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[ CONCLUSION ONCLUSION Secondary Cities and the Black Experience A ccording to the 2000 U.S. Census, Detroit, Saginaw, Flint, Benton Harbor , and Muskegon were listed among the top twenty-five most racially segregated metropolitan regions in America. With two more Michigan cities—Grand Rapids and Jackson—listed just on the outskirts of the top twenty-five, Michigan ranked as the most segregated state in the nation.1 On the opposite side of the spectrum, according to research conducted by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, in 2002 Time Magazine listed Sacramento , California, as America’s most integrated city.2 Despite the prevalence of secondary cities on both sides of the racial spectrum, the issues that led to the racial geographies of these secondary cities are almost invisible to scholars. Aside from Detroit, what does the historical literature tell us about the storied racial pasts of the remaining seven metropolitan regions? How does the black urban experience offer similarities and distinctions between the freedom struggle in Saginaw, Flint, Benton Harbor, Muskegon, Jackson, and Sacramento and the freedom struggle in Detroit? Do the experiences of blacks living in secondary cities bear a greater resemblance to similar smaller cities or to bigger cities? Equally important, why is there a need to begin a comparative of a secondary city with a bigger city, such as Detroit, when nearly 150 midsize cities of the postwar era represent the majority experience? Answering these questions carefully means scholars must include a greater variety of black urban perspectives and paint a more inclusive portrait of the freedom struggle. As it stands, taken as a whole, scholarly histories of the black urban experience and the freedom fight have often privileged the narrative of blacks living in primary cities, and these studies suggests that the primary-city narrative is the normative experience. CONCLUSION 179 Most notably, Arnold R. Hirsch’s impressive book, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960, is the first groundbreaking work to examine the African American urban experience in the post–World War II era. Shifting the focus from the formation of ghettos in early-twentiethcentury northern cities, Hirsch’s work confirms that discriminatory neighborhood patterns intensified into the making of a “second ghetto” in postwar Chicago . Building on a generation of scholarly work by Gilbert Osofsky, Allan H. Spear, David M. Katzman, and Kenneth L. Kusmer, among other scholars, whose work focused on the creation of first ghettos prior to 1930, Hirsch innovatively demonstrates how federal government programs contributed heavily to Chicago’s emerging as the most-segregated big city in the nation by the 1960s. However, Hirsch mindfully understands that “the universality of segregation should not imply an identical process in every case.” Instead, he argues, “there are variants of racism in the United States and a textured complexity to problems of race and ethnicity.”3 The second ghetto thesis contains remarkable explanatory power, offering a historical context for understanding the governmental role in establishing and maintaining de facto segregation in urban northern communities. To be certain , although Thomas J. Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis grapples with variants of racism involved in establishing a geography of segregation in the postwar era, taken as a whole, the recent literature on African American urban history concentrates on cities with large black populations and focuses primarily on the creation of the second ghetto.4 Studies of urban black life in rapidly industrializing cities in particular, such as Chicago and Detroit—by far the scholarly research emphasis of the post–World War II era—tend to mask the fact that smaller black communities in the Midwest, the West, and the North developed differently. A City within a City offers several variations on the black urban experience in the industrial heartland. For example, situated in the Rust Belt region, the primary center of manufacturing and industry, Grand Rapids did not include a notable industrial black working class like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, or Cleveland. The majority of black workers in Grand Rapids remained outside organized labor even after the 1940s. Despite the noticeable influx of black migrants during the Second Great Migration, the black population of Grand Rapids remained relatively small at a time when many midwestern and eastern cities experienced sizable increases. Although historical research by Hirsch and Raymond A. Mohl focuses exclusively on the making of the second ghetto in the post–World War II era, the absence of a clearly defined first black ghetto before 1960 distinguishes this study from...

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