Summary: Race And Inequality In Postwar Detroit

With the first World War, we saw a mass migration of diverse individual’s progress to the North in search of new opportunities. Given the large number of U.S soldiers who were in active service and the “defense boom,” there were a great number of labor opportunities available in the industrial division. Prospects which, ultimately, culminated during the homecoming of U.S Soldiers, causing an economic decline which soon enflamed, as the U.S dealt with yet another catastrophe, the Great Depression. A misfortune that disadvantaged African Americans relentlessly, as opposed to white Americans, as they continued to encounter injustices that had only intensified since the Great Depression. The onset of World War II, brought another “defense boom” that allowed Detroit to lead “the nation in [an] economic escape from the Great Depression” presenting various employment opportunities in the industrial division once again (19).

Thomas J Sugrue’s work entitled The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit demonstrates how the origins of the urban crisis were constructed during the postwar era of WWII in Detroit as American society repeats its cruel sequence of events that bring forth various factors. Sugrue brings to notice, that on the verge of the “defense boom” of WWII, Detroit was already “a city rife with social tensions” (22). Racial tensions had constructed restrictive covenants creating “black sections of the city” that soon over crowded with the growing restrictions placed on African American’s housing. Inevitably, with the influx of new migrants these already overcrowded areas soon “burst over with new migrants” (24). The “defense boom” had presented African Americans access to industrial jobs that had previously been scarce. The influx of migrants persisted “in wartime and postwar era” (29). Unfortunately,