Before The Ghetto Summary

Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century

David Katzman’s Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century is known as one of the first volumes to explore in depth an urban black Detroit community in the nineteenth century. David Katzman researched and carefully examined the history of Detroit’s black community up until 1870; which allowed him to provide a detailed historic overview. Katzman devotes each chapter to important structural factors of black Detroit. Residential location, and housing quality, the caste system isolating the community but upper-class Negroes from whites, black men and women occupations, the class system and operating in the Negro caste, and finally the Negro political activities from 1870 leading into the early …show more content…
Negros experienced much blocked opportunities in the community. Katzman gives details on upper-class Negros benefitting from their close association with the Republican Party in the 1870’s and 1880’s. It wasn’t until after the civil war that some equality would take place in Detroit. It was after the Civil War when Michigan’s republican party sought to remove legal sanctions that protected discrimination. Surprisingly, the republican party of Michigan was for black equality. Republicans would be responsible for passing a number of acts that provided the integration of schools and barred discrimination in public accommodations. Katzman’s research gives a great visual of what Detroit was like in the nineteenth century. Blacks who moved from the south in hope of a better life often experienced some of the same prejudice and racial tensions they thought they had left behind. As detailed above, Before the Ghetto details the experience of blacks in Detroit in the nineteenth century. Blacks were deprived from equality while dealing with economic and social discrimination throughout the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. Katzman story gives a great visual