a disproportionate placement of blacks in lower-paying and often more dangerous jobs. Still, job conditions were better in Detroit than in the rural South, where unemployment often topped 80 percent and where jobs were available, they often repeated patterns that existed under slavery. However, as the races began to mix in the workplace, tensions began to rise. Numerous incidents, including "hate strikes," simmered until one day in June 1943. A series (by this time, seemingly commonplace) of brawls between black and white youths on the crowded parkland of Belle Isle one hot Saturday erupted into rioting and looting. Over the next three days, 34 people were killed, including 25 blacks. Police shot and killed 17 blacks -- and no whites (29). Almost 1,900 people were arrested, 675 injured seriously and scores of shops damaged before federal troops were called in. Similar scenes erupted in other cities, from Baltimore to Los Angeles, in the same time period. Nevertheless, a significant number of black Detroiters were making enough money to dream of moving out of the city's overcrowded and downtrodden ghettos, especially in the central city area known ironically as Paradise Valley. As early as the 1920s, violence had broken out whenever an African American attempted to move into an all-white neighborhood. But by the mid-1940s, there were enough upwardly mobile blacks to cause widespread panic among white homeowners who feared that integration would mean an immediate and permanent loss of home value and social cohesiveness. All over the city, white residents began forming "neighborhood associations" that served as effective barriers to integration, often resorting to violence and property destruction -- things they usually accused African Americans of causing. Between 1943 and 1965, almost 200 such associations were formed in the city (211). At the same time, white residents and some middle class black residents in their own neighborhood enclaves resisted federal programs to create public housing, such as the fight over the Sojourner Truth project on the city's Northeast Side. What little public housing that was created in the city was almost totally segregated, giving the practice the aura of federal approval even at a time when the civil rights movement was being born. The wartime influx of workers deepened an already serious housing shortage, especially for lower-paid employees. Some plants saw scores of workers leave their jobs for want of adequate housing. Housing was scarce for whites and nearly nonexistent for blacks, outside of the overcrowded and decrepit ghetto areas, illegally subdivided rental homes and a singular stretch of land along Eight Mile Road where many African American migrants took the expensive but promising route of buying land on contract and building temporary and often substandard houses on their own. As late as 1951, blacks were only eligible to buy only about 1 percent of new homes (43). The post-war "housing boom" largely passed black Detroiters by. Federally subsidized housing loans went almost entirely to white communities, as black communities and even the few integrated neighborhoods were seen as too risky by mortgage lenders, bankers and real estate agents. Again, this helped foster the notion among whites of entitlement and privilege, of their God-given right as Americans, no matter how new they were to this country. When blacks could manage to scrape together the money to buy a home, they often were paying more money, and a greater portion of their salaries. This left them more vulnerable to any changes that would impact their income, with the resulting higher default rate. Many had to take in boarders or paying relatives to help defray the costs, playing to the white fear of crowded houses full of "noisy renters" and other "undesirables." Having less disposable income also often meant delaying property improvements, impacting the visible look of the neighborhood. However, most white residents refused to see the economic realities forced upon black Detroiters by a system of structural racism and segregation, and instead they generally laid it all to bad moral character. One black neighbor would mean, many feared openly, that soon their neighborhood would look like rat-infested Paradise Valley. In the midst of these distressing developments, there was still cause for cautious optimism among African Americans and white liberals who supported the causes of open housing policies and ending job discrimination. Though the locals often acted in open defiance, national unions, particularly the United Auto Workers, supported civil rights and open housing policies. The Detroit branch of the NAACP became the largest in the country. Civil rights groups across the country were beginning to successfully challenge racist policies, including a successful attack on racially restrictive covenants that resulted in the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer, a St. Louis case that folded in with three other covenant cases, including Detroit's Sipes v. McGhee, which declared such restrictions unconstitutional. However affirming this decision was to supporters of open housing and integration, to the white-identified communities of Detroit, it represented a threat to their "Americanness." As would soon become obvious, their hold on the American Dream was tenuous at best, or at least that was what they feared. As Sugrue describes the tenor of the times, "Many city residents had spent a large part of their life savings to buy a home, and they usually had little else to show for their work. To a generation that had struggled through the Great Depression, the specter of foreclosure and eviction was very real" (213). This fear erupted into a "war of nerves" waged upon any African American who wanted to buy a home in their neighborhoods. The oft-held impression of a long, ever-improving upward climb of the American economy in the post-war era was certainly not a reality in Detroit. The jobs that had put Detroit on the map and America in the win column in WWII slowly began to disappear from the city, moving to lower-wage areas like rural Ohio and ironically, to the Deep South. Other jobs were lost to automation. Because African American workers were largely shunted into the lower-end jobs, they were the first to be displaced. By 1960, unemployment among blacks would be two-and-a-half times that of whites; the unions that had fought on the national front for equality had quietly put in place locally contracts that protected white workers under the guise of seniority (144). Sugrue calls this "deindustrialization" and like other woes plaguing Detroit, it disproportionately affected African Americans. By the hot July of 1967, there was a whole new generation of young African Americans, largely males, whose fathers had become chronically unemployed and who themselves faced little or no hope of employment (261). The same civil rights movement that scared whites with its "drastic" changes seemed too slow in improving their lot. The culture of entitlement -- which benefited whites far more than blacks -- devolved quickly into embitterment, as it failed to recognize the very real causes of poverty. Discrimination at home and at work far outstripped a "deprived culture" in perpetuating racial divides and creating a permanent underclass. None of the programs aimed at poverty "responded adequately to deindustrialization and discrimination" (264). When whites grew increasingly angry at the government's failure to "protect" their neighborhoods, they had the financial ability to simply move to the suburbs, along with the jobs. There, they turned their collective ire toward affirmative action, further depriving African Americans of gains in the workplace. Many predominantly white suburban communities, like Warren and Southgate, look a lot like the various Detroit neighborhoods where their early residents came from. While African Americans have made gains in some suburban communities, such as Southfield and other cities especially in prosperous Oakland County, the flight of the middle class blacks from Detroit has left the city exceedingly poor, black and unemployed. Thirty years ago, journalist Ze'ev Chafets called Detroit America's "first major Third World city," (270) and it is hard to argue that casinos and stadiums have done or will do anything to change that. Read More