About 165 community members and University of Michigan students gathered in the Michigan Union Thursday evening for a discussion on race and politics in urban spaces across the United States, with an emphasis on Postwar Detroit, organized by The Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.
The keynote speaker of the event was Thomas Sugrue, a professor of history and social and cultural analysis at New York University. Sugrue was joined by Angela Dillard, chair of the U-M History Department, and U-M history professor Matthew Lassiter. Associate history professor John Carson, who helped organize the event, began the discussion by introducing the speakers.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Sugrue said the resources at the University of Michigan helped him write his first book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. He said he spent many hours in the Bentley Historical Library on campus doing research for the book. Sugrue opened the event by talking about his roots as a Detroit native and explaining how growing up in the city has played a significant role in his work.
“I grew up on Detroit’s West Side in a pretty modest neighborhood that went from being all white to predominantly Black in just about four years when I was a kid,” Sugrue said. “That’s part of the reason I decided to write about Detroit.”
Sugrue continued his keynote address by providing an overview on how systemic racism has played a role in the history of Detroit, leading to a state of ‘urban crisis,’ a point when living conditions in a city begin to deteriorate. Surgue said many of the urban crisesthe city faced started before the 1967 race riots — a series of violent confrontations between Detroit police and Black residents that led to mounting political and social tension in the city.
“The history of inequality in Detroit and America is fundamentally a political history shaped by a long history of political failure,” Sugrue said. “Or maybe to think about it differently, (it was shaped) by a political system that was meant to bring failure to a larger system by creating, reinforcing and protecting those who benefited from poverty and racial inequality.”
Sugrue discussed various topics related to Detroit and the experiences of African American people in urban areas. They discussed gentrification, the process by which high-income, college-educated people who are often white move into underdeveloped, non-white neighborhoods. Gentrification can cause cultural and economic shifts that may drive out longtime residents, who are often low-income and people of Color. The panelists also talked about the resulting disparities in gentrified neighborhoods. Sugrue said the primary challenge cities like Detroit are facing is a lack of affordable housing, which is exacerbated by gentrification.
“What we’re seeing is a pattern that is playing out in lots of places,” Sugrue said. “They look a lot like Detroit in terms of the scope and scale of gentrification: When you get out of the gentrified core, those cities are essentially still in ‘urban crisis’. Detroit is continuing to experience disinvestment, impoverishment (and) a collapse of the economy of urban infrastructure and institutions.”
As the conversation turned to urban policing, Lassiter said the Detroit police have historically served to further segregate the city.
“(The Detroit police was) an all-white institution (and) — really through the late ’60s — a white supremacist institution that terrorized Black people along and across the color line,” Lassiter said. “They operated the way we would imagine a police department would operate in a Jim Crow southern city.”
After the event, Business sophomore Hunter Heyman told The Daily he attended the event to develop his interest in the intersection between race and urbanization on behalf of the Urban Planning Student Association.
“Understanding the race and political history behind urban development is something I’ve always been interested (in),” Heyman said. “Something we’ve talked about a lot was urbanism with a focus on community input. Having that same (idea) coming from historians is very positive.”
Business freshman Paige Davis also attended and said the event deepened her understanding of the racial history of Detroit.
“What I found most interesting was how they talked about the Detroit Police system being a white supremacist organization back in the (the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s),” Davis said.
Sugrue told The Daily in an interview before the event that he hoped the panel discussion would help put the conflicts we face in the present day into a historical perspective.“Ultimately, the questions that I’m grappling with are some of the biggest questions that we in American society are still trying to figure out,” Sugrue said. “I hope that a historical perspective will help us to understand the present that we’re (living) in and ways to imagine a different future.”
Daily Staff Reporter Joanna Chait can be reached at jchait@umich.edu and Daily News Contributor Ashwath Subramanian can be reached at ashwaths@umich.edu.