Free Disintegration by Eugene Robinson Page A

Even amid the charred, still-smoking ruins, civic boosters pledged that U Street, H Street, and Columbia Heights would be rebuilt. In terms of physical and commercial infrastructure, they were right—although it took forty years for the phoenix to rise. But if they meant that those neighborhoods would someday be what they once had been, that they would be centers of black American prosperity, the optimists were dead wrong. Theneighborhoods burned in the riots were gone forever. They had been disintegrated.
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    Such nihilistic spasms of arson in urban black centers, beginning with Watts in 1965 and culminating with the riots of April 1968 in Washington, Baltimore, Boston, Kansas City, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities from coast to coast—which the writer James Baldwin had predicted in 1963 in
The Fire Next Time—
had the effect of thinning out black communities that once had been dense and full of life. In the 1960s, for example, nearly 125,000 people lived in the neighborhoods for which Chicago’s Roosevelt Road—the focus of that city’s 1968 riot—served as the major commercial strip. By 1990, fewer than 50,000 remained. 3
    Nationwide, thousands of stores, apartment houses, and other buildings were burned to the ground; many others were damaged but left standing and unoccupied. Only a relatively small percentage of buildings in any neighborhood were actually destroyed or ruined. But the fires left rips in the fabric of the affected areas, and these voids were like sinkholes that drained away vitality and promise. Housing prices in riot-torn neighborhoods fell sharply; families sold out so they could spirit their children to safer surroundings, while longtime landlords decided that the risks and headaches just weren’t worth it. Into the vacuum came a new breed of slumlords, whose business model made no accommodation for frills such as maintenance or repairs. More town houses, storefronts, and apartments became abandoned, some finding new use as trick pads for prostitutes, shooting galleries for junkies, and temporary domiciles for homeless squatters. Often theonly way to deal with such a nuisance was to tear the building down—leaving yet another hole, yet another spirit-draining void.
    In an important sense, however, the riots were more symptom than disease. They came amid a larger historical context—the relocation and eventual hollowing-out of the American industrial base. By the mid-1960s, the jobs that had sustained urban working-class black communities had already begun to pick up and move away.
    Detroit is perhaps the most vivid example. When my father was growing up in nearby Ann Arbor, the Big Three automakers were the economic lifeblood of the region and an abundant source of steady, good-paying jobs for African Americans—an escalator, in effect, that led directly to the middle class. A union job at a Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler plant meant the ability to own a home, the security of a comfortable retirement, and, most important, the promise of a better life for the next generation. The factories of Dearborn, Flint, and Pontiac were full of black men who might not have made it past high school but whose children damn well would. The dream that had inspired the Great Migration—a job, a home, a better life for the children—was coming true. But it didn’t last.
    Between 1948, when Detroit was enjoying an expansive postwar boom, and 1967, the year of the devastating Detroit riot, the city lost more than 130,000 manufacturing jobs. 4 Most of these were in the auto industry, which was already well advanced in the process of abandoning its storied birthplace. Building and retooling old factories in crowded, expensive Detroit no longer made sense, given the alternatives; the automakers had begun shifting their operations to new, more versatile and efficient plants built on former cow pastures in the rural Midwest andSouth. Even the legendary Detroit-area plants, the ones so big they were worlds