Andrew Highsmith, “America Is a Thousand Flints: Race, Class, and the End of the American Dream in Flint, Michigan”

For most of the twentieth century, observers from around the world looked to Flint, Michigan, and its most famous offspring, the General Motors Corporation (GM), as a microcosm of the American Dream of progress, prosperity, and opportunity. As America’s national obsession with automobiles took root in the early twentieth century, GM and Flint grew rapidly, with its smoke-belching factories attracting tens of thousands of migrants from across the country. After suffering through a decade of economic depression during the 1930s, Flint and its suburbs re-emerged dramatically during World War Two and its aftermath. Buoyed by the postwar expansion of the automobile industry and the unprecedented bargaining agreements won by the United Auto Workers (UAW), the Flint of the 1940s and 1950s was one of many “arsenals of democracy” in the Heartland that promised, and often delivered, high wages, economic security, excellent schools, homeownership, and other consumer fruits of middle-class abundance.

Today, by contrast, Genesee County is a landscape of Dickensian extremes. It is a place where unimaginable privilege and wealth coexist uneasily with mind numbing squalor—a place where white people and black people live and learn separately and unequally despite the poverty that moves freely across the color line. Tragically, the mid-sized city that birthed both the world’s largest automobile company and its most powerful antagonist, the UAW, is now in a state of permanent crisis—internationally branded by its unemployment, shrinking population, failing schools, racial and economic segregation, and decaying infrastructure. By nearly all accounts, and without a shred of hyperbole, the Genesee County of 2005 is one of the most racially segregated, economically polarized, and spatially divided metropolitan regions in the United States.

Yet we know surprisingly little about Flint beyond the shocking portraits of the city’s 1980s economic collapse depicted in Roger and Me, Michael Moore’s acclaimed documentary film. My doctoral dissertation aims to fill that void by tracing the political, economic, social, and cultural developments of the mid-twentieth century that transformed Flint from a landscape of dreams into a Rust Belt dystopia. By employing private manuscript collections; federal, state, and municipal records; school board files and court documents; newspaper accounts; cultural products; and oral interviews, my case study of the Flint region explores the limits of the postwar American Dream.

In the decades following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, racial and economic segregation in the Flint area increased markedly. Undeniably, the combined legacies of segregated company housing, restrictive housing covenants, “white flight,” and racial terror played key roles in that process. Yet there can also be little doubt that the actions of local officials bolstered segregation in the Flint region. By gerrymandering school attendance boundaries, blocking desegregation mandates, and imposing racially divisive urban renewal and public housing programs, local officials in Genesee County built and governed a segregated metropolis.

With chapters on housing, urban renewal, schools, suburbanization, tax policies, and deindustrialization, my dissertation will show that the deep and tangled roots of racial, spatial, and economic inequality in Genesee County can be traced back to the postwar triumphs of bi-partisan policies that rewarded mass consumption, suburban sprawl, and white racial privilege at the expense of social equity. Not a simple narrative of declension, however, my dissertation will underscore the contingency of Flint’s past by highlighting the intense postwar contestation between and among the labor and civil rights movements, General Motors, neighborhood associations, and a mélange of civic and philanthropic organizations for control over the region’s development.

I expect to draw eight primary conclusions through my case study. First, and most generally, I hope to show that rigid structural barriers to racial equality, economic equity, and spatial justice—many of them state-sponsored—emerged powerfully in the Flint region during the decades following World War Two, thereby creating the three most salient features of the Rust Belt’s decay: deindustrialization, urban sprawl, and racial segregation. Second, de facto racial segregation never existed in Flint and Genesee County. The rigid patterns of school and residential segregation confronted by Flint’s civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s had their roots in government-sponsored, de jure policies in the 1940s and 1950s. Third, Flint’s urban crisis grew out of pro-growth federal and local policies that contributed to intense racial and economic segregation, sprawling suburban development, and urban divestment. Fourth, the decline of the Flint region occurred within a metropolitan spatial context that crossed both municipal and township boundaries. Fifth, growth liberalism’s successes in spurring suburban home ownership, particularly among white auto workers, ultimately contributed to the 1970s political fractures over busing and a rightward political drift among property owning whites in Flint and Genesee County. Sixth, race, class, and space were mutually constitutive categories of distinction in postwar Flint. Although whiteness always paid a material wage regardless of geography or class in places such as Flint, the wage varied across space in accordance with one’s place of residence and property owning status. Seventh, GM and its civic allies throughout the region fought and defeated trade union and civil rights challenges over the course of the postwar decades, ultimately imposing a corporate-controlled, bipartisan political regime that obliterated distinctions between public policy and corporate interests. Lastly, schools—as taxpayer funded, publicly owned sites that shaped community identity, civic interaction, social mobility, and property values—played a key role in hardening, and sometimes even reshaping, the racial and economic boundaries created by local government action.

Situated at a theoretical and historiographical nexus with multiple interdisciplinary valences, my dissertation is a case study with national implications. As such, it aims to expand the temporal, spatial, and conceptual parameters that have traditionally defined postwar urban studies. And it hopes to do so my unraveling the complex bonds that connected Jim Crow schools, Jim Crow neighborhoods, and Jim Crow metropolitan development.