Link to the full Poverty & Race Journal (May-September 2026)
by Thomas J. Sugrue
At a moment when fair housing is under siege, it is worth revisiting the pathbreaking career of Arnold R. Hirsch, whose rigorous scholarship, some of it conducted with the support of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC), transformed our understanding of America’s stubborn history of racial inequality. Hirsch established himself as one of the most important American historians of his generation by combining the histories of race, grassroots politics, urban redevelopment, and the modern American state to explain one of the most striking features of life in postwar America: that beginning in the 1920s, “American cities achieved an exceptionally high degree of racial segregation and maintained those levels throughout the post–World War II period.” In his field-defining book, Making the Second Ghetto, and in his many articles, written between the late 1970s and mid-2000s, Hirsch drew from painstaking archival research in Chicago, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, to offer a sophisticated archaeology of power, uncovering the mutually reinforcing roles of neighborhood organizations, city governments, civic elites, housing developers, and federal bureaucrats in creating and maintaining racial inequality. Everyone concerned with America’s persistent urban and suburban divides must reckon with Hirsch’s core argument: “Expanding and reinforcing the postwar ‘ghetto’ in the face of massive demographic change and a budding civil rights movement did not just ‘happen.’ It was hard work.”
Hirsch’s scholarship was not abstract or theoretical. It was firmly rooted in place, in the everyday life and quotidian politics of postwar cities, beginning with his hometown. “I am a native Chicagoan whose family was caught up in the great movements described in these pages,” he wrote in the preface to his first book, “and one of modest enough means to equate bus fare and a transfer with ‘research funds.’” Born in 1949 to a Jewish family living in a part of Chicago’s West Side that was rapidly undergoing racial transition, Hirsch soon moved with his parents to West Rogers Park, a nearly all-white neighborhood on Chicago’s far North Side with leafy streets lined with solid single-family houses and three-story flats. The Hirsch family’s relocation was part of two great migrations that reshaped metropolitan America during the mid-twentieth century: the movement of hundreds of thousands of Black people from the Deep South to the then-booming industrial cities and the simultaneous flight of white urbanites to places like Rogers Park and the rapidly expanding suburbs beyond. Hirsch would come to see the two migrations as fundamentally connected.
For Hirsch’s entire life—sixty-eight years—Chicago was near or at the top of the list of America’s most racially segregated cities. Segregation as a social fact was visible out of the windows of any bus that Hirsch would have taken from West Rogers Park to the University of Illinois-Chicago campus, where he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees, or to the Chicago Historical Society and the University of Chicago, where he conducted much of his dissertation research. Bus lines on the North Side passed through shopping districts with nary a Black pedestrian, restaurants and bars with only white customers, and schools, parks, and playgrounds with no children of color. The only substantial concentration of Black residents on the North Side was Cabrini–Green, a large public housing project built on the rubble of the gritty Little Hell district, a once multiracial enclave of poor and working-class Chicagoans adjoining an industrial zone along the polluted Chicago River.
Chicago’s racial geography changed markedly to the west and south, the parts of the city that were the focus of Hirsch’s first book and several subsequent articles. The Black Belt, centered around South State Street, had been the heart of Black Chicago for decades. The West Side, where Hirsch spent his preschool years, saw a massive influx of Black migrants after World War II, who moved westward along the wide avenues named after presidents Madison, Roosevelt, and Washington. Both Black enclaves abutted vast white-majority neighborhoods—usually just across a major avenue or on the “wrong” side of a rail line or expressway.
