Prof's first book explains decline of cities

History Professor Thomas Surgue studied racial and economic issues. History Professor Thomas Sugrue begins his narrative career next Thursday with the publication of The Origins of the Urban Crisis, a new book focusing on the social and economic decline of American cities. The book details the process that has left American cities racially divided and struggling economically. "You see neglected houses because of landlords who have decided to stop serving a poor population, abandoned houses left by whites fleeing to suburbs following disappearing jobs [and] empty storefronts on 52nd Street, gone with the consumers who had the money to keep small business alive," Sugrue remarked in a recent interview. In the book, he traces the origin of those trends to just after the end of America's economic boom -- centered around urban industries -- during World War II. After the war, millions of southern blacks migrated to northern cities in search of economic opportunity and respite from racial hatred. "If you were the child of a Polish immigrant in the 1940s, there would be a factory job with good pay, security, a school for your kid and a chance for advancement in life," he said. But by the time southern blacks arrived in the cities, they found that the businesses that had supported the economic prosperity had already relocated, seeking places where they could pay lower wages. The loss of such businesses, Sugrue continues, also meant the loss of new entry-level positions, leaving the cities with no middle class as whites left the urban centers to follow their jobs. Newly-arrived blacks, meanwhile, became trapped in cities lacking job opportunities or money to maintain the quality of its neighborhoods. "There are schools in West Philadelphia without books, potholes on the Main Line that cannot be fixed and rotting hulks of factories which used to have the jobs and taxes to provide the money for these things, watching over them," he continued. Because their lives tell the story of the decline of American cities, the book focuses on migrant blacks -- like the ones Sugrue once saw as a young boy standing on a street corner of his native Detroit during the 1967 race riots. "I grew up in a neighborhood that went from all white to majority black in four years, and I stood on the corner on my fifth birthday watching National Guard vehicles, jeeps, trucks and personnel carriers heading to the riots and looting of unhappy blacks in a city left with no jobs and segregation," he said. Federal government policies during the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's giving subsidies to construction contractors who pledged to keep neighborhoods either all-black or all-white helped to ensure this segregation, according to Sugrue's book. "A person can see intense racial divisions in these cities," he said. "Walk along the Main Line of Philadelphia and there isn't a black face, but the same is true for the west part of the city or an area above Market Street named Mantua, where blacks live apart from whites."