It has been half a cen­tu­ry since 1967, a year alter­nate­ly termed ​‘the sum­mer of love’ and ​‘the sum­mer of rage,’ depend­ing on which part of the coun­try you looked at. While thou­sands of white youth flocked to hear music and smoke dope in San Fran­cis­co, thou­sands more young African-Amer­i­cans and Lati­nos flocked to the streets dur­ing upris­ings in Detroit, Newark and 157 more cities. Much will be writ­ten about how these ​“riots” caused the decline of urban Amer­i­ca, but that would be both a rewrit­ing of his­to­ry and a mis­take. The real­i­ty is more com­plex and instruc­tive. Detroit, per­haps more than any oth­er city, tells the large­ly unex­am­ined sto­ry of how cor­po­rate greed, enabled by and com­bined with fed­er­al gov­ern­ment road and hous­ing poli­cies, cre­at­ed the tem­plate for the weak­en­ing of unions, emer­gence of oli­garchy and devel­op­ment of gross inequality.

Detroit's first black mayor, Coleman Young, and those that followed may not have known it, but Detroit was already on life support and they were the hospice team.

It would be com­fort­ing to the rest of us if, as oft report­ed, Detroit’s cur­rent woes were due to sim­ple caus­es — incom­pe­tent may­ors, cor­rupt politi­cians or even unruly res­i­dents (like those who riot­ed in 1967). We’d think, ​“We’re not like them so it can’t hap­pen to us.”

The right-wing talk show cir­cuits and web blogs buzz with chat­ter about how Detroit’s cor­rupt Black Demo­c­ra­t­ic may­ors played racial and union pol­i­tics and drove out white res­i­dents lead­ing the city into bank­rupt­cy. But even more cred­i­ble com­men­ta­tors repeat these shib­bo­leths as well.

Steve Malan­ga of the Wall Street Jour­nal and Mar­i­lyn Salenger of the Wash­ing­ton Post peg Detroit’s demise and pop­u­la­tion loss as to the after­math of the August 1967 riots while the Post’s edi­to­r­i­al board, among many oth­ers, fix­es the blame on Detroit’s polit­i­cal and union leadership.

While it is true that many of Detroit’s may­ors had seri­ous flaws and made count­less mis­takes, they did not cause the city’s decline. In fact by the time the keys to Detroit were hand­ed to the Black lead­er­ship, Detroit was beyond res­cue and they were left to deal with up the mess cre­at­ed by a per­fect storm of fed­er­al trans­porta­tion pol­i­cy (dri­ven by the auto indus­try and its allies in Con­gress) and fed­er­al hous­ing ini­tia­tives, both of which com­bined to seal the city’s fate. Detroit’s first black may­or, Cole­man Young, and those that fol­lowed may not have known it, but Detroit was already on life sup­port and they were the hos­pice team.

Fueled by a pop­u­la­tion explo­sion dur­ing the late 1930s and 1940s when tanks and air­planes for America’s war effort rolled off the assem­bly lines, Detroit’s pop­u­la­tion grew from 1.5 mil­lion peo­ple in 1930 to 1.8 mil­lion in 1950. And dur­ing that same peri­od thou­sands more came for the rel­a­tive­ly low-skilled but high-pay­ing union pro­tect­ed jobs at places like Ford, Chrysler, Packard and GM. How­ev­er, by August 1967 Detroit had already lost more than 300,000 res­i­dents — equal to the pop­u­la­tion loss each decade since then.

The nation still calls Detroit as ​“the motor city,” but by the end of the 1950s it was cer­tain­ly not that. Big Auto dealt the first blow. Flush with cash from World War II and antic­i­pat­ing a huge growth in demand for their prod­ucts, Ford, Gen­er­al Motors and Chrysler aban­doned Detroit’s mul­ti-sto­ry plants aban­doned in favor of new sprawl­ing hor­i­zon­tal cam­pus­es on for­mer farm­land in the Detroit sub­urbs and in Ohio, Indi­ana and Cana­da. Between 1947 and 1958, the Big Three built 25 new fac­to­ries. None of them were in Detroit.

Tak­en at face val­ue this made sense, as Detroit then lacked the land for the new hor­i­zon­tal­ly inte­grat­ed and auto­mat­ed plants. Yet, as his­to­ri­an Thomas Sug­rue and oth­ers point out, it was also a way for the auto com­pa­nies to weak­en the UAW, which had won unprece­dent­ed vic­to­ries dur­ing the war years.

And with the indus­try went the jobs. In 1960, only Chrysler pro­duced cars in Detroit, its 60,000 Detroit work­ers rep­re­sent­ing only half those employed just a decade ear­li­er. In less than two decades, from 1947 to 1967, Detroit lost 128,000 jobs in the auto indus­try alone.