Black Chicago exploded in the 1960s, just as Hirsch was coming of age. Between 1962 and 1965—overlapping with his first three years at the segregated Sullivan High School in Rogers Park—civil rights activists led regular protests against underfunded, overcrowded schools on the South and West Sides, eventually forcing the resignation of Chicago’s superintendent of schools. In January 1966, during Hirsch’s senior year, Martin Luther King Jr. rented a shabby apartment in Lawndale, only a mile and a half from the Hirsch family’s first home. In July and August, King led fair housing marches through white neighborhoods on the South Side, including Marquette Park, where counterprotesters shouted racist epithets and hurled bottles and rocks, one bloodying King. “I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hateful as I’ve seen here in Chicago,” said King. Chicago was also torn by two major Black uprisings, first in July 1966, where three died and 533 were arrested after police targeted a group of Black children on the West Side for playing in an open fire hydrant on a hot summer day, and in April 1968 after King’s assassination, leading mayor Richard J. Daley to pledge that the city’s police force would respond to rioters by shooting to kill.
The unrest of the 1960s gave Hirsch’s work a sense of urgency. He described his dissertation and first book, with characteristic modesty, as an “addendum” to the 1968 Report of the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission Report for its chair, Illinois governor Otto Kerner. The report offered gripping narratives of Black uprisings in many cities, including Chicago, framed by a sweeping historical argument that the United States was divided into “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” The Kerner report charged that “white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto.” “White institutions created it,” the commission concluded, “white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” Hirsch took that conclusion seriously, particularly its emphasis on institutions, but he ultimately offered a far more sophisticated analysis than the report, finding the “two societies” framework reductionist. “The universality of segregation should not imply an identical process in every case,” he wrote. “There are variants of racism in the United States and a textured complexity to the problems of race and ethnicity that escape unnoticed if . . . one probes no deeper.” Hirsch was not just arguing with the Kerner Commission. He also challenged his own graduate mentor, Gilbert Osofsky (1939–1974), who argued that “the ghetto has always been with us—it tragically endured.” Hirsch was more attentive than his adviser to change over time and, as a result, at least a little less pessimistic than Osofsky. If the second ghetto had been made, to use Hirsch’s formulation, it could possibly be unmade.
Hirsch’s research offered a rebuttal to prevailing individualistic frameworks for understanding racism in the United States. He rejected the widely held notion, popularized by Gunnar Myrdal in his 1944 book, An American Dilemma, that racial inequality in the United States was “a problem in the heart of the American,” and he rejected influential psychological interpretations of prejudice. As Hirsch wrote in Making the Second Ghetto, “the meaningful battles over racial issues in postwar America were not fought in the psyches of tortured individuals; they were waged between the engineers and the engineered.” Urban segregation did not result from the sum of individual preferences about where to live nor from an ostensibly natural urge toward self-segregation nor, in the folk wisdom that birds of a feather flock together. It was the result of a fusion of group identity, economic interest, political expediency, and bureaucratic inertia.
In every essay in the new collection, Segregating Cities: An Arnold R. Hirsch Reader, just published by the University of Chicago Press, Hirsch offers a systemic account of the mechanisms of segregating cities, analyzing key urban actors—working-class European immigrants and their children, who fought to protect their precarious status as Americans and as homeowners; real estate brokers attempting to maintain or enhance property values; developers, civic leaders, and urban planners who envisioned “renewed” neighborhoods for middle-class whites; housing officials who contained Black households in segregated, increasingly marginal neighborhoods; and big-city politicians. Deeply attuned to the contentiousness of urban politics (how could he not be as a longtime resident of Chicago and New Orleans?), Hirsch argued against assumptions that all white urbanites and their institutions shared a monolithic ideology or common goals. To describe them all as racist was too simplistic. Instead, he offered a multilevel analysis of race and power, tracing with great precision the origins of racial ideologies; how they shaped collective understandings of urban places by ordinary citizens, developers, and policymakers; and the interrelationships of local and national social movements and politicians.
