This is a MCK-
hosted group; if you are not a Motor City Kossack, you are still welcome to jump in and join us!
This week's readings: Chapter 9 "United Communities Are Impregnable": Violence and the Color Line, and Conclusion Crisis: Detroit and the Fate of Postindustrial America
For many white suburbanites with a limited knowledge of the history of Detroit, the 1967 "riots" are often viewed as a line of demarcation in Detroit history. According to this understanding, 1967 was the advent of white flight; Detroit's decline began with the unexpected riots (and the subsequent election in 1974 of Coleman Young); and the problems of today are somehow related to Detroit's status as a majority-minority city. Sugrue's entire book, of course, is a treatise showing the inaccuracy of those views and traces the origins of Detroit's crisis back many decades before 1967. Sugrue has, however, consistently foreshadowed the anger, and the rebellion of 1967, when talking about the history of discrimination, deindustrialization, and poverty in Detroit. As a result, when I saw the word "violence" in the title of chapter nine, I fully expected to hear about the 1967 uprising.
Of course, I was wrong. Chapter nine, instead, is a painful retelling of the occurrence and acceleration of white resistance to neighborhood integration from the late 1940s onward. Sugrue opens the chapter with a snapshot of the experience of Easby Wilson in 1955, a black autoworker who bought a house on the "wrong" side of Dequindre Avenue and the ensuing harassment and violence that finally drove the family out. (Easby Wilson house today) Harassment, mass demonstrations, picketing, effigy burning, window breaking, arson, vandalism, and physical attacks were commonplace in postwar Detroit as white homeowners tried to maintain the whiteness of their neighborhoods. This hidden history of white violence is little discussed and well-concealed. However,
Racial violence had far-reaching effects in the city. It hardened definitions of white and black identities, objectifying them by plotting them on the map of the city. The combination of neighborhood violence, real estate practices, covenants, and the operations of the housing market sharply circumscribed the housing opportunities available to Detroit's African American population. Persistent housing segregation stigmatized blacks, reinforced unequal race relations, and perpetuated racial divisions.
p. 257
Sugrue focuses on three "defended neighborhoods" and their neighborhood associations, because they were the areas with the fiercest resistance to black movement: the Northeast Side (Courville District and Seven-Mile Fenelon Improvement Associations); the Wyoming Corridor (Ruritan Park, De Witt-Clinton, and States-Lawn Neighborhood Associations); and the Lower West Side (Property Owners' Association). He identifies several characteristics that these neighborhoods have in common, i.e. a concentration of skilled workers; lower rate of females in the labor force; high rates of single-family homeownership; proximity to, but not in, major industrial areas; and, with one exception, "ethnically hetergeneous, with sizable Roman Catholic populations." (p. 237 my edition) The Lower West Side was the exception in ethnicity, as well as rate of single-family homeownership. This neighborhood had older houses that were more rundown, and many of the residents were poorer whites. (Lower West Side site of 1948 protest of African-American occupancy, as seen today) "Appalachian whites, mainly Protestant, were the neighborhood's most visible group." (p. 240) Many of the racial incidents on the West Side happened in the late 1940s-early 1950s and then subsided. Sugrue attributes this to the lessening of the postwar housing shortage (a shortage poor whites and blacks both felt most) and to the continued migration of southern whites to the neighborhood; migrants who did not have the institutional attachments and roots that other neighborhoods had, particularly through the Catholic church and parish schools.
Sugrue does not identify these characteristics merely to provide a means for bashing a particular ethnic group or church. He sees this homogeneity as key not only to the neighborhoods' defense of its self-proclaimed identity, but as a precursor to the creation new neighborhoods and new identities as existing blocks were ultimately "broken." As whites were unable to prevent black movement into their neighborhoods, many moved. When they moved, they often recreated what was "lost" with neat, small houses on small lots in new neighborhoods in Warren to the north or Southgate, Taylor, Wayne, and Westland to the south and west. As they recreated neighborhoods, attitudes were also recreated: white defensiveness; fear of urban crime; a feeling that civil rights meant relinquishing "white" rights; and a general antiliberalism. These people, according to Sugrue, eventually became the Reagan Democrats.
The conclusion of the book is not a fairy tale with a happily-ever-after. Sugrue has no neat prescriptions, no magical fairy-dust solutions, and very little optimism. In fact, his 2013 preface to the revised edition is even bleaker than his original summation in 1996. However, this sentence is the one that rings truest for me: "What hope remains in the city comes from the continued efforts of city residents to resist the debilitating effects of poverty, racial tension, and industrial decline." (p. 271 my edition) That is the city that I have come to know. A city of activists and dreamers, preservationists and blight-busters, lifelong residents and young hipsters...all who want the city to rise again.