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Once a bastion of American democracy, Detroit is a metaphor for the country’s metropolitan dilemma. Thomas Sugrue is crucial in reevaluating racial and economic disparity in America. In his book The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, he explores why Detroit and other industrial cities turned into hotbeds of enduring racial poverty. This refutes the widespread knowledge that suggests racial divides and social initiatives in the 1960s were the cause of the urban decline (Sugrue, 2005). Sugrue uncovers a secret history of racial violence, prejudice, and deindustrialization as the cause of current urban poverty.
After World War II, these factors altered the urban environment in America. The 1930s and 1940s industrial boom era is a crucial chapter in Detroit’s history that must be revealed to understand this subject comprehensively.
The population of Detroit increased from fewer than 300,000 in 1900, when it was ranked 13th in the US, to almost 1.6 million in 1930. The Great Depression caused the entrepreneurial spirit, ingenuity, and investment that had fuelled the city’s explosive rise to stop (Boney, 2021). By the beginning of the 1930s, hungry and unemployed Detroiters were starving to death. Housing construction would not start in Northeast and Northwest Detroit until the late 1940s.
Nearly 90% of new automobiles sold in the US in 1935 were manufactured by General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler (Sugrue, 2005). There were the same links then as there are now between Detroit and the cities of Windsor and Ontario. The suburbs and the metropolis of Motor City were served by a network of trolleys that ran across the city. Auto manufacturing tripled from its low point five years earlier, in 1937 (Boney, 2021). By 1930, 120,000 black people were living in Detroit, up from a little over 5,000 in 1910 (Sugrue, 2005). At Ford Motor’s Rouge Factory complex, Henry Ford provided thousands of African workers with well-paying jobs.
Some individuals retaliated, as shown when black and white students at Hamtramck High School banded together to resist segregation. Tragically, Detroit’s 20th-century identity was determined by the legacy of persistent racial strife. When Detroit’s skyscrapers were built, the city’s downtown was already disrepair. The white power structure saw the congested African-American districts of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley as slums. Both of the old black regions were eventually destroyed. The author focuses on the conflicts and difficulties between the city’s white and black populations (Goyal et al., 2021).
The topic of Detroit is industrial and urban decline, found on both the social and economic levels. The city’s white, predominately racist populace is the primary antagonist and opposing player in this drama, whereas the protagonists are black workers and students.
The tension in the novel is most evident in Detroit’s housing crisis. Detroit has modest working-class areas, both black and white. There was a conflict between the two points of view about New Deal housing policies. A little black community in Wyoming’s Eight Mile neighborhood became the scene of one of the worst public housing policy battles in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In a section of the city that was nearly white and ready for growth, the Eight Mile-Wyoming neighborhood was a black island. In the black neighborhood, which covered a half-square-mile, more than 72% of the land remained vacant.
African Americans held onto many lots, intending to construct their own homes someday. Because low-income people did not pay their high-interest land contracts, many others were held by banks or real estate companies. Many plots were also returned to the city or state in exchange for unpaid taxes. The Eight Mile neighborhood was seen as a location for public housing and slum eradication by the United States Housing Authority (Sugrue, 2005). The FHA viewed the region as a barrier to insurance and subsidy programs for developing single-family residential neighborhoods in northwest Detroit.
The administration and major white companies were the agent’s primary foes in their attempts to demolish the neighborhood. In order to expand its tax base, the city of Detroit planned to cleanse and reconstruct the “decayed neighborhood.” Different groups—liberal reform organizations, city planners, and locals—reacted differently to the prospect of government action. Although minor in the 1920s, by the early 1940s, the Eight Mile region was directly in the way of new residential and commercial construction (Goyal et al., 2021). West of the Eight Mile sector, where a few residences were spread among gardens, farms, and woodlands, additional construction was planned as the city grew.
West Outer Drive was a quarter mile south of the black settlement’s three-by-fourteen-block area. Recent construction added several large middle-class homes on this street. It was separated from the Eight Mile region by a sandpit and a strip of undeveloped land. Less than a mile to the east, Palmer Woods and Sheywood Forest’s meandering, scenic alleys were lined with enormous two- and three-story homes, many of which had tennis courts and swimming pools (Goyal et al., 2021). These two white communities were among Detroit’s newest and most upscale. The black community on Detroit’s northwest side appeared to be impeding the growth of middle-class communities outside the city.
The author makes, in many ways, a complete description of Detroit’s demographic composition and racial conflicts in the 1930s. A black working population was seeking their plot of land and a new home, opposed by local businesses. The latter is predominantly white and reflects the interests of the city’s white population. Against the background of this conflict, the book thoroughly explores the racial conflict, using real estate as an example of a general situation. Given all of the above, the description of Detroit’s ethnic and social structure in the 1930s is done wholly and qualitatively.
References
Boney, S. (2021). The economics of race relations in Detroit during the interwar years. Monthly Labor Review, 1–3. Web.
Goyal, A., Richards, C., Patel, V., Syeda, S., Guest, J. M., Freedman, R. L., Hall, L. M., Kim, C., Sirajeldin, A., Rodriguez, T., Arsenault, S. M., Boss, J. D., Hughes, B., & Juzych, M. S. (2021). The vision Detroit project: Visual burden, barriers, and access to eye care in an urban setting. Ophthalmic Epidemiology, 29(1), 13–24. Web.
Sugrue, T. J. (2005). The origins of the urban crisis: Race and inequality in postwar Detroit (Princeton studies in American politics: Historical, international, and comparative perspectives, 112) (Revised). Princeton University Press.
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