Hirsch began his history of race and cities at the grassroots. One of his most lasting contributions was his documentation of the “hidden violence” targeting African Americans who attempted to move into all-white Chicago neighborhoods in the decades before Martin Luther King Jr. marched in Marquette Park. Through fastidious research, he uncovered more than five hundred violent incidents instigated by whites targeting Black people who crossed the city’s racial boundaries. Those stories had been mostly suppressed by Chicago’s white-owned newspapers, downplayed by public officials, and largely forgotten except by the perpetrators, who had no reason to come forward, and the victims, who had no recourse. To understand the motives of whites who fought the movement of Black residents into their neighborhoods, Hirsch gleaned insights from posters, improvement association pamphlets, ephemeral community newspapers, and unusual sources like notes taken by an undercover American Civil Liberties Union investigator who worked in a steel mill and hung out in white-only bars on Chicago’s deep South Side. Hirsch upended conventional narratives of civil rights history in his brilliant essay “Massive Resistance in the Urban North.” He challenged journalists and scholars who largely ignored the history of civil rights and its opponents above the Mason–Dixon Line. Through a detailed case study of white mobilization against the integration of public housing in Chicago’s Trumbull Park Homes, located in an otherwise all-white neighborhood on the far South Side, Hirsch found new patterns of anti-Black activism in the heyday of the civil rights movement. With characteristic rigor, he argued that northern whites who resisted integration laid the groundwork for what would become a national strategy of opposition to racial equality in the post-1960s years, an effective mix of “tokenism, non-deadly violence, and political reaction.”
Hirsch established his reputation through his scholarship on Chicago, but he lived nearly as much of his life in New Orleans as he had in his hometown. Hirsch spent his entire academic career at the University of New Orleans, where he taught from 1979 until his retirement in 2010, with the exception of a semester-long visiting professorship in 1988 at Harvard. Hirsch’s early research on New Orleans emphasized the city’s distinctiveness, both in the Sunbelt and the nation at large. “New Orleans never fits in,” he memorably wrote. But opening up his urban vision to New Orleans and other cities south of the Mason–Dixon Line led Hirsch to carve a fresh intellectual path, comparing the histories of civil rights, race, and politics across regional divisions, while always remaining attentive to the differences between Sunbelt and Snowbelt.
By complicating the North-South binary, Hirsch opened up new paths for historians of both regions to reinterpret the history of Jim Crow, housing policies, and postwar Southern urban and suburban development. He saw his work as “closing the theoretical space between de jure and de facto segregation and, by implication, that between the North and South. If the North now needed the supplementary power of the state to separate white and Black Americans, the South (which had long used the state to reinforce racial policy) quickly resorted to geographic concentration and distance to structure race relations in the postwar era. Whether viewed as regional convergence or the nationalization of the race issue, northern and southern cities were becoming more alike. Historians of Atlanta, Charlotte, Miami, and New Orleans, as well as Cleveland, Detroit, Oakland, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, followed Hirsch’s lead by digging into the records of property owners, mayors, city planners, and housing officials and found unexpected commonalities with Chicago. Hirsch’s work would be foundational in challenging what historians Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino call “the myth of southern exceptionalism” in twentieth-century American history. Segregation and resistance to racial equality were national, not regional, in scope.
Hirsch’s essays on urban housing policy were foundational contributions to a wholesale reappraisal of New Deal and post–New Deal liberalism that would reshape narratives of modern American political history. Understanding what was happening on the ground required a deep dive into the archives of municipal governments and the administrative state. The hard work of segregation, Hirsch argued, was consummated at both the local and federal levels, at the hands of “the largely invisible paper-shufflers who often engaged in similarly invisible discussions . . . and made discretionary decisions before exercising the federal will.” He did not see the racial division of American cities, the neglect of public housing, or the creation of white suburbs as unintended consequences of otherwise well-meaning public policies, as “evidence of a plan gone awry,” or as “‘perversions’ of the enabling legislation.” Segregation was wholly intentional.
