Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. (Reviews/Comptes Rendus).

Lyons, John F.

Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001)

US LABOUR AND URBAN historians have recently produced a variety of studies focusing on the second half of the 20th century and particularly on the decline of organized labour, racial problems in northern cities, and the fate of liberalism. In this engaging study, Heather Ann Thompson combines all three concerns as she reveals a history of political struggle among conservatives, liberals, and radicals in 1960s and 1970s Detroit that shaped the future of the city. Although Thompson, who grew up in Detroit and is now a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, offers few explicit comparisons from other cities, she argues that this conflict was replicated elsewhere and that as liberalism declined in national politics it triumphed in inner cities, which had become centers of political power and economic opportunity for the Black middle-class.

Building on the work of other historians of Detroit such as Tom Sugrue and Jeffrey Mirel, Thompson paints a vivid picture of the plight of Blacks in the city that led them to take to the streets in July 1967 in the bloodiest riot the US experienced during that tumultuous decade. After World War II, as more Blacks moved into Detroit, Whites segregated Blacks into overcrowded and inferior housing, underfunded schools, and unskilled work, and Blacks faced higher levels of unemployment than Whites. Black civil rights activists sought to integrate the neighbourhoods, schools, and workplaces, and Jerome Cavanagh, liberal mayor of Detroit from 1962 to 1970, promised to use government money to alleviate the worst ravages of racism, but both were unable to achieve much. While stressing the role that economic factors played in fueling the 1967 riot, Thompson pays particular attention to police brutality. Blacks repeatedly clashed with an overwhelmingly White racist and violent Detroit police force. Little wonder that a police action against an illegal drinking party led to the riot in the summer of 1967.

After the 1967 riot, White liberal politicians in Detroit faced increasing opposition from Black and White radicals, who wanted a revolutionary overhaul of society, and White conservatives, who opposed the Great Society and the civil rights movement. Between 1967 and 1972, groups of Black nationalists and White leftists organized in opposition to the liberal establishment, which had failed to improve the lot of Blacks. They gained popular support for their opposition to police brutality, their demand for Black control of schools in Black neighborhoods, and their call for economic justice. While Blacks accused Stop the Robberies Enjoy Safe Streets (STRESS), a special unit the police department, of brutality, White conservatives supported their touch stance on crime. White conservatives accused the liberal establishment of appeasing lawbreakers and opposed school integration and bussing.

Throughout the book, Thompson draws links among developments in city hall, on the streets, and in the city's auto plants. As police brutality fueled resentment in Detroit's Black neighbourhoods, racial discrimination, the abuses of White foremen, and deteriorating working conditions angered Black autoworkers. The leadership of the United Automobile Workers (UAWO, long recognized as racial progressives, promised to end racial discrimination in hiring and promotion and stop foreman abuses but, in practice, union officials bowed to the wishes of their conservative White members who wanted to maintain their monopoly on skilled jobs and promotions. In May 1968 Black workers in the Chrysler Assembly Plant (Dodge Main) founded the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), the first of a number of "RUMs" throughout the auto plants, which called for the appointment of more Blacks to positions of power in the company and the UAW, and protested racist supervisors. Subsequently, the RUMs united and formed the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), which blended Marxism and Black nationalism by declaring Black workers as the vanguard of a revolution. While Detroit's RUMs and the League had virtually collapsed by 1971 because of opposition from UAW leaders and because they alienated most White workers and some Black workers with their sectarianism, factionalism, and Marxist rhetoric, worker dissent over working conditions and safety continued. In response to a series of wildcat strikes in 1973, however, the UAW leadership not only sided with the car companies but gathered their supporters together and violently attacked the picketing workers, forcing them back to work and ending the rank-and-file rebellion.

While labour leaders set out to destroy the Black radicals, civic liberals gained new respect from the city's growing Black working-class and poor as they appeared more activist and sympathetic to Black demands. In particular, Thompson claims, liberal judges and politicians proved especially adept at dealing with the high-profile court cases involving Blacks who challenged racist practices. She especially focuses on the case of James Johnson Jr., a 35-year-old Black automobile worker at the Chrysler Plant who killed two White foremen and a White fellow worker on 15 July 1970, and used racial discrimination and conditions at the plant as part of his defense in his 1971 trial. Thompson weaves the story of James Johnson throughout the book as a metaphor for the discrimination, hopes, disappointments, and frustrations of all Black Detroiters. When Johnson was found not guilty of murder by reason on insanity, Thompson claims that liberalism and electoral politics gained new credibility and the appeal of radicalism declined.

As many White conservatives left the city and the radical Left waned, the stage was set for the rise of Black liberalism. In 1973 the city elected its first Black mayor, Coleman Young, a UAW organized in the 1930s and civil rights activist. Subsequently, Young maintained the support of Black Detroiters by employing Blacks in city positions, including the previously all-White police department, and by portraying himself as a defender of Black Detroit against increasingly hostile White suburbs. Because the White population continued to flee the city and the car companies relocated or cut workers' wages, Thompson concluded that Black liberals came to political power in Detroit as the city faced economic crisis and as liberalism declined in national politics.

Thompson's study is a triumph of social and political history. She connects in a most engaging style events on the street, the factory floor, and the courtroom, and convincingly shows the political realignments that have remade Detroit. The book could have been improved, however, it Thompson had spent more time finding out the views of those in the White neighborhoods. She makes extensive use of local archives and oral history collections, but undertook virtually no oral interviews herself. Oral interviews would have helped to undercover in greater detail the ideas of White conservatives who do not get the same coverage as liberals or Black nationalists, and often remain faceless and nameless throughout the book. Thompson also claims that the findings in Detroit on the triumph of city liberalism and the decline of organized labour are applicable elsewhere but offers little evidence for this. Focusing on the UAW leaderships' destruction of the rank-and-file rebellion in the 1970s, for example, she argues that the actions of union leaders played a large part in the decline of the US labor movement. To substantiate this claim, however, she needs to make far more comparisons with other cities and other unions. Despite these limitations, this book adds much to our understanding of the late twentieth century US and is a welcome addition to the literature.