Urban Crisis

The term urban crisis refers to a sense prevalent from the 1950s to the 1970s that American cities faced imminent catastrophe. The most visible evidence of the crisis was rioting in African American neighborhoods between 1964 and 1968, but problems of government finance, infrastructure, housing conditions, and employment opportunities, as well as demographic shifts, all contributed to this perception. The urban crisis is best understood not as a single phenomenon but as a variety of problems that affected urban dwellers differently but occurred within a relatively short period.

Outbreaks of rioting in Black neighborhoods in the 1960s made it appear that American cities faced catastrophe. Cities that experienced major riots included Los Angeles in 1965, Newark and Detroit in 1967, and Chicago and Washington, D.C., in 1968, but small cities such as Waterloo, Iowa, were not immune to such violence. Most of these riots took place during the heat of summer and were precipitated by contacts with police, whom African Americans charged with brutal conduct. The 1968 riots, the last major cataclysm of the decade, were a direct response to the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis on April 4. These riots were characterized by mobbing and attacks on property, most notably breaking storefront windows and arson. In general, they did not include the kind of bloody interracial fighting that occurred in the riots of the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, some of the riots resulted in several dozen deaths, mostly from bullets shot by snipers and law enforcement authorities. President Lyndon B. Johnson responded to the multiple riots of 1967 by establishing an investigative commission headed by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. In reviewing the sources of violence, the Kerner Commission Report famously found that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Although the riots were largely confined to neighborhoods inhabited by African Americans, White urbanites followed them closely in newspapers and on television and viewed them as a sign that cities might no longer be tenable.

The obstacles African Americans encountered in the postwar city were the source of these riots. The “second great migration” of the years after World War II brought hundreds of thousands of Blacks from the rural South to the urban North and West in search of employment and a more hospitable racial climate. Although migrants found less overt racism than they had known in the Jim Crow South, their fondest hopes were often disappointed. Many jobs were closed to Black migrants, who arrived just as large corporations began to shift work to suburbs and smaller cities, where African Americans were rarely welcome. Discriminatory practices in real estate effectively locked Blacks out of White residential neighborhoods, even after the passage of the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act. The neighborhoods where they were able to make homes were characterized by high rates of absentee landlords, crowding, and decaying properties and infrastructure, and low levels of city services like street cleaning and desks in public schools. In some cases, property owners cut their losses on deteriorating buildings by setting fire to them in order to collect insurance money. This practice contributed to the appearance of abandonment in neighborhoods like the South Bronx and Chicago's Woodlawn. Thus, for Black Americans, the urban crisis consisted of deindustrialization, residential segregation, inadequate provision of city services, and a deteriorating physical environment. In the 1970s, African Americans' experience of cities split. As a significant segment gained footholds in the middle class and the restrictions on residential segregation eased, many moved out of troubled neighborhoods and cities. Those who remained suffered from the deleterious consequences of hypersegrega-tion and the concentration of poverty.

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