This is an interesting account of the hardships and legal handicaps suffered by the first generation of African American migrants to booming industrial 1930s-1950s Detroit. We learn that African Americans were handed the worst jobs and limited to the lowest-quality housing. Sugrue's account ends around the time of the great riot of 1967 (about which he does not have much to say).
My only objection is that Sugrue offers this book as an explanation for why Detroit became the wasteland he found thirty years later (the book was published in 1996). You'd draw that conclusion too, reading his introduction, but I also understand that this book is popular in college courses where, once again, it's billed as an explanation for Detroit *now*.
Which makes no sense at all, because after 1967, most everyone who was in a position to subject Detroit's African Americans to racial discrimination had fled -- the racist shopkeepers who didn't want to employ black teenagers, racist homeowners and realtors who kept blacks out of the better neighborhoods, racist policemen, racist politicians who tolerated it all. If those were the reasons behind black Detroiters' misery, then the elimination of those conditions should have led to a steady improvement over the following decades. Just as the cessation of firebombing in 1945 resulted in a general improvement of conditions in Tokyo and Hamburg. Of course, the opposite occurred: far from reversing itself, Detroit's decline accelerated. But if there's a book that explains why that happened, I haven't seen it yet.
My only objection is that Sugrue offers this book as an explanation for why Detroit became the wasteland he found thirty years later (the book was published in 1996). You'd draw that conclusion too, reading his introduction, but I also understand that this book is popular in college courses where, once again, it's billed as an explanation for Detroit *now*.
Which makes no sense at all, because after 1967, most everyone who was in a position to subject Detroit's African Americans to racial discrimination had fled -- the racist shopkeepers who didn't want to employ black teenagers, racist homeowners and realtors who kept blacks out of the better neighborhoods, racist policemen, racist politicians who tolerated it all. If those were the reasons behind black Detroiters' misery, then the elimination of those conditions should have led to a steady improvement over the following decades. Just as the cessation of firebombing in 1945 resulted in a general improvement of conditions in Tokyo and Hamburg. Of course, the opposite occurred: far from reversing itself, Detroit's decline accelerated. But if there's a book that explains why that happened, I haven't seen it yet.
