Conclusion

Civic Transformation and Labor Movement Decline in Postwar America

What should disturb all Americans is that the analysis League founders offered regarding the future of the auto industry, the UAW, the city of Detroit, and African Americans now applies increasingly to the nation as a whole.1

Anyone looking out the window of a city bus headed downtown on Detroit’s Grand River Avenue in 1985 might easily think that, mysteriously, he or she had been transported back to World War II and bombed-out Berlin. Every block passed held boarded-up storefronts, vacant lots where houses once stood, and homeless people searching in piles of rubble for wood and other salvageable items. Even such formerly vibrant sites as factories and union halls looked empty, as if evacuated in an emergency. But if one got off of that bus, perhaps to go into a school or to conduct business at a bank, Detroit’s resemblance to war-ravaged Europe suddenly would evaporate. The most striking thing about walking into one of Detroit’s educational or financial institutions in the mid-1980s was that a great many of the teachers, principals, managers, and tellers inside were African American. If, per chance, one needed to meet with the head of the Detroit public schools system or the branch president of a bank that day, these people were as likely to be black as white. This odd juxtaposition of historically unprecedented African American middle-class presence and civic power amid extreme urban decay and economic decline that was Detroit by 1985, also characterized many city centers across America by that year.

Observers of the present and scholars of the past, however, should take extreme care not to associate increased black presence and power with urban decline in some linear or causal way. Nor should they privilege the historical outcomes of either inner-city economic decay or widespread white urban abandonment over African American empowerment. As this book has argued, the legacy of the urban transformation that took place across the United States between 1945 and 1985 is much more complicated than it has been portrayed to be, primarily because the roots of urban transformation and labor decline also were more complex than most have appreciated. This study of Detroit has sought to retrieve and examine significant parts of the postwar urban and labor narrative that previously have been overlooked in order to better understand why urban America and its labor movement evolved as they did and to suggest that transformation and decline was neither synonymous nor inevitable.

While this book has reexamined the urban transformation and labor-movement decline that took place within the borders of one particular city, its narrative suggests key ways in which the fate of postwar urban America as a whole also might be reassessed. Although Detroit clearly is not an Every City, its long-term fate and the many details of its past are shared by urban centers across the United States, and thus a broader reconsideration of postwar urban development can be gleaned from this study. Like Detroit, for example, many northern industrial urban centers after World War II evolved from prosperous magnets for native- and foreign-born hopefuls to decayed centers where prosperity seemed unimaginable. Detroit’s economic tailspin certainly was more dramatic than that which other inner cities experienced. As urban scholar June Manning Thomas has noted, by 1989, Detroit had the lowest labor force participation rate in the United States, at 46.6 percent; its median household income of $19,394 was the lowest of any city in the country; and its urban unemployment rate was America’s highest, at 15.7 percent.2 Such figures are perhaps not surprising, as Detroit is home to the auto industry. When General Motors shut down its Clark assembly plant and nearby Fleetwood plants in 1987, “6,600 autoworkers—mostly black” were permanently laid off.3 Chrysler’s workforce as well had dwindled from 28,000 urban employees in 1979 to 8,636 in 1990, after it also closed numerous plants.4 But Detroit was not the only city dependent on, and eventually gutted by, big industry as the 1980s dawned. From Pittsburgh to Cleveland to the South Side of Los Angeles, inner-city residents struggled to survive economically where they once had imagined prospering.

Likewise, just as Detroit experienced a dramatic white out-migration during the 1970s, and thus housed an African American majority thereafter, so did many central cities in the United States. Again, Detroit’s demographic metamorphosis was more extreme than in most other cities, but the white flight that it experienced was not unique. For example, while those analyzing census data for the University of Michigan’s Detroit Area Study concluded in 1997 that metropolitan Detroit was the most segregated city of all 47 U.S. metro regions with at least one million residents, it did not escape them that many other American inner cities also revealed noticeable concentrations of African Americans within their borders and white majorities within nearby suburbs by the close of the twentieth century. Indeed, as several urban scholars have noted, although “Detroit’s segregation index is higher than that of other metropolitan areas . . . many of them experience similar conditions.”5

But to recognize that numerous urban centers in 1980s America, like Detroit, had become the sites of deep economic distress, had lost much of their white population, and also became inhabited by an African American majority, does not, in itself, really further our understanding of postwar urban history. Indeed, to date, urban scholarship’s virtually exclusive focus on these “truths” about the fate of inner-city America is precisely what has obscured other equally important postwar urban experiences and outcomes and has led directly to the dismissal of inner cities as ultimately irrelevant to America’s political future or toxic to its social relations.6

This book has argued that it would be a tragic mistake to see American urban centers by the mid-1980s as simply the doomed place that many whites left and where the economy took a nosedive. It suggests further that it would be an equal mistake to regard America’s inner cities as the symbolic battlefields on which American liberalism died an ugly death. Indeed, this study has initiated an inquiry into postwar urban history that deliberately questions these very notions so that the political complexity and determination of American whites and blacks alike are not minimized, thus allowing the multifaceted implications of postwar urban transformation to be finally revealed.

