page_title: Detroit
section_title: Postwar era
hierarchical_section_title: Detroit / History / Postwar era
caption_attribution_description: English: Packard plant no 10 in construction 1900-1910
context_page_description: Detroit is the largest and most populous city in the U.S. state of Michigan, the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of Wayne County. The municipality of Detroit had a 2019 estimated population of 670,031, making it the 24th-most populous city in the United States. The metropolitan area, known as Metro Detroit, is home to 4.3 million people, making it the second-largest in the Midwest after the Chicago metropolitan area, and 14th largest in the United States. Regarded as a major cultural center, Detroit is known for its contributions to music and as a repository for art, architecture and design.
  Detroit is a major port on the Detroit River, one of the four major straits that connect the Great Lakes system to the Saint Lawrence Seaway. The Detroit Metropolitan Airport is among the most important hubs in the United States. The City of Detroit anchors the second-largest regional economy in the Midwest, behind Chicago and ahead of Minneapolis–Saint Paul, and the 13th-largest in the United States.
context_section_description: Industrial mergers in the 1950s, especially in the automobile sector, increased oligopoly in the American auto industry. Detroit manufacturers such as Packard and Hudson merged into other companies and eventually disappeared. At its peak population of 1,849,568, in the 1950 Census, the city was the 5th-largest in the United States, after New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.
  In this postwar era, the auto industry continued to create opportunities for many African Americans from the South, who continued with their Great Migration to Detroit and other northern and western cities to escape the strict Jim Crow laws and racial discrimination policies of the South. As before the war, competition had been fierce for employment, housing, and land. Racial discrimination took place in employment, keeping the work force and better jobs predominantly white. These unequal opportunities in employment resulted in unequal housing opportunities for the majority of the black community. Despite changes in demographics, for instance, Detroit's police force, fire department, and other city jobs were held by predominately white residents.
  The surge in Detroit's black population with the Great Migration augmented the strain on housing scarcity. Black people were often turned away from bank loans to obtain housing and interest rates, and rents were unfairly inflated to prevent their moving into white neighborhoods. Such discrimination also took place due to redlining by banks and federal housing policy, which limited the ability of blacks to improve their housing, and encouraged white people to guard the racial divide that defined their neighborhoods. This marginalized the agency of black Detroiters—another important aspect in the history of postwar Detroit.
  As in other major American cities in the postwar era, construction of a federally subsidized, extensive highway and freeway system around Detroit, and pent-up demand for new housing stimulated suburbanization; highways made commuting by car easier. However, this construction had negative implications for many urban residents. Highways were constructed through neighborhoods of poor and minority residents who had less political power to oppose them. (The neighborhoods were mostly low income or considered blighted, made up of older housing, where investment had been lacking due to racial redlining, so the highways were presented as a kind of urban renewal.) They displaced residents with little consideration of the effects of breaking up functioning neighborhoods.
  In 1956, Detroit's last heavily used electric streetcar line, which traveled along the length of Woodward Avenue, was removed and replaced with gas-powered buses. It was the last line of what had once been a 534-mile network of electric streetcars. In 1941 at peak times, a streetcar ran on Woodward Avenue every 60 seconds.
  All of these changes in the area's transportation system favored low-density, auto-oriented development rather than high-density urban development. Industry also moved to the suburbs, seeking large plots of land for single story factories. By the 21st century, the metro Detroit area had developed as one of the most sprawling job markets in the United States; combined with poor public transport, this resulted in many new jobs being beyond the reach of urban low-income workers.
  In 1950, the city held about one-third of the state's population, anchored by its industries and workers. Over the next sixty years, the city's population declined to less than 10 percent of the state's population. During the same time period, the sprawling Detroit metropolitan area, which surrounds and includes the city, grew to contain more than half of Michigan's population. The shift of population and jobs eroded Detroit's tax base.
  In June 1963, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a major speech as part of a civil rights march in Detroit that foreshadowed his "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C., two months later. While the civil rights movement gained significant federal civil rights laws in 1964 and 1965, longstanding
caption: Packard Automotive Plant, an automobile factory closed and abandoned in 1958
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