Thomas Sugrue. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. x + 375 pp. $35.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-691-01101-1.

Reviewed by Karen Miller

Published on H-Urban (November, 1997)

Thomas Sugrue's well-researched and incisive ity precede 1960. However, his work goes beyond portrait of postwar Detroit ofers readers impor‐ this relatively bland assertion. He demonstrates tant insights into debates about the contemporary that plant closings, automation, chronic waves of urban crisis and its relationship to race and post- unemployment, and the movement of industry to industrial decline.[1] Sugrue implores historians suburban, rural and other hard-to-unionize areas and social scientists to rethink their assumptions in the late 1940s and 1950s detrimentally efected about the "origins" of the urban crisis. He persua‐ the economies of urban centers in the North. Fur‐ sively argues that those phenomena usually asso‐ thermore, he shows that neighborhood based ciated with deteriorating cities--particularly de-in‐ struggles against residential integration exploded dustrialization and white fight--were not "re‐ in these decades, arguing that in order to under‐ sponses" to the urban rebellions and social dis‐ stand national politics in this era, historians need cord of the 1960s. Rather, they were the structural to spend more time focusing on local struggles. circumstances which "created" anger and frustra‐ "Housing," Sugrue explains, "became a major are‐ tion among African American residents and ulti‐ na for organized political activity in the 1940s, mately inspired the red hot summers of the 1960s. where Detroiters, black and white, fought a battle De-industrialization and white fight, Sugrue that would defne Detroit politics for decades to demonstrates, changed the contours of Detroit follow" (55). Sugrue thus attacks the notion im‐ well before 1967. In fact, these processes began in plicit in social scientists' accounts of urban de‐ full force in the 1940s, and by the 1950s they had cline that race relations in Northern cities were already afected the city's geography and re‐ relatively harmonious before the black power shaped residents' understandings of race and ur‐ movements and urban rebellions of the 1960s, ar‐ ban politics. guing that explosions of racial antagonism were Sugrue is not the frst historian to suggest that central to Detroit's culture as early as the Second the structural roots of urban poverty and inequal‐ World War. H-Net Reviews

Sugrue separates his book into three sections: a defense of their rights as citizens and their free‐ "Arsenal," "Rust," and "Fire." He uses the frst sec‐ dom as individuals to make choices about their tion to lay out the economic, racial, and physical lives. Thus, white homeowners developed a politi‐ geography of the city in the 1940s and to expose cal language to defne themselves as a political in‐ its relationship to electoral politics, arguing that terest group whose struggles were antithetical to white Detroiters lost confdence in liberalism and the rights of African Americans. Sugrue connects the New Deal state as a result of their experiences these trends to electoral politics, demonstrating "defending" their neighborhoods against black that conservative politicians swept into the city's homebuyers. While Detroit had far more single administration by deploying caricatures of racial family houses than any other large city, and while anarchy, miscegenation, and integration as the de‐ it was comparatively spread out, overcrowding cisive outcome of liberal policies. Sugrue further and a rapidly expanding population put enor‐ argues that this was the pre-history to mous pressure on Detroit's housing stock by the voters' overwhelming support for George Wal‐ beginning of the Second World War. No areas lace's presidential campaign in 1968 and 1972, were more