“They Count on Turning Us against Each Other”: Working Classes, Deindustrialization, and Control of Urban Space in Postwar Detroit

In the midst of the postwar economic boom, as early as the late 1940s and early 1950s, industry began restructuring in Detroit and other centers of industry. Workers and their families felt these changes in various ways, ranging from automation and layoffs to production speedups and physical relocation. For the working classes, whose homes were often nearby the large factories in the metropolitan area, these changes affected not just their working lives, but their homes and neighborhoods as well. Working class responses involved both the shop floor and the communities surrounding them, ranging from city council resolutions against industrial decentralization to rank-and-file plans to block factory gates.

Contestations over urban space were classed, but they were also racial. Mackie Johnson, a Detroit police officer from a small town in Oklahoma, remembered in 1971 that growing up “many problems did not run along racial line, but along economic lines,” and that he “never got the full impact of racism till I came to Detroit and saw the segregated housing and schooling.” This paper argues that understanding working-class control of urban spaces requires a racial analysis. Likewise, the events that shaped Detroit in the 1960s – slum clearance, urban renewal, the Model City program, highway construction, black radicalism, and the 1967 uprising – should be understood in the context of deindustrialization and the attendant flow of capital out of the city. The result were fights over urban space between different working classes, capital, and the state that culminated with the 1967 urban uprising and the subsequent increase in policing, surveillance, and criminalization of city residents.