White work­ers fol­lowed. In 1950 Detroit was a white-dom­i­nat­ed city; by 1970 more whites lived in the sub­urbs than in the city. While ignit­ed by the move­ment of auto jobs to the sub­urbs, this mass white exo­dus was fueled by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and its poli­cies. In 1949, Con­gress passed the Fed­er­al Hous­ing Act. For the first time, home­own­er­ship required only 3 per­cent down for an attrac­tive, low inter­est rate mort­gage. The FHA guide­lines favored mort­gages in the new sub­ur­ban devel­op­ments that were pop­ping up to meet post-war demand and active­ly dis­cour­aged their use in old­er, inner-city neighborhoods.

Armed with the new FHA prod­uct and Vet­er­ans Affairs loans, white work­ers moved with the com­pa­nies to the sub­urbs, trad­ing in their hous­es in what had become a racial­ly mixed city for a sub­ur­ban tract home in then vir­tu­al­ly all-white sub­urbs. Rather than con­gre­gate with oth­ers on the way to work in a street­car, they drove past sprawl­ing sub­urbs on the new high­ways lob­bied for by Big Auto and built at tax­pay­er expense.

For black Detroit, the sto­ry was quite dif­fer­ent. Near­ly two hun­dred thou­sand African Amer­i­cans had moved to Detroit since 1930, and by 1950 blacks account­ed for 16.8 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion. While they might have want­ed to fol­low the jobs that moved to the sub­urbs, they could not. With equal hous­ing laws still in the future, they were exclud­ed from buy­ing in the sub­ur­ban hous­ing devel­op­ments by devel­op­ers and real estate agents. Nor could they get FHA loans to buy or improve homes in the city neigh­bor­hoods where they could live because the gov­ern­ment con­sid­ered such loans too risky. Black neigh­bor­hoods, already chopped up dur­ing the 40s and 50s to build the very high­ways that took whites out of the city, became even more iso­lat­ed and iso­lat­ing. Mak­ing things worse, as fed­er­al dol­lars were trans­ferred to road build­ing, pub­lic tran­sit dol­lars dried up, and in 1956, with the active lob­by­ing of Big Auto, the his­toric street­car sys­tem dis­ap­peared, leav­ing no reli­able pub­lic transportation.

In 1950 there were 51 Cen­sus tracts in Detroit with a pop­u­la­tion of more than 30,000 peo­ple. By 1970 there were only sev­en. In the 1960s, at a time of full employ­ment in the nation, white unem­ploy­ment in Detroit stood at 7 per­cent and black unem­ploy­ment at 13.8 per­cent. By 1970, the black male unem­ploy­ment rate stood at 18 percent.

And in 1961 Detroit had its first bud­get deficit — a $16 mil­lion deficit, due to the $16 mil­lion in tax rev­enues it had lost.

While we’ve seen plen­ty of bad ideas tried in Detroit over the inter­ven­ing 40 years — from get rich quick schemes like the Peo­ple Mover (which nev­er had any peo­ple) or the Renais­sance Cen­ter (which was any­thing but), the bulk of destruc­tion in Detroit of Detroit’s phys­i­cal struc­tures and its job base is due to the same actors who ignit­ed the decline.

Dur­ing these years, fed­er­al­ly fund­ed high­ways and urban renew­al projects destroyed more than a fourth of the city and sep­a­rat­ed down­town from neigh­bor­hoods. State-fund­ed megas­ta­di­ums, casi­nos and con­ven­tion cen­ters caused fur­ther phys­i­cal dam­age and sep­a­ra­tion while fail­ing to bring the jobs and busi­ness­es promised in return for the huge debt tak­en on. And all the while, aid­ed and abet­ted by fed­er­al pol­i­cy, Big Auto con­tin­ued to move on — and most par­tic­u­lar­ly, out.

A recent Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion study revealed that Detroit holds the dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion of hav­ing the great­est ​“job sprawl,” with 77 per­cent of avail­able jobs more than 10 miles beyond the city’s core. In a city with vir­tu­al­ly no pub­lic trans­porta­tion, where 130 schools have been shut­tered and where only 20,000 man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs remain in a city of 700,000, we should not be sur­prised that unem­ploy­ment rate among black men stands at near­ly 50 per­cent — the high­est in the nation.

If there are fin­gers to be point­ed, they need to arc back far­ther to the reigns of May­ors Cavanagh and Miri­ani, Gov. Rom­ney and big oil. If there are lessons to be learned they are ones that should makes us wary of and oppose racial dis­crim­i­na­tion, demand cor­po­rate account­abil­i­ty and respon­si­bil­i­ty for the social toll their actions take, thought­ful­ly pro­tect our pub­lic assets of which pub­lic trans­porta­tion is one of the great­est and always ques­tion those who would build high­ways to escape rather than mend the mess they’ve made.

By the time the return­ing black Viet­nam Vets got into a scuf­fle with the police that set off a week of riots in late July of 1967 the seeds of destruc­tion already had deep roots. Detroit was already a ghost of its for­mer self — done in by both the prod­uct the city was known for and by the com­pa­nies whose wealth it had created.