Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. By Heather Ann Thompson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. viii, 295. $29.95.

Extract

By the mid-1980s, the city of Detroit had become an icon in U.S. urban history. Many saw it as the most extreme example of what went wrong in Northern industrial cities in the late twentieth century. The sequence of events is well known: the rapid influx of African American migrants from the South, combative reaction from the white community, civil unrest culminating in the 1967 riot, white flight, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the development of a desperately poor, socially alienated, primarily black underclass. Other cities experienced similar events, but Detroit's descent was certainly among the most dramatic.