Sifting through government records, Hirsch showed how the federal government baked racism into New Deal housing policies and how municipal governments deployed federal funds to entrench segregation. Hirsch offered a case study in what scholars of American political development call path dependency—of how, once enacted, policy decisions structured generations of policymaking. The Public Works Administration (1933) introduced the “neighborhood composition rule” that required racial homogeneity in public housing. The United States Housing Authority (1937) gave local governments full control over the location of public housing. When Congress enacted the Housing Act of 1949 and the Urban Renewal Act of 1954, federal housing officials “inherited policies—especially with regard to race—that had their own history and momentum.” Those who challenged segregated housing from within the federal government—such as Frank Horne of the Housing and Home Finance Agency and staff members of the Racial Relations Service, a New Deal agency committed to using federal power to integrate housing—were marginalized and starved of staff and resources. Even modest efforts to desegregate public housing faced fierce opposition from local governments. Elected officials from Chicago joined their counterparts in other northern cities and the Jim Crow South to preserve their discretion about whether to construct public housing, and if so, where and for whom. “In what ultimately proved to be a showdown between local control and at least potentially coercive federal authority,” concluded Hirsch, “the locals won hands down.”
Local control played out with pernicious consequences. In Chicago, the housing authority made only token efforts to integrate public housing projects, instead forcing African Americans who were displaced by redevelopment projects into the massive, segregated projects of the South Side or, just as problematically, into the ostensibly free housing market, into decaying housing, overseen by predatory landlords and speculative real estate brokers, in neighborhoods abandoned by whites. In Baltimore, the city housing authority engaged in an aggressive slum clearance and redevelopment program to “increase the density of already identifiable black neighborhoods and thus stabilize the city by ‘arresting’ the movement of minorities” to white sections of the city. And in New Orleans, local officials used federal housing funds to create a middle-class Black subdivision that was separated from a nearby white neighborhood by an elevated rail line. At the peak of the national civil rights struggle, Hirsch noted with irony, New Orleans “used the tools of urban redevelopment to separate the races to a greater extent than ever before.” Summarizing all of these cases, Hirsch’s conclusion was damning: “Postwar federal housing policy, when measured against even weak contemporary standards of racial equity and justice, aimed low and fell short.”
Hirsch’s arguments about the history of segregation, the rise of the second ghetto, and urban politics all have important political implications, even if he was loath to draw simple lessons from the past. Hirsch, wrote James R. Grossman, was “a historian who never framed an argument until and unless he had the evidence.” When Hirsch engaged with audiences beyond the academy, he marshaled all of his scholarly rigor. He was an expert witness in a Louisiana voting rights case and a Baltimore housing discrimination case; conducted research on the history of federal housing policy for PRRAC; and testified before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Hirsch knew that how we tell the history of the recent past has high stakes. The history of urban policy, he wrote, provides “a vital link between past and present that affords an opportunity to learn from our mistakes and begin—however incrementally—to make them right.”
When he had the evidence, Hirsch was fearless in naming names, in holding past actors—whether mayors, university presidents, developers, civic association activists, federal policymakers, and even President Dwight D. Eisenhower—accountable for the racial divisions that were their legacy. “A reckoning is in order,” argued Hirsch, in a provocation to both researchers of urban redevelopment and advocates of reparative justice. “How many small businesses lost their clientele and closed, never to reopen? How many landlords lost their rental property? How many struggling homeowners were reduced to tenantry? How long, if ever, did it take for informal economic and social networks to recover? How many families—extended or otherwise—were shattered by the relocation process?” In one of his last written works, a draft introduction to his unfinished history of urban housing policy and its critics, Hirsch, aware of both his own fragility and of the uphill battles of those who fought to overcome urban inequality, poignantly wrote: “I have been more cognizant of the cold succor offered by notions of having fought the ‘good fight’ against long odds.” But he knew that the fight, whatever the odds, was worth fighting. n
Adapted and excerpted from Segregating Cities by Arnold R. Hirsch, published by the University of Chicago Press. Introduction © 2026 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
Thomas J. Sugrue is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History and the Director of the Program in Urban Studies at New York University. His many books include Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North and The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.