It is only when one recognizes the complexity of postwar political and racial goals as well as alliances, for example, that one can see the extent to which the racially conservative whites who chose to abandon the inner cities in the 1970s and to vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980 did so as losers, not victors, of their battle to lead urban America into the future. Clearly, as important as it was for postwar evolution that many whites eschewed inner-city living and liberalism after the politically tumultuous and racially rancorous 1960s, it was equally important that urban centers across the United States in the 1970s witnessed the most dramatic ascendancy of black liberal political power ever seen in American history as a result of this same tumult and rancor. Indeed, by the 1970s and into the 1990s, not just Detroit but many American inner cities witnessed precisely this unprecedented rise of African American political power. According to Manning Thomas, between 1969 and 1974 alone, “the number of black elected officials in the United States increased 120 percent, to include 16 congressional representatives and 104 mayors.” She points out further that, by 1974, Los Angeles; Atlanta; Newark, New Jersey; Raleigh, North Carolina; Gary, Indiana; and Detroit had black mayors, and together these cities contained 5.5 million people.7

The fact that black liberals were taking control of key urban centers after 1970 certainly did unnerve many Americans. To a significant number of others, however, black-led cities quickly came to represent the last bastion of an American commitment to more just and equitable social relations. It was significant to such Americans that, whereas Head Start programs and civic civil rights commissions were few and far between in suburbia after 1980, they still were a prominent feature of black-led inner cities and not because they merely were holdovers from an earlier, more optimistic, time. Not only did black-led liberal cities house the few remaining American institutions committed to economic and racial equity in the 1980s, but these enclaves also had become home to the largest, most economically secure, and most influential black middle class ever before in existence in the United States. Indeed, the fact that middle-class African Americans could be found in numerous positions of social, economic, and political power in America’s urban centers by the 1980s—that more corporate executives, social welfare advocates, educational personnel, middle managers, and the professional staff of hospitals and city agencies were black than ever before—indicates that the inner city had also come to be one of the very few places in the country where “equal opportunity” finally had some meaning.

In addition to black urban liberals being among the few U.S. politicians to make African American advancement a reality, at least for those in the middle class, these leaders and their supporters also wielded power beyond the borders of their own cities. With their vision for a more socially and economically just future and their continuing commitment to many 196os-style programs, urbanites would provide a vital electoral base to any Democrat hoping to take or keep power nationally. Urban voters continued to send liberal representatives and senators to Washington well into the 1990s, propelled numerous black and white liberal mayors to power across the country, and made it possible for the Democratic party to regain presidential power in 1992 and to hold onto it in 1996. Significantly, as well, this urban constituency, comprised primarily of African Americans but made up of scores of whites still deeply committed to a progressive politics both racial and economic as well, served as a check on the Democratic party itself—a constant reminder that it should not swing too far to the right if it planned on keeping its crucial urban electorate. Indeed, it is only by ignoring the complexity of how urban politics evolved after World War II, and by dismissing urban centers after 1980, that one could argue that postwar liberalism had fully collapsed and that conservative whites had become the only relevant political actors in America by the close of the twentieth century.

Without discounting the tremendous suffering urban America—and poor and working-class urbanites specifically—experienced as a result of the antiliberal backlash that swept the country after 1980, this book nevertheless has suggested forcefully that black liberal politicians, the black middle class, and white progressives had clearly won something out of their tumultuous battles with white conservatism before the 1980s. Indeed it maintains further that even America’s urban Left had gained something out of its determined postwar struggles. Not only had the activism of inner-city radicals in the 1960s and 1970s fueled a promising political moment for postwar America, but the Left influenced the country’s future in real and positive ways thereafter.8

One writer has noted that in Detroit, for example, “while many of the goals and objectives of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers may have been underdeveloped and much too audacious for the times, many of them now are vital components in groups and organizations far less radical than the League.”9 While it is undeniably the case that “the League’s attempt to stimulate a mass reaction to race and class oppression was only minimally achieved,” as Herb Boyd points out, nevertheless it had a “most practical invisible legacy [that] was realized through electoral politics.”10 According to Edna Ewell Watson, Detroit’s radicals had deeply “influenced many of those who served as the backbone and lynchpin of Coleman Young’s administration.”11 And the radicals who had long agitated in other black-led liberal cities (such as Los Angeles; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C.) influenced their civic administrations in subtle but important ways as well.

