Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. xvii + 375 pp. $35.00 cloth.

Abstract

Thomas J. Sugrue's excellent book begins and ends with the defining moments in the history of Detroit: the effects of the Second World War and the riot of 1967. By tracing deindustrialization, unemployment, and ghettoization to the immediate postwar era, Sugrue's analysis of the history of Detroit challenges the idea that its economic downturn began with the riot of 1967. He casts doubt on the common assumption that Detroit's decay and that of other northern industrial cities began in the late 1960s or early 1970s. To the contrary, Sugrue demonstrates that the postwar boom was uneven in the US and that northern and midwestern cities began losing industrial jobs in the 1950s. Today Detroit is an extreme case of what is happening and has happened in many Rust Belt cities. The urban crisis, according to Sugrue, is longstanding—more chronic than acute.