But if America’s remaining urbanites had won several concrete as well as subtle things in their struggles since World War II, at first glance it appears that, as workers, they had achieved nothing. Indeed, the only group that appears to have emerged victorious in the ugly labor relations conflicts that developed after 1945 is the companies. Yet like the popular “truths” about the fate of the postwar city and liberal politics, this “truth” about the fate that befell the American labor movement also tends to obscure more than it illuminates. While American workers suffered mightily at the hands of capital as the 1980s dawned, such an eventuality was not inevitable. Indeed, to see it as such both denies postwar workers their determination to better their lot and ignores union leaders’ complicity in helping to usher in the very procompany environment that would prove so costly to their membership.

Nevertheless, it does appear that America’s dissident laborers had won little that they had fought for. But in fact, in Detroit and elsewhere, while it is true that American trade unions weakened dramatically in the 1980s, it is not true that dissident workers had no impact on the long-term character of their labor movement. As journalist Thomas Brooks pointed out, for example, it was black activism that forced the UAW in Detroit to desegregate its upper leadership, and this phenomenon also played out in other American unions that had witnessed rank-and-file African American dissent.12 As Brooks noted about Detroit, in the 1970s, “more blacks are now on the staffs of both institutions [company and union] than before DRUM made its appearance,”13 and as early as 1971 eleven local presidents were African American.14 Likewise, although black revolutionaries lost their bid for electoral power at Local 3 in the 1960s, soon thereafter, four out of six union officers and 56 percent of the union shop stewards at that local were African American.15 And, as Detroit Councilwoman Sheila Murphy Cockrel noted in 1998, even though “to this day, the League’s role in opening up the United Autoworkers leadership to people of color and focusing the UAW on racial issues remains unheralded,” this radical organization nevertheless did cause such a union transformation.16 Not only did the plant dissidents push the Detroit labor movement in a more racially progressive direction, but, as Judge George Crockett noted in 1994, “it was in the framework of the trade union movement that Detroit’s black leadership got its start in politics.”17

Although it is beyond the parameters of this study to examine the character of American labor relations in much detail after 1985, one final point bears mentioning. The desire for a more worker-friendly and racially just labor movement, which had surfaced with a vengeance in the late 1960s and was squelched in the early 1970s, may appear to have evaporated thereafter, but this is not so. Indeed, by the latter half of the 1980s, dissent not only surfaced once again in the ranks of the UAW (this time directed against the consessionary bargaining strategy of the International, and this time based in a biracially supported organization called New Directions), but labor dissent also began to reappear outside of the auto industry as well. For example, by the mid-1980s, in the dissident organization Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), workers in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters were dramatically escalating their efforts to democratize their union and to make their leaders more aggressive with owners.18 Also in that decade, another dissident organization, Labor Notes, came of age, which brought together workers from virtually every American workplace who were committed to putting company abuses firmly in check.19

Although the autoworkers in New Directions ultimately lost out in their battle with the UAW International in several bitterly contested regional elections, both TDU and Labor Notes grew markedly during the 1980s and into the 1990s. In addition, by the early 1990s, even the more traditionally conservative leaders of the American labor movement, specifically those in the AFL-CIO, also began to reassess the wisdom of unions continuing to take a cooperative posture with management. With the upsurge and activism of TDU and Labor Notes, and with the ascendancy of the more militant John Sweeney to the presidency of the AFL-CIO, management was put on notice once again that a new day of labor activism was dawning—one that, like its predecessor in the 1960s, would take the needs of white as well as nonwhite workers seriously and one that now would expand beyond the boundaries of traditional blue-collar and industrial workplaces. Despite the labor movement’s undeniable decline in the mid-1980s, in later years, corporations were once again alerted to the fact that they would not be allowed to determine the future solely or indefinitely.

While this study of postwar Detroit suggests the necessity of reexamining the complex roots and the legacy of urban transformation and labor movement decline, it does not pretend to predict the future of either America’s inner cities or its labor relations. Through a more penetrating look at America’s urban and labor past, however, we can at least get a more nuanced and balanced perspective on who won, who lost, and who might shape the next millennium. By digging more deeply into the history of urban America and its workplaces, and by reexamining their respective fates, we can clearly see that U.S. inner cities did not become simply abandoned wastelands by the 1980s; that they had never been divided primarily by race because they always were politically complex; that the radicals, conservatives, and liberals who had been agitating within them each impacted upon the future to an equal degree; and, finally, that the American labor movement always had more power over its destiny that its leaders imagined.